O'Connor PITCHf/x

The Yankees recently picked up southpaw Mike O'Connor on a minor league deal.  O'Connor, who is now 31, has pitched in 35 major league games; he made appearances for the Nationals in 2006 and 2008 and spent some time with the Mets last year.  Only one of his major league games since 2006 has been a start; the Yankees will look at him strictly as a reliever with Damaso Marte and Pedro Feliciano going down with injuries.


We have 14 games and 14 2/3 innings' worth of PITCHf/x data on O'Connor.  As little as overall performance metrics mean with this kind of sample, individual pitch type metrics mean even less, so I won't spend too much time on that stuff.

#     Whiff%  Ball%   GB%     
256     22%     46%     33%

Pitch   #      mph      pfx_x   pfx_z
   FF    162     87      +7.6    +9.8
   SL    35      81      +0.5    +3.0
   CU    32      74      -5.1    -6.0
   CH    27      77      +9.0    +9.4    

• O'Connor's arsenal consists of a tailing fastball, a tight/cutter-ish slider, a curve, and a change that looks similar to his fastball but is 10 mph slower.
• He's been fastball/slider recently.  He didn't throw any changeups this year, despite facing righties in 14 of his 29 plate appearances.  He only threw two curves.
• He looks like an extreme flyball pitcher.  His groundball rate in 105 2006 innings (BIS data) was 36%.  

Soft-tosser, lots of walks, lots of flyballs.