Daily Archives: September 25, 2008

The Blue Jays beat the Yankees 8-2 last night as Roy Halladay picked up his 20th win with his ninth complete game of the season. By doing so, Halladay tied CC Sabathia for the major league lead in complete games, though Sabathia could break the tie in his final start. Only one team other than the Blue Jays and Brewers has more than nine complete games.

Halladay needed just 96 pitches to finish off the Yankees’ B-squad. Of the six hits he allowed, three were by Brett Gardner (one of them a double, one of them in infield hit on which Gardner beat out a nice play by Jays second baseman Joe Inglett on a hard grounder in the hole). Melky Cabrera (1 for 3) got one of the others, and Cody Ransom drew the only Yankee walk of the night.

It might have been a bit unfair for Joe Girardi to give catching prospect Francisco Cervelli (0-for-3) his first major league start against Halladay, but then Girardi didn’t make Cervelli swing at the first pitch he saw in his first two at bats (both groundouts, the second a double play). Cervelli took two pitches in his final at-bat, but still struck out swinging on just four tosses. That said, Cervelli showed great form on the one stolen base attempt against him, firing a strike that would have nailed Alex Rios in the third had Rios not gotten a huge jump on Carl Pavano.

Speaking of Pavano, in his final act as a Yankee, he gave up five runs in just 3 2/3 innings. Don’t let the door bruise your buttocks on the way out, Chuckles.

At least Pavano’s short outing allowed Girardi to audition some relievers. Dan Giese stranded the two runners he inherited from Pavano in the fourth, but couldn’t get the second out of the fifth inning, allowing two runs on three consecutive hits before David Robertson tidied up his mess. Edwar Ramirez struck out Vernon Wells and Lyle Overbay in a scoreless sixth. Humberto Sanchez gave up a run in the seventh after walking two men on nine pitches, but got a double play to get out of his own mess. Finally, in the eighth Darrell Rasner retired the Jay’s 4-5-6 hitters 1-2-3, getting ahead of each hitter before inducing each into a groundout.

Speaking of the bullpen, Mariano Rivera had an MRI on his shoulder yesterday and could need some minor arthroscopic surgery this winter. Meanwhile, Joe Girardi continues to display either a dangerous ignorance or an inexplicable need to snowball the media regarding his players’ physical health. After listening to his post-game press conference, I think it’s the former, which means he needs to work on his communication with his players and his training staff. A manager’s primary job is distributing playing time to his players. If the manager is ill informed about his players’ health for whatever reason, his ability to perform that essential task in the manner most beneficial to the team is compromised. That may not be an issue in Rivera’s case, but may have been with regard to Jorge Posada’s shoulder, Alex Rodriguez’s quad, or any of a number of other early-season aches and pains that got worse before they got better.

With four meaningless games left, the Yankees have mothballed Andy Pettitte for the year, giving Sidney Ponson his start on Saturday. Ponson and tonight’s starter Pavano won’t be back next year. Tomorrow night’s starter, Alfredo Aceves, has already shown enough to survive a bad start and still arrive in spring training to fight for a rotation spot. The means the only remaining game that will actually be worth watching will be Sunday’s finale in Boston as Mike Mussina goes for his 20th win (which he will do; his elbow is recovering nicely).

Here’s tonight’s lineup:

L – Brett Gardner (CF)
L – Robinson Cano (2B)
L – Bobby Abreu (DH)
R – Xavier Nady (RF)
L – Jason Giambi (1B)
S – Wilson Betemit (3B)
R – Cody Ransom (SS)
S – Melky Cabrera (LF)
R – Francisco Cervelli (C)

Derek Jeter is still sitting due to being hit on the left hand on Saturday and playing through it on Sunday. Cervelli is making his first major league start. This is just Melky’s second start since being recalled (he went 1 for 3 in the last, accounting for his only trips to the plate since August). Brett Gardner is 8 for his last 23 (.348) with three extra-base hits. Wilson Betemit 6 for 19 (.316) in September with four extra base hits, but hasn’t drawn a walk since August 16. Ransom is 0 for his last 16.

Perhaps most significantly, tonight’s game will bring Carl Pavano’s phantom Yankee career to a close. He faces Roy Halladay, who’s going for his 20th win. Halladay’s only previous 20-win season was 2003, when he went 22-7 and won the AL Cy Young award.

Meanwhile, Joe Torre’s Dodgers have clinched the NL West. Congratulations to the Dodgers, their manager, and their fans.

Over at Baseball-Intellect, Alex Eisenberg takes a look at the pitching mechanics of Yankee minor leaguer Brett Marshall. Don’t slumber.

Oh, and p.s. here is my favorite Yankee shout-out in a rap song. From Bronx resident, Diamond D, "the best producer on the mic":

It comes about two-thirds of the way into the song. It’s so cheap it’s great.

By Tim Marchman

When I was small, I didn’t understand the point of the Yankees. It wasn’t that I disliked them, but that they were irrelevant, the team of suburbs to the north and parts of the city that to me may as well have been. Even in deep Queens there were a few Yankees fans, usually Italians whose families raised them to think of Joe DiMaggio the way Catholics were raised to think of John F. Kennedy.* Those kids would taunt the rest of us odd moments. You’d be playing asses-up, dealing the ball in your best Dwight Gooden motion, when some kid would let on that two rings were nice enough and nothing to be ashamed of, but certainly not as nice as twenty-two, as if he’d been there in the stands when each of them was won. But mostly this didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything. They may as well have been Kansas City Royals fans.

It wasn’t until I was 22 that I understood the Yankees at all. My friend P. and I had upper deck seats for the Stadium, and two Snapple bottles full of liquor. We drank and watched the game and talked, convincing ourselves that we were much above everything that was going on around us: New York would never again be something it had stopped being around the time we were born; baseball had changed, with the money; capital had failed us; the electronic advertisements, greasy brokers on cell phones, cheap plastic, and loud music were an indictment; everything was at second hand and a great remove; the world was infinitely mediated and the city a sad, lonely and disfigured place in which great things were no longer possible; etc.

The score ran up early enough, and it was chilly enough, that the stands began to empty early, so we made out way down to field level, well toasted, and then worked our way from seat to seat until we were a row back of the home dugout. There was the field in total clarity: still and quiet, steam rising off the grass, the lights a half mile high, and Mike Mussina on the mound, curling up into his motion, in total control of events. At that moment it may as well have been 1946, 1977, or whatever moment P. and I had just spent so much time convincing ourselves we wished it was. The game seemed further away than it had seemed in the nosebleeds, but very much more peaceful, and at that exact moment neither Mike Mussina or all the ambitious people in the park seemed at all to inhabit a different city than I did, but just to be different parts of one raging engine—parts with which I may not have had much in common, but parts toward which it was somewhere between absurd and obscene to feel something just past distrust and shading toward resentment.

(more…)

Baseball and rock ‘n’ roll are such elemental and ubiquitous American inventions that it’s a bit perplexing that they don’t really fit together. Baseball just doesn’t rock, no matter how hard stadium public address systems try to force the issue. Baseball is a game of calm, precision, suspense and strategy. For that reason, there are precious few worthwhile rock songs about the game.

That’s not to say there aren’t some great baseball songs in other genres. “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” the 1941 novelty hit from Les Brown and his Orchestra, is a stone cold classic, and “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?,” written by Buddy Johnson and recorded by both Johnson and the Count Basie Orchestra in 1949, is a jump-band variation on that theme that’s nearly as good a song and a superior cultural signifier (Johnson name checks African American major leaguers Satchel Page, Roy Campanella, Don Newcome, and Larry Doby). Bob Dylan’s “Catfish” from 1975 is great as well, but it’s not rock, it’s acoustic blues.

Being more of a fan of jazz than of baseball, my dad goes for David Frishberg’s “Van Lingle Mungo”, though I consider it more of a tone poem than a song. Still, I’ll take Frishberg’s list of names over any version of Terry Cashman’s trite “Talkin’ Baseball” (originally “Willie, Mickey, & the Duke”). “Joe DiMaggio Done It Again” is a fun alt-country tune, but it’s removed from it’s place and time as part of the Mermaid Avenue sessions in which Billy Brag and Wilco set long lost Woody Guthrie lyrics to music.

There are rock tunes that reference baseball, but aren’t really about the game. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”, speaking of DiMaggio, is the most famous. Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” contains a variety of baseball references (including Joe D yet again), but Joel uses the game to greater effect in 1978’s “Zanzibar” (“Rose he knows he’s such a credit to the game, but the Yankees grab the headlines every time”) and also drops a Yankee reference into “Miami 2017”. “Zanzibar” also uses a bit of the “bases” metaphor best employed by Phil Rizzuto in Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf’s “Paradise By The Dashboard Light”. More recently, Belle and Sebastian’s “Piazza, New York Catcher” is something of a cryptic love song in which Piazza (and Sandy Koufax, who isn’t actually named) are either incidental or symbolic, and the only baseball reference in Kanye West’s “Barry Bonds” is the title. Of course, extending the conversation to hip hop brings in hundreds of references, from the Beastie Boys having more hits than Sadaharu Oh or Rod Carew to Jay-Z having “A-Rod numbers.”

For a long time, John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” seemed like the only proper rock song that was actually about baseball. As a result, it quickly became overplayed to the point that it is now one of the few 1980s hits I can’t stand (and I can stands a lot), though if it weren’t so trite it would have held up better. Fortunately, “Centerfield” finally has some company this year. A quartet of alt-rockers, the most famous of whom is R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, came together earlier this year as the Baseball Project and released a 13-song album devoted entirely to songs about the game and players including Ted Williams (via a rewrite of Wings’ “Helen Wheels” called “Ted Fucking Williams”), Curt Flood, Satchel Page, Fernando Valenzuela, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Ed Delahanty, Harvey Haddix, and Jack McDowell (“The Yankee Flipper”).

More recently, Eddie Vedder, who is name-checked in “The Yankee Flipper,” released a Cubs anthem called “All The Way” (as in “someday we’ll go all the way”), and E Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren released “Yankee Stadium,” a tribute to the doomed ballpark which he cowrote with his wife, Amy. Unfortunately, neither really fits on the list of rock songs about baseball. Vedder’s song deserves to be listed among the classics above, but it’s more of a prostest/drinking song than a rock song (and veers dangerously close the list of team fight songs below). Lofgren’s tune, though well-intentioned (“For every soul who entered here/we raise a glass we shed a tear”), just isn’t very good. Lofgren’s vocal delivery is off-putting and, not surprisingly, the best part of his song is the guitar solo.

Of course, Lofgren already has his baseball song bonafides from Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” (that’s him in the beret with the white guitar), but that’s another one of those songs that mentions baseball, but isn’t really about it.

So what’s your favorite song about the game? What did I miss?

Note: Even though Yo La Tengo once covered “Meet the Mets” and “Here Come the Yankees” by the Sid Bass Orchestra and Chorus, a 1967 Columbia Records release that was the best thing to come out of CBS’s ownership of the team, is a personal favorite, team fight songs don’t count. That includes “Tessie” by Boston’s Dropkick Murphys, and the Sammy Hagar-meets-Kenny Loggins “Let’s Go Mets Go” from 1986. Having said that, be sure to check out Larry Romano’s trapped-in-time “Rock In The Bronx” from 1993. Also worth a look are the abominable “Super Bowl Suffle” rip off “Get Metsmerized,” also from 1986 (cripes, how many songs did the Mets need?), and the horrendous 1987 update of The Twins’ 1961 anthem “We’re Gonna Win Twins.” Actually, pregnant women and people with heart conditions should probably skip those last two.

Sidd Finch, eat your heart out.  It’s Jimmy Scott!

Andy Pettitte’s Yankee career could be over. Pettitte, talking to Mark Feinsand in the Daily News, was critical of his own performance:

"The biggest thing was me, personally; I just pitched terrible," Pettitte said. "I don’t think we played great, I don’t think we hit in some clutch situations when we needed to, but everybody pitched really well other than me down the stretch. If I don’t win one game out of my last 10 starts, I think the last couple days of the season, we’d be right there."

…But was it his last season in the Bronx? Pettitte will be a free agent at the end of the season, and while he said he would consider playing only for the Yankees next year, he hasn’t decided whether he’s prepared to take on the mental grind that comes with another season.

"I probably just need to get away for a while, but I don’t want to drag it out," Pettitte said. "They’ve pretty much already told me they’d like to have me back, so we’ll just have to see."

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Pettitte return but I’m not counting on it.

Last night’s pitching matchup of Phil Hughes and likely free agent A.J. