Monthly Archives: May 2006

Never mind last night’s loss to the Red Sox. The Yankees have far more pressing issues that a one-game deficit in the standings on May 12. What the Yankees need right now is an outfield as Gary Sheffield and Hideki Matsui are both on the DL with injuries to their left wrists and Johnny Damon is literally banged up, his achy left shoulder and sprained right foot having been aggravated by another collision with the outfield wall last night.

Damon will continue to play through his pains, but a few days at DH would be advisable as the last thing the Yankees can afford right now is to have either of Damon’s ouchies turn into a chronic injury that might effect his offense or availability. That means a Yankee outfield of Melky Cabrera, Bubba Crosby and Bernie Williams might become a common sight over the next couple of series. Gulp. One thing’s for sure, with Matsui and Sheff on the DL and Kevin Reese having been called up to take Matsui’s spot on the roster, those three along with Damon will see the bulk of the playing time in the outfield and at DH.

I’m tempted to say that the time has come for Torre to make Andy Phillips his primary DH, sitting him only to give Damon an occasional break from the field. Certainly a line-up with Phillips at DH, Damon in center, Melky in one corner and a Bernie/Bubba righty/lefty platoon in the other inspires more confidence than what we’re more likely to see, which is Bernie at DH and an outfield of Bubba, Damon and Melky from left to right. But I think I’ve finally given up hoping that Phillips will get his shot. That said, the Yankees will face lefty starters tonight and tomorrow, so there’s a ray of hope.

Barring Joe seeing the light on Andy, here’s what the Yankee line-up will look like for the next week or two:

L – Johnny Damon (CF/DH)
R – Derek Jeter (SS)
L – Jason Giambi (1B)
R – Alex Rodriguez (3B)
S – Jorge Posada (C)
L – Robinson Cano (2B)
S – Bernie Williams (DH/RF)
L – Bubba Crosby (LF/CF)
S – Melky Cabrera (RF/LF)

You can kiss 1,000 runs goodbye.

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Last night I got together with Cliff, Jay Jaffe, Mark Lamster and SI.com’s Jacob Luft for a bite to eat. We caught the game–or at least portions of it–and obviously, it was a devastating night for the home team. Both Cliff and I got home way too late to be able to write a thorough recap of the nights events, which is too bad because it was an absorbing game. The Yanks lost 5-3, with Bernie Williams and Derek Jeter contributing key defensive errors, but the critical moment of the game came early when Hideki Matsui fractured his left hand trying to make a shoestring catch.

Anyone who saw the replay knows how bad the injury instantly looked. It might not have been Joe Theisman/Jason Kendall horrific, but it was painful to watch (oddly enough, it was a night for highlight reel injuries–we must have seen the replay of Philadelphia’s Aaron Rowand crashing into the centerfield fence 58 times). Matsui’s consecutive game streak–which dates back to his days playing Japan–is over (1,768 straight). Godzilla is scheduled to have surgery today and after the game Yankee GM Brian Cashman commented that it is possible that Matsui could be lost for the year. According to Tyler Kepner in the New York Times:

“It’s going to be a long time,” General Manager Brian Cashman said. “Whether we get him back before the season’s over, we won’t know for a while.”

With Gary Sheffield still out, the $64,000 question for the Yankes is who will replace Matsui? The lines are open. What do you think?

Bubba Crosby and Johnny Damon both made outstanding catches at the wall, and it looked as if the Sox were not going to be able to get a break (they stranded 15 on base for the game). Their luck would change however as they took advantage of New York’s fielding mistakes and good pitching from Tim Wakefield, Mike Timlin and Jonathan Papelbon for the win. The Yankees’ fortunes continued to go south. Both Jeter and Williams reached second base in the late innings, making up for their errors, and both were stranded when their teammates could not drive them home. Mariano Rivera allowed a run in the ninth. He was livid with himself when he left a fastball over the plate which Kevin Youkilis drove into center for an RBI single. To make matters worse, Damon hurt his shoulder and right foot when he robbed Doug Mirabelli of extra bases.

In the end, it was a painful night in the Bronx. And losing to the Sox was the least of it.

Well sorta. Tonight’s rubber game will determine the winner of the current-three game series between the Yanks and Red Sox, and will give the winner a one-game lead in the AL East, but if the Yankees win the two teams will be tied overall this season and will even up their head-to-head record since 2002 at 92-92.

The last two nights were opposites in just about every way. Tuesday night was characterized by sloppy play and awful pitching, at least by the home team. Last night was a crisply played and well-pitched game, eight of the ten runs coming on homers, one bad pitch at a time rather than the persistent inability to get hitters out.

