Monthly Archives: August 2008

With 35 games left—a third of those coming against Tampa and Boston—the now six-game Wild Card deficit is not insurmountable. The Yankees are still mathematically in it, but as the losses aggregate, it’s growing difficult to be optimistic about giving Yankee Stadium a proper sendoff with October baseball.

Newsday‘s Mark Herrmann agreed with that position in his Sunday column, advising fans not to count on a happy ending this season.

Even certain circles of the blogosphere have soured on the team. This from NoMaas on Aug. 17:

Between us declaring that this team won’t make the playoffs and the organization failing to sign their 1st-round draft pick, the Yankees aren’t exactly holding our interest right now.

Compared to Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and some of the baffling Olympic commentary (Al Trautwig’s descriptions of Nastia Liukin stretching were borderline pedophilic, and Andrea Kremer’s interviews from the Water Cube have demonstrated that she’s out of her element), I’ll admit, the Yankees haven’t exactly been holding my interest, either. Carl Pavano starting on Saturday has me interested in the team, but not for the right reasons. I’m ready to place the over/under at five innings before Pavano discovers another injury and removes himself from the game.

On the Desperation Meter, Pavano’s start isn’t close to having Kevin Brown start Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS, but Joe Girardi could pencil in "Last Resort" as an alias for Pavano at Camden Yards and few would know the difference. Consider the following paragraphs from Mr. GAK III of the New York Post:

How desperate are the Yankees? Publicly, none of the players spoke despairingly of Pavano re-entering their universe.

"If anything we are excited," Jason Giambi said of Pavano, who has pitched in 19 games in three-plus years and hasn’t worked a big league game since last May due to Tommy John surgery on his right elbow. Pavano missed the entire 2006 season with assorted injuries that included a bruised buttock.

"We need a win and he is a guy who can help. I hope we get the real Carl Pavano."

It’s fortunate that Pavano is making this start in Baltimore. That may not be enough of a break, however. Without the Olympic coverage that has pushed baseball to mid-section status on some editors’ agendas, Pavano will be front and center and a surefire headliner for the Sunday papers. His anxiety level will be high. The stress might have killed him if he was making this start in the Bronx.

(more…)

What with all my attention focused on the final year of Yankee Stadium, I haven’t paid as much notice to what’s happening out in Queens. It is the last season at Shea too, and the Mets have more than a decent chance to play baseball in October.

Tom Seaver, the greatest player in Met history, isn’t sad to see Shea go (Peace to Repoz for the link):

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not a big fan of the stadium,” Seaver said before last night’s game against the Braves. “It’s strictly an architectural observation.

“I said this before, and got my rear end in a little bit of hot water. It’s just a physical presence to me. Now the physical is just going to move across the street.”

…”I get sentimental about the people, not the physical structure here,” Seaver said. “When I’m here, I see the spot where Gil Hodges used to sit, Rube Walker. I look to see where Tug McGraw used to sit. That’s what I see. It’s the people who occupied those spaces that are important to me.”
(Barbara Barker, Newsday)

Seaver is right on here. In some ways, the same can be said about Yankee Stadium. The rennovated Stadium may not be as grand as the original version, but for a generation of Yankee fans, it is home. And it is the relationships we’ve had with our family and friends at the park, our relationships with the players, from Steve Balboni to Bernie Williams, that makes the place special.

The town is dead and I love it.  There’s nothing better than New York City when it’s practically empty.  Everyone will be back from vacation soon, back to work, back to school, and the subways will be crowded again in the morning.  But for the next ten days, we’ve still got the town to ourselves.  And I just love a farmer’s market in late August–peaches, corn, and all of those amazing tomatoes. 

Good and good for ya.

Hard as it may seem to believe, it’s true: Carl Pavano will start for the Yankees tomorrow against the Orioles. Tyler Kepner has more…There will be no shortage of wise cracks from the peanut gallery over the next couple of days, that’s for sure.

Sir Sidney had nothing and was torched by the Blue Jays’ hitters tonight and they weren’t done. They had 21 hits in all and the score was 14-3 when the fireworks was over.

Yanks face Doc Halladay tonight in Toronto. A formidable task for sure. But who knows? Stranger things have happened. Maybe they get him on an “off” night. Maybe Sir Sidney Ponson has another good outing. Maybe pigs will fly.

Either way, Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

The Red Sox are clearly the third most popular team in New York these days. Ten years ago you’d rarely see someone wearing a Red Sox hat, and when you did, it was hard not to have some grudging admiration for the brave soul. Now that the Red Sox are a success the bandwagon is full and Sox fans can rock their gear without shame. They are a dime a dozen. This trend will eventually pass but not anytime soon.

And so long as the New York Times owns a piece so the Red Sox we’ll continue to see features in the sports page like Jack Curry’s piece on Jed Lowrie. Curry has been with the Sox in Baltimore the past couple of days.

Why would the Times assign their lead baseball feature writer to follow Boston? They aren’t playing the Yankees until next week. Because at the Times, the Sox matter almost as much as the Yankees or the Mets.

It’s a sorry state of affairs but that’s the way it is.

Meanwhile, in more regional affairs, Tyler Kepner has a nice post over at Bats, and asks the question: Should the Yankees re-sign Bobby Abreu?

Steven Goldman, writing in the New York Sun, thinks 2009 might be more of the same, or worse, for the Yanks. His suggestion? Bust ’em up, baby:

With next year’s pitching staff likely to be at least as unsettled as the current edition, the Yankees are in a difficult spot. If baseball teams don’t decide when to rebuild, the gods of baseball tend to decide for them. There’s a penalty to holding on too long, to having the issue forced: Your team might turn into the Baltimore Orioles (in the Yankees’ case, Jeter standing in for the aging Cal Ripken). Hence, the Yankees should be broken up now, by Brian Cashman, with the veterans sent out of town by August 31 for the best offers available.

That’d be a bold move. Doubt it’ll happen though.

Over at Baseball Intellect, Alex Eisenberg takes a look at Joba Chamberlain’s mechanics. 

Fun, thought-provoking stuff.  Excellent job by Eisenberg.

I was downtown last night near Washington Square Park, crossing Fifth avenue, when I saw a black kid on a skateboard gliding up the street.  He was listening to music and singing loudly.  I smiled and thought, man, I really don’t get around downtown much anymore.  You just don’t see people uptown expressing themselves with such theatricality–here I am, hear me, love me or screw off, I don’t care. 

I couldn’t make out what he was singing until I heard, "I live by the river."

Ah-ha. That made me smile even more.  Wouldn’t have pegged him for a Clash fan.

I got caught up working late last night and didn’t catch a single pitch of the Yankee game. By the time I got home, shortly before ten, it was over.  I turned on Baseball Tonight and waited for the score to appear on the crawl.  Wouldn’t you know it, the Yankee-Toronto game was the last of the AL scores to appear.  While I waited I felt sure that the Yankees had won and for a few moments I thought about sure things.  Mariano Rivera is as sure as you get, though he’s not perfect of course.  The Yankees themselves have been a sure thing for a long time too.  That isn’t the case this year, sure-things don’t last forever, but the fact that you can have them, even for a little while, is something to savor.  

Still, the longer it took to get to the score the more I started thinking, maybe they lost again.

But they didn’t.  Andy Pettitte pitched a nice ball game and Derek Jeter had three hits, including a two-run dinger as the Yanks beat the Jays, 5-1.  His batting average is up to .298.  The Yankee captain is also two hits shy of 2,500 for his career.  Even though he’s shown signs of decline this year, unless Jeter gets hurt or starts to deteriorate rapidly, he’s virtually a sure thing to reach 3,000.  If all goes well he could reach the milestone in three more seasons. 

Pretty cool, huh?

…The Yanks will serve the Jays up like Stove Top Stuffin’ tonight.  And if they don’t, if we see Bad Andy, if the Yanks get rocked, well, then I just don’t know what.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

Diane Firstman offers this video look at the Yankees playoff drive:

I realize these are truly the dog days for Yankee fans.  With each passing day it appears increasingly unlikely that the team will qualify for the playoffs.  Not only that, but they are just a tough team to watch in so many ways.  This morning I saw two Yankee fans at work and the first thing they did was hide their face as if they were Dracula meeting the morning light.  They hung their heads.  One of them told me he’s not watching anymore.  And he’s not the first one I’ve heard that from over the past few weeks.

These are tough times, relatively speaking, and if you’ve got better things to do with your time than watching a lousy team, that is understandable.  But this idea of forgetting your team or giving up on them when they don’t live up to our collective expectations really seperates the true fans from the causal rooter. 

We’ll be here at Bronx Banter win or lose, and that’s that.  Even if they play like a bunch of bums, we’ll be here.  We were here when they were winning and we’ll be here when they stink.  That’s a promise.

The hot mess that keeps giving…

As Bob T mentioned…20 mugs?  Dude, that’s a lotta beers.

With last night’s win, the Blue Jays improved to 5-1 this season in games against the Yankees started by their top two pitchers, A.J. Burnett and Roy Halladay. It was Burnett’s turn last night, as he struck out 13 Yankees while allowing just one run on five hits and a walk over eight innings.

The one run came right away in the first inning as Johnny Damon took the first five pitches of the game to draw a walk and Bobby Abreu doubled him home. Abreu has faced Burnett more than any other hitter in Burnett’s career and seemed to be the only Yankee not overmatched by him last night, cracking another double in his second at-bat leading off the fourth (Burnett then struckout Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi and got Xavier Nady to ground out) and a sinking liner nabbed by a sliding Adam Lind in the sixth. After Abreu’s second double, which was also the Yankees’ second hit of the game, the Bombers managed just three singles off Burnett, one of which didn’t leave the infield.

Remarkably, Darrell Rasner nearly made that first-inning run stand up. Though he struck out ten fewer men than Burnett, Rasner limited the Blue Jays to just three hits and a walk over 6 2/3 innings. Unfortunately, the last hit was a seventh-inning solo homer by Lind that tied the game. Jose Veras replaced Rasner a batter later, finished the seventh and struck out the first two men in the eighth. Toronto leadoff man Joe Inglett picked up a single with two outs in the eighth, but it seemed an insignificant hit until Marco Scutaro blasted Veras’s next pitch to the wall in dead center.

Here’s where things went from tense to traumatic. Back in the first inning, following the only walk Rasner issued in the game (to Scutaro), Alex Rios hit a deep fly to the gap in left center. Damon and Nady converged at the ball, but Damon called off Nady and camped under the ball only to have it hit off the outside of his glove and roll away for a two-base error. Fortunately, Scutaro was held at third base and Rasner picked up his center fielder by striking out Vernon Wells and getting Lind to ground out to end the inning. Now, with the game knotted at 1-1 in the bottom of the eighth and Jays closer B.J. Ryan warming up for the ninth, Damon drifted back on Scutaro’s blast, turned toward his left to catch the ball a foot shy of the wall, then suddenly turned back to his right stretched and had the ball tip off his glove again, this time for what was ruled a double, but a game-winning RBI double.

Damon was in disbelief. After the game, he remained, to use his word, “baffled.” “I just dropped two balls,” he said almost to himself, shaking his head and laughing at the absurdity of that fact as if he had to remind himself it actually happened. “Just . . . just . . . awful.”

Damon also scored the Yankees’ only run of the game, but it was particularly striking to see Damon make two such plays on the day he’d been essentially named the Yankees regular starting center fielder due to the return of Hideki Matsui (who went 0-for-3 with a fly out, a pop out, and a strikeout).

Adding insult to injury, Alex Rodriguez led off the ninth against Ryan by lifting a flare over Lyle Overbay’s head at first base. The ball dropped in fair and rolled toward the retaining wall in foul territory with Overbay losing ground in pursuit. Seeing that, Rodriguez sped up and headed for second base, but Overbay made a great play, sliding past the ball to stop it and, in one motion, rising to his feet and firing a one-hop strike to second base to nail Rodriguez by several feet. Jason Giambi then struck out for the fourth time on the night and Xavier Nady hit the first pitch he saw to left field for the final out. 2-1 Blue Jays, as the Yankees continue to find new ways to lose.

For the second time in as many series, the Yankees open a three-game set with a significant roster change. On Friday, they promoted Brett Gardner and Cody Ransom at the expense of Melky Cabrera and Richie Sexson. Today, they’ve activated Hideki Matsui from the disabled list and optioned Justin Christian back to triple-A.

