So what the hell happened in Kansas City? Steven Goldman offers his two cents on today’s Pinstriped Blog. Joe Torre says it all comes back around to starting pitching. If you ask me, the pitching wasn’t the problem. Yes, you’d like to see the Yankee starters dominate a hapless offense such as the Royals’, but the 4.00 ERA they posted over three games is more than half a run better than the staff’s season mark and Torre didn’t have to use his bullpen much at all (2 2/3 innings of Sturtze, 1 of Gordon).
No, I blame the offense. This team is simply giving away outs, be it by starting Tony Womack and Ruben Sierra, a series of awful baserunning blunders, or simply by hacking their way into outs at the plate. The last of those is enough to make one wonder if Don Mattingly will ever get any heat from the local media. Don’t get me wrong, I love and respect Donnie baseball as much as any pinstripe-blooded Yankee fan, but back when the Yankees were looking for a hitting coach after losing the 2003 World Series, I wondered if Donnie’s personal history of contact hitting was less than ideal for a team built around working the count, drawing walks, and knocking them home with big blasts. Though I was very pleased when Mattingly was hired less than a week later, and thrill to the site of Donnie with his beat-up little black book consulting hitters before and after at-bats, I still wonder.
Heading into Minnesota, the Yankee bats get a break, as they will miss both Johan Santana (who struck out 14 Indians last night) and Hometown Brad Radke, who has walked just three men all season. But then again, to an offense that just scored a grand total of three runs against D.J. Carrasco, Ryan Jensen and the Royals bullpen, Kyle Lohse, Joe Mays and Carlos Silva could just as easily be Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz.
