Justifying strategic errors: The "mootness" defense

With two outs and runners on second and third in the sixth inning of yesterday's Red Sox-Yankees game, Joe Girardi and Mike Mussina chose to pitch to Manny Ramirez rather than walk him and face Kevin Youkilis. Ramirez doubled on the first pitch, giving Boston a lead it would not relinquish.

Mussina is quoted in the Times this morning saying, "Whatever the strategy was, I didn’t make a good pitch. . . If Youkilis had been up there, he probably would have done the same thing if I’d thrown the same pitch.”

That may be true. But it doesn't obviate the fact that the Yankees made a glaring strategic error. It is clearly the case that throwing an ephus pitch to either Ramirez with two on, or Youkilis with the bases loaded, would be a bad decision. But, on the assumption that Mussina would genuinely have been trying to get out of the inning regardless of who he was pitching to, the fact that he happened to leave a fastball belt-high to the batter he did face does nothing to change the underlying calculus: playing the odds, you're likely to do better pitching to "the Greek [sic] God of walks" and maybe having him tie the game on a base-on-balls than to a red-hot Manny Ramirez, who had homered in his previous at-bat and is in a contract year.

Where's that Stanford education now, Moose? [Go Bears!]