Girardi: Pineda’s luck ‘has got to change’

NEW YORK — As the season was coming to a close and the Yankees evaluated Michael Pineda’s final performance, Joe Girardi attempted to parse the numbers and called them “mind-boggling,” saying that the assortment of stats were “probably the most interesting that I’ve ever seen.”

Pineda led the American League with 10.61 strikeouts per nine innings, ranking third among AL starters with a 27.4 percent strikeout rate, yet he surrendered a career-high 27 homers and finished with a 6-12 record and a 4.82 ERA. How to make sense of it?

“Sometimes you scratch your head,” Girardi said. “The average of batted balls in play off of him with two outs [.406] — it just doesn’t make sense. You look for reasons. Believe me, we’ll look; I’m sure we’ll look a long time this winter.”

It is possible that Pineda could be closer to becoming a dominant front-line starter than his 2016 performance would suggest.

Examining his year through the window of Deserved Run Average (DRA), an advanced metric which incorporates factors like stadiums, situations, defense, weather, catcher framing, umpires and opposing hitters, Pineda ranked among the top starters in the game with a 2.58 DRA.

Only the late Jose Fernandez (2.23) posted a better DRA in 2016, with Cole Hamels (2.65), Chris Sale (2.69) and Noah Syndergaard (2.71) all trailing Pineda, who allowed two earned runs or fewer in 17 starts but at least five earned runs in 11 starts.

The metric, created by Jonathan Judge of Baseball …

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