Joba pitches well, Melky takes out Lester, Yanks win (postgame notes 25 September 2009)

As per my post on TYU:

While beating the Red Sox always makes for interesting storylines of its own, tonight's game produced two occurrences of note:

1) Joba Chamberlain pitched well. If anything, Chamberlain may have been hampered by the long innings the Yankees had at the plate, but he pitched six innings completely and used only 86 pitches to get there.

2) Melky Cabrera took Jon Lester out with a liner off of the plant leg. Officially, it's a contusion on the quadriceps, but every fan of the Red Sox has got to be concerned--Lester appeared to be in serious pain, and he is easily one of the two best Red Sox pitchers (though he didn't pitch like it tonight.)

The Yankee offense has Alex Rodriguez to thank tonight--his four RBI ended up as the difference in the final 9-5 score.

It should also be mentioned that the Yankees ran roughshod over Boston's defense, stealing bases at will and not even coming close to getting caught.


***

Much of the broadcast tonight was taken up by Michael Kay and Al Leiter arguing that the current postseason format does not penalize the Wild Card slot enough.

While I don't agree with everything the two brought up, there are two points with which I do agree:

1) a five game series is too short of a series. It benefits the team with a better 1-2 starting rotation; not a better team.

2) Give the top two teams in the league a first round bye. Then, the Wild Card team or teams will have to exert more energy and more strategy in that first round. Think of an NFL-like scenario, though ostensibly without six teams.

On Posada and Basebrawls (postgame notes 15 September 2009)

I admit it.

Brawls, fights, whatever you call them, in the right time and place do not bother me.

Hockey is only second to baseball in terms of my love for the sport, and fights have long been part of the game. I like to see guys drop the gloves, play with a little intensity and bring some color to the game.

Don't blame me, I'm a Devils fan.

While baseball brawls, for the most part, play out like senior proms compared to hockey fights, I generally don't have too much of a problem with them. They can make a boring game a little more entertaining.

Then the fight happens to you or your team, and you realize there are very negative consequences.

The "fiery" Jorge Posada, as he's known, had every right to be peeved when Carlson threw behind him, but it should have ended there.

Be at the center of a baseball brawl, and two things happen: 1) you risk injury, and any injury in mid-September is likely to be season-ending, and 2) suspension.

Let's take these two in turn.

1) Injury.

This is by far the biggest issue. The Yankees are where they are right now because, for the most part, they've managed to stay healthy, or as healthy as you could expect a team with a LF, 3B, SS and other assorted on the wrong side of 30.

Even if it was just Posada that got hurt, it would still be a tremendous blow--I point you verily in the direction of 2008.

At the very least, those other teammates that rushed into to the fray put themselves at risk, too. While I understand that Shelley Duncan is unlikely to make the postseason roster, what the heck is Joba Chamberlain or any of the pitchers thinking when they are in the fray?

It'd be one thing if this was a last place team going nowhere, but the Yankees are legitimate contenders. They cannot, right now, risk anyone getting hurt. There's too much riding on it.

2) Suspension

In hockey, you fight and you get a five minute "major" and, barring extenuating circumstances, it ends there.

Baseball, alas, is not hockey. Fights come with suspensions.

If we look at Kevin Youkilis's six-game suspension for going after Rick Porcello, Jorge Posada might expect similar. The good news is that with September call ups, Jose Molina and Francisco Cervelli can split the catching duties as may be and neither will get too worn down. The bad news, however, is that all of a sudden the Yankees miss Posada's bat. The Yankees still have to go back to Seattle and Anaheim, which makes this an even less pleasing scenario.



There are two camps out there.

There's the camp that think the Yankees need to act with class and never retaliate, and then there's the camp that thinks the Yankees should retaliate, and the team should literally fight on occasion.

Normally I'm in the second camp, but this late in the season, with so much riding on it, Posada's actions hurt the team tonight and for the upcoming week.

Yanks have 13th Walk Off of Season (Postgame Notes 08 September 2009)

For a complete recap please check out my post at The Yankee Universe

• Nick Swisher hit two home runs, Phil Hughes blew a 2-1 lead in the eighth inning, and Chad Gaudin pitched an utter gem for six innings.

