Yankees Steal Brandon McCarthy

The New York Yankees acquired Brandon McCarthy from the Arizona Diamondbacks for Vidal Nuno with the Yankees also receiving cash from the D-Backs.

Good move by New York.

On the surface, neither player really seems to be all that spectacular.  McCarthy is 3-10 on the season with an ERA of 5.01, while Nuno is 2-5 with 5.42 earned runs per nine.  

Both also have a WAR of less than 0 on the season.

But dig a little bit deeper into some of their more advanced stats, and all of a sudden this is a trade that looks pretty good for the Yanks.  McCarthy's Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) on the season is 3.79, and he also has a strikeout-to-walk ratio that's ninth best among qualifying MLB pitchers.  

Meanwhile, Nuno's FIP is 5.15, and while that's lower than his ERA, the difference between those two stats is much lower for him than it is for the guy who's taking his spot in the Big Apple.  His K/BB ratio is also 277th among all MLB pitchers on the year.

Ouch.

And things get even a little bit better, at least for the Yankees. Fangraphs.com lists McCarthy's adjusted FIP at 98, while Nuno's is 128 (lower is better, so says Fangraphs).

Based on that info, I feel like the Yankees got the good end of the deal on this one.  They upgraded their starting rotation and  got cash from Arizona too.

You might even say that it was a steal.

**All of the stats used for this post came from baseball-reference.com, except for strikeout-to-walk ratios, which came from MLB.com, and the Fangraphs.com statistics, which came from ... well, Fangraphs.com.