Daily Archives: April 18, 2007

One night after beating the Indians 10-3 on a cold, rainy, sparsely attended night at the Stadium, the Yankees beat the Indians 9-2 on a cold, rainy, sparsely attended night at the Stadium.

The Yankees jumped out to a 1-0 lead in the first when a leadoff walk to Johnny Damon came around to score on a Derek Jeter double and a Bobby Abreu sac fly. Kei Igawa, meanwhile, looked sharp early, getting ahead of hitters and allowing only a Travis Hafner single in the first two frames.

Most of the scoring occurred in the third inning. Igawa started off the third by ringing up Josh Barfield for his third strikeout of the game, but Kelly Shoppach followed with a double to right and Igawa’s 0-2 pitch to Grady Sizemore slipped out of his hand and plunked Sizemore in the tuchus. Igawa got ahead of Jason Michaels as well, but Michaels singled to plate Shoppach on the 0-2 pitch. Again, Igawa got ahead of Travis Hafner 0-2, but his next pitch was in the dirt and rolled away from Jorge Posada, sending Michaels to second. Hafner then tapped a slow three-hopper to the shortstop hole for an infield single that plated Sizemore. Igawa then started Ryan Gargo off with a ball, just the second time in his first 13 batters that his first pitch was out of the strike zone. On his next pitch, Garko hit a check swing flare over the mound. In reaching for it, Igawa sent his glove flipping into the air. Robinson Cano charged and scooped the ball after two quick hops, flipping it to Jeter in one motion to start a 4-6-3, inning-ending double play.

Trailing 2-1, the Yankees let loose on Jeremy Sowers in the bottom of the third. Jeter kicked things off with his second double in as many at-bats. Abreu singled Jeter home to tie the game. Alex Rodriguez ground into a fielder’s choice to replace Abreu at first. Jason Giambi doubled Rodriguez home to give the Yankees a 3-2 lead. Posada singled Giambi to third. Cano singled Giambi home. Josh Phelps singled Posada home. Melky Cabrera flied out for the second out, and Johnny Damon finished the job by singling Cano home and knocking Sowers out of the game.

Igawa gave up just a walk and Travis Hafner’s third single over his remaining three innings, again starting eight of the ten hitters he faced with strikes and erasing Hafner’s single with a double play. All totaled, he threw 67 percent of just 92 pitches for strikes and struck out five in six innings while allowing just seven base runners on five hits (four singles, three by Hafner, one that weakly tapped infield single), a walk, and a hit-by-pitch.

Scott Proctor, Sean Henn, and Chris Britton added three more hitless innings to finish the job, each recording one strike out, with Proctor and Britton each issuing a walk.

Oh, and those last three Yankee runs? Yeah, another two-run Alex Rodriguez jack and a solo shot by Jason Giambi, back to back off different pitchers in the sixth no less. In case you’re wondering, Rodriguez is on pace for 112 home runs, 287 RBIs, 199 runs scored, 62 doubles, and 237 hits. He’s slugging .981 (no, that’s not his OPS).

To sum up, in these first two games against the Indians, the Yankees have outscored Cleveland 19-5, two Yankee rookies have picked up their first major league wins, and the bullpen has contributed seven hitless, scoreless innings while issuing just two walks.

Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed.

Kei Igawa makes his third Yankee start tonight hoping to get the Yankees a series win over the Indians. Igawa’s last start in Oakland looked a heckuva lot like Chase Wright’s outing last night:

Igawa 4/13: 5 1/3 IP, 3 H, 3 R, 1 HR, 2 BB, 3 K, 95 pitches

Wright 4/18: 5 IP, 5 H, 3 R, 1 HR, 3 BB, 3 K, 104 pitches

Is that a compliment to Wright, a fresh-faced rookie out of double-A? An insult to Igawa, a seasoned Japanese veteran whose line above actually represents a significant improvement over his MLB debut a week earlier? A little of each? Curiously Igawa and Wright are both lefties whose best pitch is a changeup. Does that mean the Indians will benefit from seeing similar pitchers two nights in a row or that Igawa should have similar success against the Cleveland lineup because of his similar stuff, with hope for improvement because his Opening Day jitters are now two starts behind him?

So many questions.

Then there’s Cleveland starter Jeremy Sowers, a 23-year-old lefty in his first full season in the majors. Taken out of Vanderbilt with the sixth overall pick in the 2004 draft, Sowers shot all the way to triple-A in his first professional season in 2005 and joined the major league rotation in late June of last year, finishing the season with a 7-4 record and a 3.57 ERA in 14 starts, two of which were shutouts. In Sowers’ second major league outing, he faced the Yankees at Jacobs Field and held them to two runs over seven innings, those two runs coming on a first-inning Jason Giambi homer. Sowers is a finesse pitcher who fits the description of "crafty lefty" to a T and conjures up comparisons to Jamie Moyer and Tom Glavine, but his rate stats are troubling. In sixteen major league starts between last year and this, Sowers has struck out just 3.46 men per nine innings (Moyer and Glavine’s career K/9 rates are both about 5.35). Seeing as he lacks the extreme groundball tendencies with which Chien-Ming Wang has survived a similarly miniscule strikeout rate, it would seem Sowers is going to have to figure out a way to miss more bats in order to keep winning. Indeed, his .257 opponents’ batting average on balls in play last year is bound to snap back to league average (around .300), taking his ERA with it. Still, he’s excelled in his two starts thus far this year, holding the White Sox to just one hit (but two runs on five walks) over six innings in his first start and the Angels to one run over seven innings in his last. Just because a correction seems inevitable doesn’t mean it will happen tonight.

by Allen Barra

Alex Belth has asked me to fill in again this week with the explanation that he’s getting married. He’s used this excuse on four previous occasions, so all I can say is that this time I’d better see a ring on his finger when I bump into him.

I warned Alex that I didn’t have anything good to say about the 2007 Yankees, and I’m warning you now in case you want to go read something else. My bad feelings about this year’s team go beyond the recent rash of injuries, but I may as well deal with those before moving on.

Matsui’s hamstring, I think, is a fluke, and he’ll be back strong. I’m fed up with Mussina and especially Pavano. Mussina has increasingly become a frequent breakdown pitcher, one whose usefulness to the Yankees is very nearly at an end. Even when he’s not hurting, he’s wasting so much time trying to make that perfect pitch that he’s usually teetering by about the fifth inning and threatening to be a burden on the bullpen. Pavano is simply a disaster, one of the highest priced in Yankee history. I think he’s poised, when he comes off the DL, to replace Jaret Wright as the team’s number one bullpen drainer. What, oh what, are the Yankees going to do when Andy Pettitte hurts himself? (And he will, you know it, before the season is over, probably before the first half of the season is over.)

Looking around the rest of the lineup, I don’t see much to cheer about. Towards the end of last season, Jason Giambi, who really ought to know better, made an ass of himself by contributing all kinds of needless verbiage to articles written about Alex Rodriguez. My favorite comment, and I’m quoting from memory was, We really don’t know who A-Rod is. We’ll find out in the next couple of weeks. Well, when do we find out who the real Jason Giambi is? Actually, I guess we already have. He is now a practically useless ballplayer. He performs like 42-year-old man. He can no longer field and can’t hit to the opposite field, which takes 40 or more points off his batting average. As for his base running ability, any time the Yankees get three hits without scoring a run, Giambi is usually involved.

Giambi is such a bad fielder the Yankees have had to compensate by giving a roster spot to Doug Mientkiewicz. There is no bigger mystery to me than how a team with the biggest payroll in baseball continually gets stuck with players like Mientkiewicz. I don’t know that he’s all that good a fielder, but even if he was the second coming of Don Mattingly or Keith Hernandez he would still be a huge liability. He is one of the worst hitters I’ve ever seen, the first man I can honestly say would lose a home run derby to Sal Fasano. How is it that the Yankees cannot find at least a player of average ability to put into the lineup at this key hitting position?

I can’t say a great deal that is complimentary about the stars, either. A-Rod’s hot start is probably for real, but I’m not yet convinced that his third base woes are over. Jeter’s fielding problems are, I fear, for real and may be linked to his rumored back trouble. (Note his relative lack of power so far.) Yankee fans are reduced to saying "Wait till Chien-Ming Wang comes back," but if I was Wang and looking at the prospect of having opposing batters hit ground balls to this infield, I think I’d stay on the DL.

It’s possible that if the Yankees go on a tear then the ugly disaster of the last road game in Oakland—the worst pitching I have ever seen from Mariano Rivera—will be erased. But with this rotation—and if you put a gun to my head right now, I couldn’t tell you the starters the Yankees plan on using for the next five games—I don’t see how any consistency is possible.

I guess this all sounds a bit doomsdayish, but the truth is I can’t lose. If I’m right, I’ll just remind all of you that you heard it here first. If I’m wrong, I’ll be as happy as the rest of you.

Allen Barra is currently writing a biography of Yogi Berra.