• Derek Jeter was again held hitless, and it’s beginning to look like he’s pressing–not for sake of a record, but because Jeter is now in his longest 0-fer for the season.

• The Yankees have been playing .750 baseball since the All Star break.

Yanks Sweep Double-header; Magic # down to 16

For a complete recap, check out my post on The Yankee Universe

• Perhaps it's a microcosm of how this season has gone for the Yankees, but both Sabathia and Burnett turned in stellar outings

• In the first game, the Yankees remained deadlocked at 1-1 in a pitchers' duel until the eighth.

• In the second game, the Yankees scored eight runs in the third inning, and never looked back, notching Burnett his first win since the end of July.

• Derek Jeter went hitless, the first time in his career in a double-header.

• Larry Mahnken of Replacement Level fame mentioned to me that the Yankees are now getting above league-average production at every position.
  

Yankees Sweep Baltimore; Rivera out with Tight Groin (Postgame Notes 2 September 2009)

View my complete recap at The Yankee Universe

• Marc Carig and Pete Abraham are reporting that Mariano Rivera has tightness in his groin and will miss a few days but could be back by the weekend.

• Sabathia struggled early--five hits in two--but picked it up afterwards and held Baltimore to one run.

• The Yankee offense exploded for seven runs in the 9th.

• All Eric Hinske does is come off the bench and hit HRs.
  

Bombs and Bullpen back Burnett (postgame notes 1 September (!!) 2009)

For a full recap, please check out my post on The Yankee Universe any time after midnight.

Notes:

• Handed leads of 3-1 and then 5-3, Burnett could maintain neither, and while he only walked two, he did surrender eleven hits.

• The offense was Bronx Bombing at its best: five home runs, from Robinson Canó (who's hitting somewhere around .480 against Baltimore), Jorge Posada (who hit two, including one after he forgot the count and thought he had struck out!), Nick Swisher (whose home/road splits in the words of Girardi are "mind-boggling"), and Eric Hinske.

• Damaso Marte, David Robertson, Phil Coke and Mariano Rivera combined to hold the Orioles scoreless for 3.2 innings.

• The Orioles have been mathematically eliminated from AL East contention tonight.
  

Pettitte takes Perfecto into the 7th (Postgame Notes 31 August 2009)

Throughout his career, Andy Pettitte has been known as a second half pitcher.

That was never more apparent than it was tonight, where Pettitte pitched eight two-hit innings of baseball--he took a perfect game into two outs in the seventh and lost it only when Jerry Hairston Jr did his best Bill Buckner impression at third, filling in for Alex Rodriguez.

The Yankees scored their own five runs--it's a road game, so of course Swisher had a home run and was a triple away from the cycle--but the story of the game is easily Pettitte.

Pettitte was so good that even when he did lose the perfect game and the no-hitter (lost on a clean single), and the game was only 2-0 at the time, Pettitte still got himself out of the inning without allowing a run. Pettitte would allow a lead-off home run to Melvin Mora, but by that time the Yankees were leading by five.

Pettitte's ERA since the all-star break is 2.56--and despite CC Sabathia having lost only one August game in the past two seasons, one could make the argument right now that Pettitte is pitching better than anyone else on the Yankees' staff.

In the end, tonight's game is exactly what should have happened when the team with the league's best record plays one of the cellar-dwellers: Good pitching, enough offense and the other team never really has a chance.

(For what it's worth, though, Brian Bruney has quite a bit of work to do to if he really really wants to be on that postseason roster...)

Mitre and Gaudin combine to one-hit White Sox (Postgame Notes 29 August 2009)

You can be forgiven if, at the outset, you thought that today's Contreras-Mitre match up would be one long and non-fun game to sit through.

Jose Contreras certainly kept up his part of the bargain--unable to make it even through the fourth inning as the Yankees singled and doubled him to death.

Sergio Mitre, on the other hand, pitched well.

Not well-for-a-five-starter or well-for-someone-that-has-an-awfully-high-WHIP or passably good, but well.

Very, very well.