Tonight could go either way, though a repeat of last night seems more likely. After a rough start, a pair of ugly relief appearances, and despite a skipped start due to a rainout last week, Shawn Chacon appears to have found his way back to his late 2005 form. In his last three starts he’s done this:

19 2/3 IP, 13 H, 3 R, 0 HR, 9 BB, 12 K, .216 BABIP, 1.12 WHIP, 1.37 ERA, 3-0

The only ugly number there is his walk total and there’s been some recent discussion that Chacon’s walks, which have always been high, are actually part of his pitching strategy. He pitches around dangerous hitters and gets the next man out. That he’s walked more than four men per nine innings but managed to keep his WHIP down supports that theory, which of course requires Shawn to work more of his BABIP magic.

Those three starts have brought Chacon’s season ERA down to 3.94 and pushed his record to 4-1. Indeed, add Chacon to Mussina, the bullpen, and the quest for 1000 runs on the list of reasons why the Yankees are in first place right now despite the complete disintegration of Randy Johnson’s delivery.

Tim Wakefield, meanwhile, has had some hard luck thus far this season, posting a Chacon-like 3.97 ERA and making quality starts in five of his seven turns, but getting just 3.71 runs worth of support per start, resulting in a 2-4 record. Take out his last two starts and that run support drops to just 2.00 runs per game. In his penultimate start, Wake beat the Yanks by holding them to three runs on four hits and three walks over seven innings while Joe Torre’s Jeff Weaver Syndrome handed the Sox the win.

Two of those three hits and two of the three Yankee RBIs in that game came off the bat of Robinson Cano, who is now 5 for 15 in his brief career off the knuckleballer with two doubles, a homer and four RBIs. The only other Yankee hitter with a career OPS above .800 in more than ten at-bats against Wakefield is Gary Sheffield, who is on the 15-day DL. Yes, those 15 at-bats are a ridiculously small sample size, but after years of watching Robbie’s veteran teammates wave at Wake’s knuckler like they’re swinging at houseflies with a rolled up magazine, it’s striking how confident and locked in Cano seems against Timmy’s tumbler.

Bronx Banter Interview: Joel Sherman

This is a tidy year for baseball anniversaries here in New York: Thirty years ago, the Yanks returned to the playoffs for the first time since 1964; twenty years ago, the Mets enjoyed the best season in their organization’s history and won the World Serious, and ten years ago, of course, Joe Torre managed the Yankees to their first Serious victory since 1978. So it is entirely fitting that Joel Sherman’s first book, “The Birth of a Dynasty”–an insider’s account of the 1996 Yankee team–has just been released. Sherman has been a columnist for the New York Post since ’96 and his book is a must-read for both casual and die-hard Yankee fans. I consumed the book in a few days and was excited about how much I learned (I never heard of a six-tool player before, but Ruben Rivera apparently fit the profile).

Sherman took some time out this week to discuss “The Birth of a Dynasty.” Hope you enjoy our chat.

Bronx Banter: You are a veteran baseball writer–first as a beat reporter, then as a columnist. Both of those jobs require different skills, but in both positions you are still working on a deadline and have only a limited amount of space to get your point across. This is your first book. What challenges did you encounter with the new medium? What was the most difficult transition for you, and what did you learn about yourself as a writer?

Joel Sherman: This is an excellent question. My whole temperament is built to be a newspaperman. I am almost a New York stereotype. I like to work quickly and move on to the next thing. The column feeds that. At the New York Post, you work on three deadlines a day. So you are constantly working all day on the days you write and then, boom, you are done. It is in the paper for various editions and you are on to the next day. When you write a book, there is no instant gratification or negative reaction, at all. It is a long-term process and my Brooklyn mindset had a tough time with that. As for what I learned during the process was more something that was re-established in my own mind, which is how much I love to report. The 1996 Yankees were an extremely well covered team and interviewing folks to try to find new information and new avenues to tell these stories really energized me.

BB: Did you enjoy the process?

JS: Mostly no. It was a difficult time for me to take on this process. My wife and I had our first children, our twins Jake and Nick, and trying to research/write as an extra job during first a pregnancy and then the early months of the lives of my children was straining. Also, a relationship with a publishing house is like a brief, shot-gun marriage. You are forced to deal with people for a very short, intense period that you probably would not associate with at other times.

BB: How long did it take to write?

JS: The research and writing took about 18 months, but there was no continuity to it because of the pregnancy. I went long stretches of doing nothing.

BB: It sounds like it was a humbling experience for you, going from the immediate gratification of newspaper writing, to the grind of a longer project. The scope is so much larger as you mentioned. Also, book writing is often a collaborative situation, which means you don’t have as much control as you have been used to. How important were the contributions of your editor–or colleagues who looked at different versions of the manuscript–in terms of helping you compose a dramatic arc for a book as compared with a column?

