What Happened to Wang?

It’s looking more and more likely that Chien-Ming Wang’s time with the Yankees is over, with the St. Louis Cardinals currently rumored as the most likely landing place for the potentially former Yankee.  Over at the Lohud Yankee blog last week, a guest post by Greg Mathews looked at Wang and laid out a theory that batters started to lay off Wang’s low sinker and that it was indicative of a trend that may mean his effectiveness will suffer unless he makes an adjustment.  Trying to see if letting Wang go is a mistake and being on Pitch F/X kick lately I figured I’d look at the data to see if there was any truth to this theory. Since Pitch F/X has only been around since 2007 and was not completely rolled out until 2008, we don’t have data from Wang’s best season of 2006, and 2007 data is incomplete, which kind of limits how much we can infer from the data we do have given his missed time in 2008 and his very abbreviated 2009, so keep ...