Through six and a third innings, Mitre gave up only one hit--a scorching double to Jim Thome (if you're going to give up a hit might as well be to a guy that's headed to Cooperstown)--and, just as importantly, walked only one.

Had he not been hit in the elbow with a come-back-line-drive-thingie, Mitre would have likely pitched the seventh, probably the eighth and possibly even the ninth--easily his best performance since 2006.

Coming on in relief, Chad Gaudin was also excellent--not allowing a single hit to the White Sox over the rest of the game.

On the flip side, the Yankees scored four runs in the second, four in the fourth, and then two more later on, and--unusual, perhaps for this team--the only home run was an Alex Rodriguez solo home run in the later innings.

Robinson Canó now has three hits with runners in scoring position since last night--a very rare feat for him this season.

Just as important, he made a stellar defensive play in the sixth inning--and he has played solid defense all season.

The Yankees have now assured themselves of their 14th straight season at .500 or better--even if they go winless the rest of the season (in which case they'd have some more serious problems).

Yankees Walk Off (Again) (Postgame Notes 28 August 2009)

If the Yankees have a "secret sauce" to winning in 2009, it's gotta be that they've figured out the recipe for the walk-off win.

When the game gets to the bottom of the ninth and it's tied, one almost expects, now, that the Yankees will win--and the only question is who will get the game winning hit (or walk, or hit by pitch, or pop up...)

It's quite a simple thing, really: decent starting pitching, good defense at key points in the game (like that seventh inning that could have been so much worse), a spotless bullpen and the offense getting the right hit at the right time.

Sabathia was great through six and kind of came apart in the seventh; Alex Rodriguez and Jose Molina sort of saved him on defense.

Phil Hughes struck out the side in the 8th, Mariano Rivera was Mariano Rivera and Brian Bruney had a delightfully decent appearance and Robinson Canó hit a bomb with a runner in scoring position (and a runner on first, too).


The Yanks had another rather bad night with runners in scoring position, but when you have the best record in the league such things seem minor concerns.

The Yankees were fairly desperate to get tonight's game in given the horrible weather forecast for Saturday; they did so without so much as a delay, which is impressive given that the heavens have now more or less completely opened.

Yanks do that pitching thing, win (Postgame Notes 26 August 2009)

For the first time since, uh, before last weekend, the Yankees received a quality start from their starting pitcher, and, accordingly, they won.


Andy Pettitte has historically been good in the second half; this year is no different.

After a some-what rough first inning that took a double play to escape scoreless, Pettitte cruised through seven innings.

The Yankee offense scored four runs off of long balls from Jorge Posada and Jerry Hairston Jr (yes, you read that right), and then five more in the bottom of the seventh inning doing damage against the Texas bullpen.

The one blemish to the night was Jorge Posada leaving the game in the top of the eighth inning after a pitch hit his (gloved) hand; via the beat guys on Twitter (Sweeny Murti and Josh Thompson covering for Pete Abraham), Posada re-aggravated a ring finger injury, but x-rays were negative and he is day-to-day--Posada was unlikely to catch tomorrow's game anyway, being a night game after a day game.


AJ Burnett goes tomorrow in the rubber game of this series, and after his last start at Fenway (yet another Fenway disaster in 2009), he could use a decent outing.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of an Unlikely Victory (Postgame Notes 25 August 2009)

The win was there for the taking.

Down by five runs in the ninth, the Yankees clawed back to within one run, and had men on second and first base with no one out and Swisher at the plate.

Nick Swisher doesn't much like hitting at Yankee Stadium, but he still draws quite a few walks, and against a pitcher that couldn't throw strikes, the call for him to bunt in that situation will likely haunt Joe Girardi and the Yankees until their next win.

The bunt may have been the conventional move and the by-the-book move, but there were two problems with it: Swisher's not a typical bunter, and Frank Francisco had been showing himself to be eminently hittable.

The only significant problem I have had with Joe Girardi all year is that he plays by the book just a little too often.

Sometimes--rarely, but still--momentum or a unique situation calls for the book to be thrown out the window.

That's exactly tonight. The Yankees had sent six men to the plate before Swisher in the ninth inning, and all six of them had reached via walk or hit.