JS: The publishing house provided very little guidance. But I am blessed with great, talented friends. Mike Vaccaro, a columnist at the Post, was terrific at encouragement. When he was interested or intrigued by a topic, I knew it was a topic to pursue. I wanted to have moments all over the book where even people who follow the team religiously would go, “wow, I didn’t know that.” Mike was fantastic at helping me with that. Lou Rabito, an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I went to school at NYU. Among Lou’s many skills is that he is the best line editor I have ever worked with and he is brutally honest. So he not only cleaned up the copy, but he told me frankly when items did or didn’t work. His touch is on nearly every page of the book. Also, Ken Rosenthal, now of Fox Sports, worked at the Baltimore Sun in 1996 as a columnist. He was in fact, a great columnist. The Orioles were the Yankees’ foil in 1996 and I had Ken read passages about the Orioles just to make sure I was getting them right. He was invaluable, as well. I think the key thing all three did was give me confidence. With no instant gratification, I needed people along the way to tell me, you are going right or you are going wrong. They did that.

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After belting a two-run homer into the upper deck in his first at bat, David Ortiz tapped a single through the right side of the infield with two outs in the top of the third. Had the infield been positioned normally, it would have been an easy out, but Ortiz, who has been slumping of late, generally finds a way when playing at the Stadium (he went 4-4 on the night, yet he only hit the ball hard twice…”just” two times, oy). When Ortiz reached first he shared a smile with Yankee first baseman Jason Giambi, who also sees an extreme shift employed when he bats (Giambi would crank a two-run homer of his own in the bottom of the inning). The scene was notable only because it demonstrates that, with a few exceptions, the players on the Yankees and Red Sox are not engaged in the same kind of rivalry that you see and hear in the stands. Yes, I’m sure the players feed off the intensity of the fans, and the hype in the papers, but this isn’t 1977 and for the most part, you don’t get the feeling that the participants hate one another too tough.

The rivalry has become more about the fans than anything else, and often it brings out the worst in us. The electricity in the crowd–at either Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park–is palpable and that brings an acute tension to almost every pitch, every at bat. I think this is great as you just don’t see the same kind of excitement elsewhere around the majors for a regular season in game. But the downside is that the crowd entertains itself with lewd chants that have nothing to do with the action on the field. The so-called class acts in the Bronx last night spent a good portion of the game riffing how much the Red Sox suck. C’mon now. I just find it pathetic.

But nobody heard boos last night like Alex Rodriguez did after his second at bat. Rodriguez struck out looking (on three pitches) in the first inning, and then popped out weakly to first base the next time up. The boos showered down on the reigning AL MVP. As Mike Lupica notes in a refreshingly sharp column today, “Sometimes the place isn’t nearly as cool as we make it out to be, or want it to be.”

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There’s not much that needs to be said about tonight’s game that can’t be summed up by this chart:

Schilling and Mussina have just one non-quality start between them this year in 14 tries, that being Schilling’s fifth start of the year in which the Indians touched him up for five runs on nine hits and two walks in 6 2/3 innings despite striking out eight times in that span. The Indians, incidentally, currently lead the majors in runs per game, edging the Yankees by less than six one-thousandths of a run.

Baseball Prospectus’s Jim Baker provides a brief history of the three prior head-to-head matchups between these two borderline Hall of Famers, both of whom are improving their chances of enshrinement weekly. He also reminds us that both were both minor leaguers with the Orioles in 1990, Mussina cracking triple-A for the first time that year and Schilling splitting time between starting in triple-A (prior to Mussina’s mid-season promotion) and relieving in the majors in his second of three stops before finding a home with the Phillies.

I wonder if Glenn Davis will be watching tonight.

Steve Lombardi has an revealing post on Alex Rodriguez vs. the Red Sox, and David Pinto has an equally good one on Randy Johnson. Check ’em out.

Here’s what I wrote in anticipation of last night’s game:

Given their performances over the past few weeks, tonight’s match-up of fireballers Randy Johnson and Josh Beckett could be the wildest game of them all. In his last three starts, Beckett has posted this combined line:

16 IP, 16 H, 18 R, 17 ER, 6 HR, 10 BB, 11 K, 9.56 ERA

Meanwhile, in three of his last four starts, Johnson has done this:

15 IP, 22 H, 18 R, 18 ER, 2 HR, 8 BB, 8 K, 10.80 ERA

That’s ugly enough in and of itself, but consider that, despite all of those crooked numbers, the two have combined to go 2-2 in those six games thanks to their offenses, which have scored 15 runs for Beckett and a whopping 32 for Johnson in those three games. That would seem to place the over-under on total runs scored tonight somewhere around 15.

The Yanks and Red Sox combined for 17 runs last night. What I didn’t expect was that the Red Sox scored 14 of them, posting a pair of touchdowns to the Yankees lone field goal.

