Daily Archives: June 8, 2007

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a terrible franchise and a terrible baseball team. Their list of attributes in 2007 is as follows:

Jason Bay, LF (.310/.378/.531, 11 HR, 45 RBI)
Ian Snell, RHP (2.91 ERA, 71 K, 10 quality starts)
Tom Gorzelanny, LHP (2.53 ERA, 9 quality starts)
Matt Capps RHP (2.70 ERA, 33 G, 4.00 K/BB)
Damaso Marte LOOGY (1.37 ERA, .125/.222/.125 vs. lefties, 0 XBH)

The Yankees won’t see Snell, can pitch around Bay in big spots, and can make Capps and Marte irrelevant if they can do enough damage early against Paul Maholm and old pal Shawn Chacon over the next two days. The only trouble is Gorzelanny, who starts tonight against Andy “Hard Luck” Pettitte. Pettitte knows the Pirates well having spend the last three years in the NL Central. Last year, he beat them in a pair of late-season quality starts. In 2005, Andy posted a 2.08 ERA in four starts against the Bucs. In 2004, he faced them in back-to-back starts early in the year and allowed just one run in 11 innings (that on a Jack Wilson home run during the hottest month of Wilson’s career). Both of tonight’s starters have nine quality starts in 12 tries on the season.

The Yankees and Pirates have met in interleague play just once before, that coming in 2005 when the Yankees swept the Pirates in the Bronx. If the Yanks can pull out a win tonight, they’ll have put together their first four-game winning streak of the season and will stand an excellent chance of repeating that feat, thereby extending that streak to six games.

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The following is the first part of a series that Jay Jaffe and I are writing about a terrific new box set of the 1977 World Series. Jay kicked things off earlier in the week, as we address the first disk, Game 5 of the ALCS between the Yankees and the Royals. Here is my response:

Yo Jay,

Dude, one of the main reasons why I loved football so much as an early teenager is because that was also the time I first really started getting into movies, and NFL Films had an enormous impact on me. The way they visually presented the game, the melding of movies and sport, defined the sport for me. It had a reverence for the sport and mocking sense of humor too. We didn’t have to just read about Jim Brown or Gayle Sayers, we could see. But we can’t see Sandy Koufax or Willie Mays in the same way because Major League Baseball has never had anything close to NFL Films. Part of this is understandable because baseball has such a long season with so many games. You’d go broke if you filmed all of it waiting for a great moment to go down. I understand why it hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t of have, to some extent. The other part is that baseball has simply never been blessed with a creative partner like the Sabols.

And that’s a real shame because you’d think baseball games from the ’70s at least should still be around somewhere. I want to see the 1977 NLCS and I want to see the 1980 NLCS. That’s why I’m lovin’ this box set series that A&E is putting out. At first, I thought they were just putting out old MLB Films half-hour/hour-long wrap-up shows. They do have those, but on top of that, they are also have team sets—the Yankee Dynasty Years set, 96-01, a Cubs set, a big Red Sox set from 2004, the Cards from last year. But the best thing they’ve got are box sets of entire series—they’ve got the complete World Series from 1975, 1979, 1986, 1987, and now, of course, ’77.

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One of the classic comic book images–stolen from the movies, of course–is the close-up of a character’s eyes as they watch some unspeakable act of horror. I thought of that last night in the seventh inning when Rob Mackowiak crushed a Scott Proctor fastball to the deepest part of the ball park. Proctor remained in a crouch, peered back over his left shoulder, with only the whites of his eyes showing. Like most Yankee fans, his heart must have been racing, bracing for the worst.

Proctor, who relieved Mike Myers, after the lefty relieved Mike Mussina, who was brilliant, stubbornly fed Mackowiak fastball after fastball. On the YES broadcast, Joe Girardi warned that Mackowiak had been putting good swings on fastballs all night, and sure enough he put a charge into this one. The intense winds–foreshadowing a storm that never came, at least not while the game was still being played–played with the flight of the ball, but Melky Cabrera hauled it in about a stride-and-a-half away from the center field wall.

That was the second out of the inning. Proctor got a ground out to end the inning, and the Yankees escaped with the score tied 1-1. Which was good news for Joe Torre, who pulled Mussina after only 79 pitches. I know many Yankee fans must have been pulling their hair out when Torre yanked his starter; Mussina wasn’t thrilled about the move either. Acccording to the New York Times:

“Why am I upset?” Mussina said after the game. “Because I threw 80 pitches and I think I could have thrown 110. It was the first mess I had. I just felt like I could have kept going.”

…”I understand his thinking, but seventh inning with 79 pitches?” Mussina said. “I know I haven’t been pitching that well, but oh well. Gotta earn it back, I guess. Gotta earn it back.”

What had been a fast-moving pitcher’s duel between Moose and Jose Contreras, suddenly turned into a laborious bullpen affair. Bobby Abreu, who has been looking very impressive of late, had a big, two-run double in the eighth, and Alex Rodriguez hit a grand slam in the ninth, as the Yankees broke the game open and won it by the final score of 10-3.

It was a milestone win for Joe Torre, the 2,000th of his career. When the game was over and the Yankees were slapping each other five, Torre finally reached Mariano Rivera–who entered the game with one out in the eighth on the count of Cooter Farmadooke stinkin’ up the jernt. Rivera placed the game ball in Torre’s hand and Torre cupped Mo’s cheek with his palm and gave him a quick pinch on the cheeck–Love, straight out of Brooklyn.

It was a very good win for the Yankees who return home to play the Pirates and then the tough young Diamondbacks. Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada were given the night off, but both found their way into the game anyway. Jeter led off the eighth with a pinch-hit walk and came around to score the go-ahead run. Wouldn’t ya know?