When Swisher showed bunt, it became clear that Girardi was playing for the tie and not the win (which is normal when you're home), but one has to ask, had this been any other inning, would Swisher really have bunted there? If this game was on the road, would Swisher have bunted there?

Absolutley not.


****

That aside, this game wasn't lost in the ninth inning. It was lost when Joba Chamberlain blew a 4-0 lead.

Some stuff from Joe P. of River Ave Blues:

Nine of 10 runs scored after bases empty, two outs...in both innings Joba allowed runs, it came down to his inability to retire the No. 9 hitter...


Sure, it'd have been nice if Chad Gaudin had not given up those two bombs, but Gaudin didn't put the Yankees in a 7-4 hole to start.

Right now, the fact that Joba is the Yankees' #4 starter in the postseason is a little disconcerting. He's still young, but he's got some serious on-field growing up to do.

Yanks Beat Beckett (Postgame Notes 23 August 2009)

The Yankees' just-finished 10 game road trip was their longest of the season--and they responded by going 7-3.

Think about that for a moment.

That's the type of road trip that separates the contenders from the pretenders.

The Yankees, going into the series against Boston had only one thing they needed to do, and that was to not get swept. They accomplished that the first night, but tonight they won the series as well.

It's not very often a baseball team will get five home runs off of Josh Beckett (Matsui had two--all four of his hits on the road trip were home runs), but that is what happened tonight.

Funny game, that baseball.

The Yankees couldn't buy a run off of Junichi Tazawa yesterday, but scored in each of the first five innings today.

Some observations:

• Derek Jeter hit .500 on the road trip. Let me repeat. Derek Jeter hit .500 on the road trip. There's being good, there's going on a hot streak, and then there's that.

• The Yankees --okay, Robinson Canó--was doing his best Luis Castillo impression in the field today. He mitigated it a bit with one of five Yankee home runs, and I wouldn't get too concerned--one poor defensive game does not a season make.

• Sabathia wasn't unhittable, but he was what the Yankees needed, and the bullpen was (as it usually is in a win) excellent.

• It's going to be an odd series with the Rangers--the Yankees want to win, of course, but us fans have been rooting for the Rangers to win the Wild Card. Guess we will see who are true Yankee fans and who are just Red Sox haters...

• Nick Swisher had his consecutive-game-reached-based streak snapped, but this only underscores how great he's been this season--especially on the road.
  

Yanks 30 over .500 (Postgame Notes 14 August 2009)

Doing this one in bullet form because it's late and I'm tired:

• The Yankees have a .902 OPS in the 7th inning or later. The next closest is .787.

• The Mets have 69 HR all year; the Yankees have 68 from the 7th inning on alone.

• Andy Pettitte's 10 strikeouts are a season high for him and match the season highs of CC and AJ. Oh, and he did it in six innings. Ken Griffey, Jr. was the only Mariner not to strike out. Which would be why he's Ken Griffey, Jr.

• Brian Bruney threw a greater percentage of strikes tonight than did Mariano Rivera, but Rivera still retired the side on nine pitches.

• Mark Teixeira is making quite the case for an MVP award, no?

Blog at you in the morning.

These Boots are Made for Walking-off All Over You (postgame notes 12 August 2009)

At this point, if a Yankee game is tied headed into the ninth inning at home, you might as well start an office pool for who will hit the walk off.

For the eleventh time this season, the Yankees walked off--a quarter of all of the team's wins.

The game, otherwise, was fairly non-descript.

AJ Burnett was at times filthy, but, being Burnett, struggled with his control at others, and it came back to bite him when the Blue Jays tied the game on a wild pitch in the sixth inning.

The offense was stagnant, for the most part, though it should be noted that Ricky Romero is Toronto's best starter not named Roy Halladay.

Both Jeter and Alex Rodriguez got hit by pitches--Jeter eventually left the game, but to the relief of Yankee fans everywhere, X-Rays on his foot were negative. Alex Rodriguez got hit in the eleventh inning, so while we don't know if he would have stayed to play in the field, it would have been awkward if he hadn't. Jose Molina was the only Yankee left on the bench, so if A-Rod came out the most likely scenario would have been Mark Teixeira at third, Posada at first and Molina catching. Not the defensive alignment you want.