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Last week’s two-game series in Fenway Park was disappointing as scheduled and became even more so after the second game was rained out. The three-game series that kicks off tonight in the Bronx, however, should make up for it and then some, thanks in large part to some fantastic pitching match-ups. Both teams are skipping a starter due to yesterday’s off day (Wright for the Yankees, Clement for the Red Sox), and the Red Sox fifth starter/place holder Lenny DiNardo started on Sunday, leaving us with the three best starters on each team for this week’s series, the highlight of which, at least on paper, should be tomorrow’s pairing of rejuvenated aces Curt Schilling (5-1, 3.02 ERA, 0.99 WHIP, 45 K, 7 BB, 6 quality starts in 7 games) and Mike Mussina (5-1, 2.35 ERA, 0.98 WHIP, 42 K, 8 BB, quality starts in all 7 games).

Coming into the season one would have thought that Thursday’s matchup of soft-tossers Shawn Chacon and Tim Wakefield would be the most likely of these three games to be a high-scoring shootout, but given their performances over the past few weeks, tonight’s match-up of fireballers Randy Johnson and Josh Beckett could be the wildest game of them all. In his last three starts, Beckett has posted this combined line:

16 IP, 16 H, 18 R, 17 ER, 6 HR, 10 BB, 11 K, 9.56 ERA

Meanwhile, in three of his last four starts, Johnson has done this:

15 IP, 22 H, 18 R, 18 ER, 2 HR, 8 BB, 8 K, 10.80 ERA

That’s ugly enough in and of itself, but consider that, despite all of those crooked numbers, the two have combined to go 2-2 in those six games thanks to their offenses, which have scored 15 runs for Beckett and a whopping 32 for Johnson in those three games. That would seem to place the over-under on total runs scored tonight somewhere around 15.

Incidentally, the Yanks and Sox are still tied for first in the AL East, with the Yanks still ahead by percentage points and a game in the loss column due to having played two fewer games. Both teams have won five of their last six. The Sox have won their last four, the Yanks their last five and seven of their last eight.

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Anything interesting going on this week for the Yanks? Ah, yes, baseball’s version of the WWF returns to the Bronx. In-Your-Face Action! No, it’s not Madden 2006, it’s the most over-hyped rivalry in professional sports. But even with the customary hoopla, there are three fun pitching match-ups to be had in Boston’s first trip to the Stadium this year, starting tonight with Randy Johnson vs. Josh Beckett. Cliff will be round a bit later with a thorough series preview. On a softer note, erstwhile Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez is featured on the front page of the New York Times this morning as a gardner of all things. When he was with Boston, I feared and loathed Martinez. He was an easy villian. But I have to say, in spite of his faults, I can’t continue to hate the guy–I’m a sucker for his charm, his sense of humor and his sense of theater. This article accentuates the sensitive side of Pedro.

While Cliff and I were busy with our lives this weekend, the Yanks took two more from Texas (6-1 on Saturday, 8-5 on Sunday) to extend their winning streak to five games. Hideki Matsui and Alex Rodriguez had strong weekends, while it appears as if Gary Sheffield is headed for the DL. Yesterday’s win was the 1000th of Torre’s Yankee career. But it didn’t come without some tense moments from the usual suspects. Tyler Kepner reports in the Times:

The Yankees’ bullpen has not blown a lead for a starter this season, but Tanyon Sturtze did not help Sunday. He is struggling at a crucial time, because the Yankees may need to find room in their bullpen if Octavio Dotel returns in a few weeks.

It is clear now that Scott Proctor is going nowhere, despite having minor league options. Proctor bailed Sturtze out of a seventh-inning jam after Sturtze walked the leadoff man, threw away a grounder with an off-balance heave to second and walked the No. 9 batter.

“I wanted to wring his neck,” Torre said of Sturtze, referring to the error. “You’ve got to keep in mind the score. He looked like he was trying to get rid of the ball so we can get a double play, but we just needed one out there. He dug himself a hole. Fortunately, Proctor dug him out of it.”

Sturtze, Torre: wringing necks. Does any of this sound familiar to any of our readers?

The Yankees hope to clinch the first of their two series in Texas this year with a far less eventful game tonight than last night’s. The pitching matchup will see Shawn Chacon take on the lone holdover in the Rangers’ rotation, Kameron Loe (though Loe pitched primarily in relief last year, he did do it in a Texas uniform). Chacon’s last start got washed out by rain in Boston. As a result he’ll take the mound tonight on eight day’s rest. Here’s what I wrote in anticipation of Tuesday night’s game in Boston:

After a couple of rough outings and an ugly stint in the bullpen, Chacon has come around in his last two starts working his low BABIP magic to hold the Orioles and Devil Rays to a combined .190 BABIP over 13 1/3 innings that saw just two runs cross the plate. That sort of thing won’t continue, of course, and the Red Sox, even with their diminished offense, are exactly the sort of team in exactly the sort of park in which such a stat is likely to correct itself.

The same could be said of the Rangers and their ballpark, though the Texas hitters are in general a less patient sort, which gives Chacon a little more leeway.

Loe, meanwhile, has alternated good and bad starts over his first five turns. His last start saw him hold the A’s to three runs over six innings. If the pattern holds, the Yanks will do some damange tonight.

