Daily Archives: September 9, 2005

Johnny Damon lifted the first pitch of last night’s game between the Yankees and Red Sox to right field for what appeared to be an easy fly out, but Matt Lawton, starting in place of the injured Gary Sheffield, perhaps unaware the game had begun, misplayed the ball so badly, staggering around right field like a man with an inner ear infection, that he didn’t even come close to catching it. The ball dropped in front of Lawton for what was inexplicably ruled a single (the old, “if he didn’t touch it, he couldn’t have made an error” ruling), setting the tone for an evening of sloppy, but enthralling baseball from which the Yankees ultimately emerged with an 8-4 victory.

With Damon on first, Renteria bunted Aaron Small’s second pitch foul, took his third for a strike and lost his bat swinging at Small’s fourth offering of the game to strike out on three pitches. That brought David Ortiz to the plate. After a first-pitch ball, Small blew a gut-high 90-mile-per-hour fastball past Big Papi, threw three pitches low and away–the first a ball, the second a perfectly placed strike, and the third fouled off by Ortiz–then came back to blow another gut-high 91-mile-per-hour fastball past Ortiz to pick up his second strike out of the night.

After striking out Renteria and Ortiz, Small got ahead of Manny Ramirez 0-1 and 1-2 before getting Manny to bounce a weak grounder to third base. Unfortunately the grounder was so weak that Ramirez was able to reach on an infield single, well ahead of the barehanded scoop and throw of Alex Rodriguez. Small then got ahead of Trot Nixon 1-2 before getting him to foul out to Derek Jeter charging the stands behind third in a faint echo of last year’s July 1st epic.

Small retiring Ortiz and Nixon would also be a sign of things to come, as the lefty-hitting, Yankee-killing duo would finish the night 0 for 9 with three strikeouts and six runners left on base, their only RBI coming when Robinson Cano booted a potential double play ball off Nixon’s bat with the bases loaded and one out in the seventh.

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Three weeks ago, the Yankees headed to Chicago to face the first-place White Sox coming off yet another dispiriting series loss to the Devil Rays. Having been spared their performance in that series in Tampa due a long weekend away from electronic media of all kinds, this is how I sized up the Yankees chances at that point in the season:

What I see when I look at the standings is that the Yankees are four games behind the Red Sox in the AL East with six games left to play against Boston and one and a half games behind the A’s in the Wild Card race with three games left to play against Oakland. That means the Yankees’ destiny is in their own hands. If they are able to match just one of these two clubs win-for-win over the remainder of the season and sweep their head-to-head confrontations, the Yankees will make the playoffs for the eleventh consecutive season.

Here’s how those three teams have faired since then:

Red Sox: 13-7
Yankees: 13-7
Athletics: 10-9

The Yankees didn’t sweep the A’s head-to-head, but they did take two out of three while otherwise outplaying the A’s by a game and a half (removing that head-to-head series, their records over that span are NYY: 11-6, Oak: 9-7). So, despite yet another just-completed dispiriting series loss to the Devil Rays, the Yankees have thus far accomplished what I said they would need to.

There are only two problems:

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“We have to be better,” said Rodriguez, who was 1 for 4 with an infield single. “We expect more out of ourselves. That is just not acceptable. We’re better, I’m better, the whole team is better.”

“It’s just one of those things I don’t think you can explain,” Derek Jeter said. “They’ve played better than us. I don’t know how many games they’ve beaten us, but they deserved to win all of them.”

…”We have to come out and play better,” Jeter said, “because we’re running out of games.”
(N.Y. Times)

A Bomber blowout? So what do I know? At least I was thinking positively. Instead, it was another pathetic outing against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, as the Yankees were trounced 7-4, and it wasn’t even as close as the final score suggests. New York was mastered by Mark Hendrickson–dig it–and their bullpen could not hold Tampa Bay down after Chien-Ming Wang’s decent return performance. The four runs they scored in the seventh inning proved to be an abberation as the offense was lousy all night–in four at-bats, Bernie Williams saw a total of five pitches. This is the Yankees?

Apparently so. The Red Sox are in town for three games starting tonight and their offense has been terrific of late–last night’s loss notwithstanding (David Ortiz, representing the go-ahead run, struck out with the bases loaded in the eighth inning–Great Googlie Mooglie, the man is human after all). I wish I had a good feeling about Aaron Small tonight but I fear that the Sox will crush him. Hopefully, the Bombers will take two of three, but these days, it’s tough to figure what you are doing to get from them on any given day. With just over twenty games remaining they are four behind Boston in the AL East and a half-a-game behind the Indians for the wildcard. They are still very much in it. As down as I feel now, I realize that can all change quickly. Or it could get worse. Ah, these are the pros and cons of hitchhiking, right?