Thankfully, Robinson Canó--who has been red hot--was there to end it.

What should, of course, not go unnoticed is the stellar bullpen (yet again)--Phil Coke, David Robertson, Phil Hughes and Chad Gaudin.

Gaudin, especially, was impressive in his Yankee debut, pitching two scoreless innings.

Mariano Rivera was apparently not available--but this might just be related to the fact that the Yankees have that long west coast swing of doom upcoming.


The Yankees finish the homestand at 6-1, and their 41-18 home record is the best in the league.

They've taken the bottom of the ninth and turned it into a true home field advantage

A Moment in the 2009 Season (postgame notes 11 August 2009)

If the 2009 Yankee season were a book and you opened to a random page, tonight's game is what you'd find.

Joba Chamberlain cruising through some innings and nibbling in others.

A stellar bullpen taking over in the middle innings and not letting Toronto add to a 5-4 lead.

A rally in the late innings to secure a come-from-behind win, with some help from the short porch in right field and back to back jacks from Matsui and Posada.

A win.

That's the entirety of the game in a nutshell. Sure, there are concerns: Joba's nibbling and the fact that it took the Yankee offense from the second to the eighth to be able to score one more run off of a not-very-good Toronto ball club, for instances.

Still, as is more often than not the case this season, the ultimate result was a win.

Oh, and while there's still some time left--today is Melky Cabrera's 25th birthday. Cabrera has blossomed this year as a hitter, taking more pitches and hitting for more power. He had two RBI on the night.

The Hangover (Postgame Notes 10 August 2009)

It's common that when a team comes off a playoff-clinching performance to play flat the next day. A hangover, if you will.

The Yankees didn't clinch anything in their four game sweep of Boston, but you would have never known it from the atmosphere at the Stadium and the intensity in which those games were played.

Although the Yankees weren't exactly flat--they were done in more by bad pitching from Sergio Mitre than anything else--there was just something different about tonight.

It wasn't until the ninth inning that the crowd at the Stadium was anything close to alive, and by then it was pretty much too late--the Yankees best opportunities to tie the game had come earlier.

To be fair, had Sergio Mitre pitched to a modicum of a decent effort, the Yankees four runs could have been enough. One gets the feeling that any of the other Yankee starters and the 1-0 and 2-1 leads would not have been blown (almost) as soon as they were obtained.

At any rate, because of a heroic effort from Alfredo Aceves, no one else in the bullpen was used tonight, and Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui got (most) of a much-needed day off, while Posada had a day off from catching.

No, no one likes to lose, but when you're 31 of your last 42 it's hard to find decent reasons to complain.

The Yankees will be back at it tomorrow. Joba Chamberlain needs a decent outing to prove that his struggles against the Red Sox were an aberration and not him slipping back into his pre-All Star break whatchamacallits. However, the difference here is that while giving up 4 or 5 runs from Mitre constitutes an average and almost expected performance, the same from Chamberlain is considered failure. That's the difference between the first four in the Yankees' rotation and the guy that's pitching only because Wang's hurt and Hughes is otherwise occupied.

The important thing, as always, is to make sure that one loss doesn't become two.

Boston Sweep Party

If there was any question, any doubt, any uncertainty about the character of the 2009 New York Yankees, this weekend it was answered.

Oh, was it answered.

All the talk, all the rumors that the Yankees could not beat decent teams, that they were a bully team that could only beat up on teams like the Mets and the Orioles, all the insinuations that Alex Rodriguez couldn't hit in the clutch, all of it has gone for naught.

The Yankees came into the weekend set with the Red Sox needing to win one--just one--to ensure they woke up on Monday morning still in first place, and to get the 0-fer off their backs.

So they won the first game.

It wasn't pretty, a 13-6 slugfest in which the Yankees walked twelve of the Red Sox, but it counts.

After winning the first game, the rhetoric turned to winning the second. Win the second game and ensure a split, ensure that no matter what there is no net loss in the standings. Win and get AJ Burnett's own Boston monkey off his back.