Perhaps the hardest part of any manager’s job is managing his bullpen. Some relievers need to pitch regularly to stay sharp. Others need proper rest to avoid fatigue and injury. And there’s often a very fine line between one and the other. But in a pen such as the Yankees’ that has a clear hierarchy of talent, there is one overriding principle. There are high-leverage relievers (Rivera, Farnsworth, Myers against lefties) and low-leverage relievers (Sturtze, Proctor, Villone, Small). The high-leverage guys need to pitch in high-leverage situations (leads of three runs or less, tie games at home or on the road, and, depending on the relative strengths of your offense and the opposing pitching staff, trailing by one or two). The low-leverage guys, meanwhile, are there to eat low-leverage innings, allowing the manager to save the high-leverage guys for when they’re most needed.

Of course, it’s impossible to stick to this formula exactly. Going deep into extra innings will require the use of a low-leverage pitcher in a high-leverage situation, as might playing many tight games in a row. Conversely, participating in a number of blowouts in a row might force a manager to use one of his high-leverage guys in a low-leverage situation just to keep him fresh. Last night was not one of those situations.

Mike Mussina entered the eighth inning with an 8-1 lead having held the Rangers to a run on three hits over seven innings, striking out five, walking none, and needing just 85 pitches, 72 percent of which were strikes, to do it. After Kevin Mench lined Moose’s first pitch of the eight into center for a lead-off single, Joe Torre popped out of the dugout and signaled for Aaron Small.

Fair enough. Sure, Mussina was cruising and a first-pitch single with a seven-run lead hardly amounted to a sign of struggle, but Small had pitched just once since coming off the disabled list on Monday and here was an extreme low-leverage situation in which to get him a couple of innings of work, both for his own good, and so Torre and his staff could have a better idea what Small has to offer now that his surprising 10-0 run is a thing of the past.

Brad Wilkerson hit a sharp grounder through the second base hole into center on Small’s second pitch to put runners on the corners. Rod Barajas then a punched a 1-1 pitch past Derek Jeter to score Mench and push Wilkerson to third. Mark DeRosa followed by grounding into a fielder’s choice to score Wilkerson, and Gary Matthews followed that by singling under the dive of a drawn-in Alex Rodriguez to put runners on first and second for the Rangers who still trailed by five runs.

That brought Torre back out to the mound, but he didn’t call for Sturtze, Villone or Proctor. No, he went straight to Kyle Farnsworth. The very same Kyle Farnsworth who sat and watched as the Yankees lost a tie game on the road in Oakland in the season’s second game. The same Kyle Farnsworth who didn’t get into the next night’s game until after Jaret Wright had allowed the A’s to break another tie in the eighth inning. The very same Kyle Farnsworth who got the night off in Boston on Monday while Small and Tanyon Sturtze allowed the arch rival Red Sox to break another eighth-inning tie. True, Farnsworth was rested, having not pitched on Thursday, but he was not in need of work, having gone an inning and a third in a high-leverage win on Wednesday.

What happened next was not Joe Torre’s fault, but it exacerbated the damage done by going to his high-leverage pitchers in a low-leverage situation.

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“If the guys behind me would have come in and it would have been smooth, nobody would have thought anything of it,” [Mike] Mussina said. “You’ve got to believe those guys can come in and pitch, and they can. Today was the day when it was tough to get through that one inning.” (New York Times)

Yeah, and if Woody had gone straight to the police, none of this would have ever happened…

The Yanks and Rangers played two games on Friday night in Arlington. The first saw Mike Mussina continue his stellar early-season pitching, while the offense patiently beat the bejesus out of the Rangers’ pitching. Alex Rodriguez, dropped to fifth in the order, had two hits, a walk and three RBI–nothing like being back in Texas. The first game ended when Moose allowed a single to open the bottom of the eighth and was relieved by Aaron Small. Certainly Mussina could have continued to pitch, but with a huge lead, it didn’t seem odd that he was pulled.

Then the second game began. The one where the Rangers rallied for six runs against the Bombers’ bullpen in the same eighth inning. Aaron Small, then Kyle Farnsworth and Mariano Rivera were slapped around as the home team pulled to within 8-7. With a runner on first and one out in the ninth, Michael Young hit a hard ground ball to the hole between shortstop and third base. Derek Jeter moved to his right and made a nifty, mid-play adjustment, stabbing at the ball which had taken a late, high hop. There would be no chance to get Young at first; Jeter’s only play was to second. As his body carried him out to left, Jeter spun and fired to second to nab Gary Matthews, Jr by a half a step. It was a fine play and most likely helped save the game for Rivera, who then retired the Rangers’ slumping Mark Teixeira on a well-struck line drive to right to end it. (Rivera’s location was off all night and he was hit relatively hard.)

