It was not a triumphant return to the majors by Andy Pettitte on Sunday. He walked three, struck out only two, threw a wild pitch and gave up two meatball home runs in six and a third innings. That said, he did a fairly good job of only allowing four runs to plate, and a silver lining is that he induced 12 ground balls out of 20 balls put in play. Let’s delve into some more specifics of his start (all data courtesy of FanGraphs and BrooksBaseball.net).

Since FanGraphs has Pettitte’s pitch data from only 2002 onwards, for the purpose of this exercise, we’ll know him as a five-pitch guy: generic fastball, cut fastball, slider, curveball, and changeup. Pettitte, based on career averages, throws a fourseamer or a cutter around 63% of the time, and in 2010, he relied even more on the gas, throwing it for nearly 70% of his pitches.

Out of his 94 pitches on Sunday, Pettitte wasn’t too much different, throwing six pitches (a twoseamer as well), with the three fastballs making up 70% of his pitches. His off-speed stuff was consistent with career norms ..read more

Andy Pettitte returned to the mound yesterday as he threw 94 pitches over 6.1 innings and allowed four earned runs on seven hits, three walks, and two strikeouts. It wasn’t a great outing, but very solid as he was able to maintain his velocity and use all of his pitches to varying degrees of success. Overall I would call it a C+.

“It felt good,” Pettitte told Josh Thomson of the Journal News. “It felt like I never left. It really did.”

Everything considered, a C+ is a solid grade. He would have had to have blown away the Mariners to get an A, which he clearly did not do. If the results were a little bit better, if he had given up two or three runs instead of four he probably squeezes out a B. Against the Mariners though, with a young a overly aggressive lineup, a 6.1 inning and four run outing lands him a C+ in my book.

It was encouraging though. He was able to stay in a similar 89-87 mph range that he was in for most of his 2010 ..read more