Chien-Ming Wang makes his third major league start tonight. Despite it resulting in a loss, his second outing, last week in Tampa, was not a total disaster. In fact, considering the fact that he is a groundball pitcher who was working on the slick turf of the Trop, and that one had to expect some regression after his excellent first start, he did just fine for someone making their second-ever start in the majors. Here’s hoping he will build on that performance tonight, particularly on the three strikeouts (two swinging). Wang struck out 7.16 men per nine innings in his minor league career, with his strikeout frequency increasing at each level as he moved from rookie ball to triple-A over the past two seasons.
His opponent is Aaron Sele, who had a nice run as a solid league-average or better innings eater for some successfull Texas and Seattle clubs from 1998 to 2001 (his age 28 to 31 seasons), but has been comfortably below league average ever since.
Yanks go for four-in-a-row tonight. As Alex always says . . .