In a Sports Illustrated poll released earlier this week, Jeter was voted by his fellow-players as the most overrated player in the game. I haven’t mentioned it earlier because this doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know. Jeter makes a lot of money, and has had the good fortune to be the star player on a string of championship teams in New York. He is as over-exposed as a player can get. You could say he’s overrated, but I think if you asked players who the most respected player in the game is, Jeter would find his way to the top of the list too, so you’ve got to take these things with a grain of salt.

I don’t need to argue Jeter’s case–his numbers speak for themselves: the man is a sure-fire Hall of Famer. One thing that I think is interesting is that in the same issue of SI, there is a piece on the Rangers’ Michael Young, talking about what a stand-up guy he is, what an overachiever he’s been. One of his teammates said that if Young played in New York he’d be bigger than Jeter. Now, I don’t know about that, but Young is very much like Jeter–a hard-working gamer.

There is a little blurb in the Young article about the three great shortstops in the American League right now–Miguel Tejada, Michael Young and Derek Jeter. Ten years ago, Jeter was the weakest link in the Rodriguez-Nomar-Trio of great young shortstops. Nomar fell off that list due to injuries a few seasons back, and Rodriguez has shifted positions. But Jeter still remains. I’m not saying he’s better than Tejada or Young, but he’s right up there with them, and if either of those two players are still amongst the best in six, seven years, that’ll be something too, wouldn’t it?

If the Yankees caught the Devil Rays at exactly the right time over the past week and a half, getting off to a 3-1 start in the season series against their nemesis of a year ago while Aubrey Huff, Julio Lugo, and Jorge Cantu languished on the DL, the opposite is true about the six games they’ll play against the Texas Rangers over the next two weeks. As of this afternoon, the Rangers had a half-game lead on the Yankees for the second-best record in the American League, they’re sixth in the AL in runs scored, but just five runs behind the second place Yankees (the Indians lead by a bunch), and fifth in the AL in ERA with a 4.21.

It’s that team ERA that is the big news here. The Rangers pitching has been awful for years, and the primary reason their crop of young hitters has been unable to take the team into the playoffs. In 2001 and 2003 the Rangers were dead last in the AL in team ERA and they were in the bottom three in 2002. In 2004 they lept into the top half of the league on the strength of a fluke season by their bullpen, which posted the third best pen ERA in the majors, but their starters still struggled, posting a 5.16 mark, leaving few leads to be protected. Last year, their pen crashed back to earth and the Rangers once again finished among the worst three teams in the majors in team ERA.

This year, the Rangers rotation features just one pitcher who was with the team last year, and he, 24-year-old Kameron Loe, pitched primarily in relief in 2005. Loe’s 4.15 ERA stands as the worst of the five men currently in the Texas rotation. While big trade acquisition Adam Eaton languishes on the 60-day DL following surgery on the middle finger in his pitching hand (he’s due back in August), Loe, late-March acquisition John Koronka (25) and veteran free agents and former Phillies Vincente Padilla and Kevin Millwood have combined to record 14 quality starts in 24 tries. Meanwhile, Robinson Tejeda, who is younger than Loe (having just turned 24), and a more recent Phillie than Padilla, and more recent acquisition than Koronka, held the Devil Rays to three hits over five innings in his first start of the year on Tuesday. Other spot starters and new acquisitions Rick Bauer and John Rheinecker have also turned in solid, if abbreviated starts, with only famiar face R.A. Dickey, since dropped from the 40-man roster, stinking up the joint.

Things have been only slightly less encouraging in the bullpen, where Francisco Cordero has lost the closer job he’s held for the past several seasons, but Akinori Otsuka, who came over in the Eaton trade, has picked up the slack, posting a 1.98 ERA and a 0.95 WHIP in 13 2/3 innings. No one else has been quite that dominant, but only another member of last year’s staff, lefty C.J. Wilson, has been truly bad.

Back on the other side of the ball, the few Rangers hitters who didn’t get off to hot starts have heated up in past weeks including Brad Wilkerson, the key player in the Alfonso Soriano deal, and Kevin Mench, who–as the Yankee broadcasters are sure to tell you far too many times over the next three days–discovered his shoes were a size to small and has been hitting the cover off the ball ever since he fixed his footwear. Most notably, Mench fell one game shy of Don Mattingly’s shared record for most consecutive games with a homer (the record is eight, shared with Griffey Jr. and Dale Long, Mench hit homers in seven straight).

The good news is that the Yankees have Mike Mussina on the mound tonight and Gary Sheffield back in the lineup to get things off on the right, properly outfitted foot. Moose’s opponent will be Vincente Padilla, a borderline All-Star for the Phillies in 2002 who posted similar numbers in 2003 before a pair of disappointing and injury-shortened seasons in 2004 and 2006. Still just 28, Padilla looks to be reestablishing himself as a solid mid-rotation starter, having failed to record an out in the sixth inning just once in six starts, and lasting through five in that exception. Padilla had one dominant outing against the Mariners two turns ago (7 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 HR, 3 BB, 7 K), which was immediatley preceeded by that stinker in Oakland (5 IP, 8 H, 5 R, 4 HR). His other four starts have fallen in between those two extremes, though curiously he hasn’t given up any other home runs in those four other starts.

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Last week, Emily and I were watching the game and she says, “Isn’t Al Leiter there tonight?” Indeed he was. It was just that, without anything pressing to say, Leiter had actually been silent for several minutes. Go figure that. Generally, new announcers are so geeked-up, they go the other way–they never shut up. They don’t actually say anything, but that doesn’t stop their mouth from running. Of course, this happens to some veteran announcers as well. Earlier this season, Michael Kay and Bobby Murcer were calling a game, and for the life of me, bless ‘ol Bobby, but I don’t think either came up for air all afternoon. It was exhausting, because it was as if they were talking just to talk.

Al Leiter’s sense of reserve is appealing–he’s learning the ropes and being cautious and respectful in the process. His insights into pitching have been outstanding. He’s still not completely sure of himself, but is obviously being encouraged to be more forceful in selling his thoughts. (Richard Sandomir has a good piece on the man-behind-the-scenes at YES, John Filippelli today in the Times.) Last night, he talked at length about how Randy Johnson is still making the transition from menacing flame-thwrower to crafty veteran. He discussed why this would be more difficult for a guy like Johnson, who used to be able to overwhelm hitters with his stuff, than for guys like Maddux or Glavine. Leiter even snapped at Kay at one point, and then made sure to soothe any hard feelings moments later.

It has been a pleasure following Leiter’s progress thus far. That he’s willing to keep his trap shut, listen, and learn already sets him apart. Good job by the YES in landing him.

The Yankees beat the Devil Rays 10-5 last night, but the game was closer than the final score indicates. There were five lead changes and the Bombers didn’t break the game open ’til late. Here are a few things that caught my eye:

Randy Johnson, who had another uneven game, smirking to himself and then laughing as he came off the field in the second inning. The guy is so private you don’t normally see him smile. I wonder what struck his funny bone.

In the fifth, Robinson Cano lined a double to right field (Cano would also line out hard to the outfield twice) and Bernie Williams followed with an RBI single, also to right. It’s funny, we’ve been busting on Bernie for his lack of pop. His single missed being a home run by a few feet–it was a line drive that just didn’t get up enough, but it was hit too hard for him to get to second. I was laughing, thinking, “Even when he strokes one, it’s still a single.”

The Yankees went ahead for good in the top of the seventh. The most encouraging part of the inning was that the Bombers rallied after recording two quick outs. Gary Sheffield started it off with a pinch-hit single to right (he would later line out to right field too). This was Sheff’s first appearence since colliding with Shea Hillenbrand last weekend and it was a pleasure to see him again.

Alex Rodriguez went 0-4 but had the go-ahead RBI (he was plunked on the first pitch of his at bat with the bases loaded). How’s that for clutch? Har-har-hardy-har-har.

Jason Giambi had “driven in” the tying run one batter earlier when he walked with the bases loaded. It was another impressive at bat for Giambi who was down in the count 0-2. He took two very alluring change ups with the count 2-2, and then 3-2, showing tremendous restraint.

The strangest moments of the game came in the top of the eighth inning. After Jorge Posada walked to start the inning, Dan Miceli entered the game for Tampa Bay and promptly booted a little tapper hit by Cano. Then, Bernie Williams stepped in and sqaured to bunt. He took the first pitch right-down-the-pipe for a strike. It looked like an ideal pitch to bunt, but then again, what does Bernie know from bunting? Well, he laid down a nice sarifice on the next offering and almost beat the throw to first. The YES announcers said that Bernie had one sacrifice bunt last year, one in 2004, but prior to that his last sacrifice came in 1996. That’s three in eleven seasons.

The Rays chose to intentionally walk Sheffield, and the first pitch came a little high to the catcher, Toby Hall. Then Miceli stuttered off the mound and chucked one way over Hall’s head. Talk about a pysch job. Posada, who is not one of the team’s best base runners, screamed for a balk then didn’t get a great jump, so he did not try to score. The ball actually bounced off the fence behind home plate and right back to Hall, so Posada would have likely been out had he tried to come home. Larry Bowa, and then Joe Torre, joined Posada in arguing about the missed balk. The umps didn’t change their mind, but they clearly blew the call. Actually, they were probably as caught off guard as eveyone else was, but it was as obvious a balk as you are likely to ever see. So of course, Miceli completes the intentional pass, then serves up a grand slam to Johnny Damon. He then fell behind Jeter 2-0, was taken out of the game and later placed on the DL with a sore shoulder and hurt feelings.

I usually don’t play armchair manager at home, but I was thinking about a lot of our readers who enjoy that sort of thing, watching Torre manage the bullpen last night. It seemed as if Torre was over-managing taking out Scott Proctor (heck, even taking out Sturtze), but for one night, all of the moves worked out.