Matsui has been on the shelf since late June due to inflammation in his left knee, but was one of the Yankees best hitters over the first three months of the season, going .323/.404/.458 and failing to reach base in just eight of his 69 games before succumbing to his injury. Matsui has slowly and steadily rehabilitated his knee since then, concluding his work over the weekend by playing in three rehab games with high-A Tampa in which he went 2 for 8 with a solo homer and two walks.

With Matsui back in the fold, two big questions need to be answered. The first is, obviously, “will he hit.” The second is, “if he hits, who sits?”

There’s no question that Matsui will DH and DH only, that’s been stated explicitly by the team, but with Gardner having just been installed in center field and having picked up five hits (including a double, a triple, and a game winner) in the final two games against the Royals, the big question is whose at-bats will Matsui might be taking.

Tonight the answer is Gardner, as Johnny Damon starts in center flanked by Xavier Nady and Bobby Abreu with Jason Giambi at first. To his credit, Joe Girardi has put his best offense on the field (including Ivan Rodriguez behind the plate) against A.J. Burnett, turf be damned. Still, one suspects that if that lineup was intended to be permanent, Gardner, who’s being groomed to start, would have been sent down in stead of Christian, who has emerged as a viable bench player. Instead, Gardner’s continued presence suggests an intended rotation that will see Girardi continue to rest his stars, be it by giving Damon or Matsui days off, or giving Nady some work at first base in place of Giambi.

No one really knows what to expect from Matsui any more than they know what to expect from Gardner 2.0. If Matsui picks up where he left off and Gardner continues to hit .400 with runners in scoring position, resting Damon and Giambi won’t hurt. If Matsui struggles and Gardner’s weekend proves to be a fluke, resting Damon and Giambi could undermine what little fight this team seems to have left in it.

Still, replacing Cabrera and Christian with Matsui and Gardner sure feels like a hefty upgrade, even if the offense’s biggest problems remain the catchers, Robinson Cano, and Jason Giambi’s poor performance with runners in scoring position (which has allowed teams to pitch around Alex Rodriguez in such situations).

The Yanks will need all the pop they can get in Toronto as they have to face not only Burnett tonight, but Roy Halladay on Thursday. The last series between these two teams was also played in Toronto with Burnett and Halladay pitching the bookend games. The Jays won both of those games, while the Yankees pounded Jesse Litsch in the middle match. On the season, the Jays, who are just two games behind the Yankees in the standings, have won four of the nine games between the two teams, with either Halladay or Burnett getting the win in all four victories. The Yankees have won just one game started by either of the Jays’ top two starters all year, that coming on Opening Night, when Chien-Ming Wang out-dueled Halladay, 3-2.

The Jays are a better team than they seem. Since Cito Gaston returned to the site of his past glories by replacing John Gibbons as manager at the end of a miserable June for the Jays, Toronto has won at a .580 clip. Had they done that over the rest of the season, they’d be leading the Red Sox in the Wild Card race (only one team in the NL has a winning percentage higher than .580). Over the same stretch, the Yankees have played .520 ball, which is actually worse than their overall winning percentage of .532.

Halladay and Burnett have obviously been key to that run under Gaston (Burnett is 9-2 under Gaston, Halladay has a 2.24 ERA since Cito’s return), as has the Jays’ dominant bullpen (a MLB-best 3.02 ERA). As for the offense, Vernon Wells spent most of Gaston’s first 50 games back at the helm on the DL and has only recently returned. Scott Rolen hit .229/.338/.382 under Gaston before landing on the DL himself. Instead it’s been left fielder Adam Lind who has been sparking the lineup, hitting .329/.363/.587 since being recalled two days after Gaston’s return. Gaston’s other big lineup change was to bench David Eckstein in favor of starting first Marco Scutaro and, with Scutaro now needed in Rolen’s place at third base, John McDonald at shortstop. Neither player provides much offense, but Scutaro has out-hit Rolen under Gaston, and McDonald’s defense makes Halladay all the more dominant.

Every little bit helps, which brings us back to Matsui. The last time he returned from a long DL stay he went 4 for 4 on his first night back. Of course, that was in mid-September 2006, when the Yankees had a double-digit lead in the AL East. Things are a bit different this year.

(more…)

Ponson, Pavano and, would you believe, Zambrano. Yup, Joel Sherman mentions Victor Zambrano today in the latest edition of his Hardball blog.

Remixed…

This book looks amazing…