So they won the second game.

It was pretty--a thing of baseball beauty--until it went too long, well into the early morning hours. Eventually, Joe Girardi out-managed Terry Francona's bullpen strategy; while Girardi maximized the relievers he did use in extra innings, Francona opted for one-inning stints and eventually Junichi Tazawa made his Major League debut, and Alex Rodriguez was waiting.

After winning the second game, the rhetoric turned to winning the third. Win the third game and ensure a net gain in the standings. Win the third game and ensure a series victory in a series in which most would have been satisfied with a split.

So they won the third game.

It was pretty, too. The pitching was pretty--more, actually, like domination than pretty--and with a starter like CC Sabathia on the mound, domination seems a better term to describe it. The offense scored early enough and the team never looked back. It wasn't a 15-0 thrashing, but the way the Red Sox had been hitting, it might as well have been.

After winning the third game, then, the rhetoric turned to winning the fourth game.

To a sweep.

No one wanted to utter that word before--too much attached to it, it might too quickly act as a jinx--but now, three wins already down, the fans (and, one senses, the Yankees) smelled blood in the water.

The match up, on paper, favored Boston. Jon Lester, in his career, is (still) undefeated against the Yankees, although he has not always won.

Tonight, Lester wasn't much different. He made only one mistake--a solo home run to Alex Rodriguez--in seven innings of work. That the Red Sox were held scoreless, too, had less to do with Andy Pettitte (though it must be said that Pettitte got much stronger in his last two innings of work) than it did the Red Sox offense, which has simply disappeared.

Between the ninth inning of Thursday's game and the eighth inning of tonight's, the Red Sox did not score a single run. Thirty-one-and-a-third scoreless innings. Blame Boston's offense or laud Yankee pitching, it's your choice, but the fact remains that in four games against their rivals the Red Sox scored eight runs and four of those came before the fifth inning on Friday.

If there was one blemish tonight, it was Phil Coke giving up a two-run home run to Victor Martinez, but Girardi's reasoning for using Coke in that spot was sound: Phil Hughes was unavailable after pitching four games out of five, and if the game got to extra innings, the Yankees needed pitchers available who could give length.

During the postgame interview on YES, Coke explained that the pitch to Martinez was supposed to be up near his hands, and not down by his thighs. He was angry about it, and then was not angry anymore once the Yankees won. "So much for 8-0," he said.


Johnny Damon and Mark Teixeira were there to bail Coke out, though, with back-to-back home runs in the next half inning. In fact, while with two outs, the Yankees would proceed to bat around in the inning.

So the Yankees won the fourth game.

They won the fourth game and swept the Boston Red Sox.

Had they swept this series against any other team it would be noted for the stellar pitching, clutch hitting, brilliant defense and everything else that went right. Since the series was against the Red Sox, though, it'll be remembered, rightly or wrongly, mostly for being a sweep of the Red Sox.

The Yankees are now 6.5 games in first place--the first time since 2006. It's still early, and there's still a long way to go, but there it is.

This is a team that is not just playing like it could, but playing like it will go on to do special things.

They can't get complacent now. They have to keep going. This has the feeling right now that the Yankees have just clinched the division. They have not, and with a month and a half to go it's not really that close, either.

Look for some of the regulars to get a day of rest while playing Seattle--after that it's back to the West Coast and then Boston again the weekend after.

For the moment, enjoy what you've seen.

And so much for Boston being 8-0, huh?

October in August (Postgame Notes 7-8 August 2009)

So this is what October feels like, eh?


For a baseball purist, or any fan of pitching, tonight was manna sent from heaven.

If anyone told you that today's game wasn't a big game, they'd be lying--while it may not have been as big (at least for the Yankees) as last night's was, it was still big. Win, and the Yankees assure themselves of at least a series split and now Boston cannot, no matter what, come out of this having gained any ground on the Yankees.

Furthermore, tonight was a chance for AJ Burnett to prove that the Yankees didn't make a mistake in signing him to pitch a big game, though his two previous starts in Boston would have seemed to indicate otherwise. He had a real chance to deliver tonight.