Even with Johnson not pitching especially well, I had all the confidence in the world that the Yanks would come back and win that game. It was great to see the two-out rally. These are games good teams need to win. The Rays were without some of their best hitters and man, thier bullpen is just plain lousy. In the end, it was a satisfying, though slightly odd night. Hey, we’ll take it, right?

With Joe Torre having finally figured out that he needs to go to his big guns in tie games on the road, the Yankees are set up for a quick two-game sweep of the Devil Rays with Randy Johnson taking on Doug Waechter tonight. The only question is which Unit will show up tonight, the one that has done this in two games against the Blue Jays:

8 1/3 IP, 15 H, 13 R, 2 HR, 6 BB, 4 K

Or the one that has done this in four starts against everyone else:

28 IP, 19 H, 6 R, 2 HR, 1 BB, 21 K

I know one thing for sure. He’s happy that Eduardo Perez has moved to the central division.

For his part, Waechter has made just four starts thus far, failing to make it through four innings in two of them. Does anyone still remember when a 22-year-old Waechter shut out the last good Mariners team in his first major league start in 2003, pitched five solid innings to beat the Yankees in Tampa two starts later, and then lost a tough 2-1 game in the Bronx in his next turn? He seemed like the next big thing back then, the Tampa rotation’s answer to Aubrey Huff, who had what remains his best season that year. Waechter’s still just 25, but that exciting start seems like a lifetime ago. I still root for him to make good, but it seems increasingly unlikely. Here’s hoping if he ever does break through he won’t start tonight.

Hey, I forgot to mention it earlier, but just how digusting was the last pitch of the game last night? Joey Gathwright, a slap hitter was batting against Mariano Rivera, and he kept fouling pitches off. Rivera threw cutter after cutter. Then at 2-2, he tried to go away with a fastball. It was up and away and Gathwright took it for a ball before fouling off a few more pitches. I thought Rivera might try going away again, but no. He throws a cutter on the inside corner at the knees–the best pitch of the sequence. Gathwright didn’t offer at it–he didn’t have a chance. Wow.

In his latest mailbag column, Tom Verducci was asked about Carl Pavano:

Remember, teams such as the Tigers, Mariners and Red Sox also wanted Pavano badly, even indicating that they would have paid more than the $39.95 million over four years that New York did. There is no way to be delicate about this: The Yankees have come to question Pavano’s toughness. Now, injuries are always sensitive subjects, because only the player knows for sure about the severity. But this is two years running where Pavano seems to be doing nothing but playing catch in Tampa. Could all of those teams have been wrong about measuring his character? So far, and until he takes regular turns in the Yankees’ rotation, yes.

Though he’s only be out for a handful of games, how much do you guys miss watching Sheffield?

Lastly, fellow Yankee bloggers, Pete Abraham and Mike Plugh note how even when he does something well, Alex Rodriguez gets precious little love. Is it ridiculous to say that Rodriguez is to Winfield what Jeter is to Mattingly?

No two Yankee hitters have struggled as much of late as Alex Rodriguez and Hideki Matsui. Rodriguez struck out in the fourth inning last night, swining through a hittable slider that Casey Fossum left over the plate; with the Yanks trailing 2-0 in the sixth, he tapped into an inning-ending double play. Normally, Rodriguez is so fluid that it almost seems as if the game is easy for him. However, in the middle of a rough stretch, everything looks difficult for him, from recognizing pitches, to being able to put a good swing on the ball. On the other hand, Matsui had a single but was robbed of two hits. While Rodriguez looked out-of-whack, Matsui’s at bats were encouraging. He was simply running into hard luck, just off. Yet the Bombers eventually tied the game–and received some fine pitching from starter Jared Wright and relievers Ron Villone and Kyle Farnsworth (my boy Farnsworth, was particularly sharp).

The game went into extra innings and Johnny Damon doubled to start the tenth. Derek Jeter followed with a walk, and Jason Giambi’s ground out advanced the runners. Rodriguez had another chance and got ahead in the count, 2-0. He fouled off a slider bearing in on his hands and on TV, he appeared uncomfortable, though Joe Torre had given him a bit of encouragement just before he went to bat. According to Tyler Kepner in the New York Times:

While Rodriguez waited to hit, Torre tried to get his attention. The bench coach Lee Mazzilli whistled him over from the on-deck circle, and Torre gave him a message.

“Just hit the ball on the good part of the bat,” Torre said, repeating what he told Rodriguez. “Just trust the ball will find a hole somewhere. Have an at-bat where you just make good contact.”

Rodriguez stroked the next pitch into center field for an RBI single. Matsui followed with a ground ball single that snuck through the infield, driving in another run. A-ha. Nice and easy. No 500 foot dingers, just two singles. It was enough, as Mariano Rivera closed the door and the Yanks came away with a tidy 4-2 victory in Tampa Bay.