"You Can't Predict Baseball"

A week ago, would you have believed me if I told you that on a trip to Seattle and Oakland, the Yankees would go 5-2, losing games started by Joba Chamberlain and AJ Burnett (to guys named Fister and, uh, Tomko) but winning games started by Chad Gaudin and Sergio Mitre?

Crazy, huh?

This is the beauty of baseball--more than perhaps any other sport, the unexpected can and does occur.

And, of course, this is exactly what happened.

The West Coast Swing has long been a dread of Yankee fans--and no eastern time zone fan enjoys that the Yankees will return yet again in late September--but this time the Yankees did quite all right out there.

Once again, the Yankees won their games in a variety of ways, blowouts and one-run games, and with the exception of Seattle's one clunker, the pitching kept pitching like it belonged on a playoff team.


That said, there are a couple of concerns:

Alfredo Aceves cannot possibly be healthy. I refuse to believe it. His number since his spot start in Minnesota have not been Ace-like.

Phil Hughes isn't pitching very often. I'm not sure why. I want to trust that the Yankees know what they are doing, but if the long term goal is for him to be a starter, it would be nice to have more than, say, 6.2 innings in the entire month of August.

Alex Rodriguez has kinda sorta stopped doing that home run thing. It's a good thing his average is on the rise, but I think we'd notice his relative power outage a bit more if it wasn't for the amazing seasons Jeter, Damon, Teixeira and Canó are having.

Jorge Posada looks like he could benefit from a week off at the plate. Of course, every time I say that he goes and rips an RBI double so what do I know...



These are all minor concerns; things to think about not necessarily as something wrong, but something to cause you to keep your eyes open.

At any rate, the Yankees are more than 30 games over .500. Life is good.