And deliver, Allan James Burnett, did.

Holding Boston to just one hit--the first batter of the game on a play that probably should have been made--Burnett went 7.2 innings, which has a further benefit in that since Phil Hughes only pitched to one batter, he can probably pitch tomorrow.

The problem was, as well as Burnett pitched, Josh Beckett matched him step-for-step.

And so they dueled.

That the game became a battle of the bullpens should be no surprise to fans of either team, but the caliber of the relief pitching on both sides was mostly extrodnary.

The Red Sox used their entire bullpen; the Yankees five men, and it came down to a rookie making his major league debut only since Terry Francona had no other options, to break the scoreless tie.

Otherwise, tonight's game may have gone on forever.

There's thus nothing really to say about the offense--both teams had chances and couldn't capitalize, but it has more to do with the quality of the pitching than anything else.

So, you there Yankee fan, take it and enjoy it.

This is what October feels like--the atmosphere, the quality of play, the unfathomable-ness of a loss.

It's been a while, now, since there was October baseball in the Bronx, but the way these Yankees are playing, they may well be unstoppable.

Bring on the Sox (Postgame Notes 5 August 2009)

Admit it, because I will: at the start of this game, it would have taken a coin flip to decide which mix was more volatile: ammonia mixed with bleach or Sergio Mitre on turf.

While Mitre didn't exactly pitch well--and that's a generous assessment as he could not make it out of the fourth--he did, however, limit the damage to three Toronto runs.

The Yankees then got some help from Alfredo Aceves, Phil Coke, Phil Hughes and David Robertson--all of whom were excellent, and, once they grabbed the lead in the seventh, seemed to cruise to an 8-4 victory.

The Yankees struggled to score runs early, but, as they have done so often this season, did their damage in the latter innings--scoring six of their runs tonight in the seventh inning or later.

What does it all mean?

The past three games, the Yankees have played some great baseball after playing some rather bad baseball in the first three games of the White Sox set.

The offense seems to tailor its performance to exactly what's needed, scoring runs at the right time, and not all in the same way, either.

Make no mistake, the upcoming four-game set with Boston is huge, and the biggest game of the series is tomorrow. Win the first game of that set and they will automatically excise the Boston demons. Win tomorrow and the Yankees are assured that no matter what else happens they'll still be in first place on Monday morning.

Win tomorrow and Joba Chamberlain can continue to prove all us naysayers wrong.

Win tomorrow and much will be well.


One game in a baseball season rarely changes everything, but sometimes it can mean just that little bit more.

That's tomorrow's game.

It's too late in the season for excuses.

Andy is Dandy; outduels Halladay in Toronto (postgame notes 04 August 2009)

Among his many phrases, one of the most obvious--and yet ignored, except in a mocking tone--quotes of John Sterling is simply that "you can't predict baseball."


On paper, this should have been a rough game for the Yankees. They have, historically, struggled against Roy Halladay, and, of late had not been getting Andy Pettitte much in the way of run support.

Thankfully, the games aren't played on paper.

The Yankees never trailed, as they scored two runs in the first before Toronto had an at bat. Although the game did get close at times, the Yankees maintained their lead throughout, making the most important pitches at the most important spots.

Andy Pettitte, the starter, was brilliant.

In his career, Pettitte has solid enough numbers against Toronto, but tonight he needed to match Roy Halladay--and that he did.

He had some of his best stuff all season, and used it in a game where the Yankees sorely needed it.

The Yankee offense was excellent given the opposing starter; like the game on July 4th, the Yankees hit three long balls off of Halladay, this time Johnny Damon, Mark Teixeira and Hideki Matsui being the culprits.

The home runs, all solo shots, came late in the game and gave the Yankees insurance runs that they ended up needing, on a night when Mariano Rivera was not at his best.

I wouldn't get too concerned about Rivera; before pitching on Sunday he had not pitched in a while and thus, rust is rust. What matters is that he held onto the lead--if he's still getting hit like this come September, then there's an issue, but he's still 39 years old...

At any rate, the Yankees have won a game that didn't favor them on paper, and all of a sudden there's just a little less pressure on Sergio Mitre tomorrow.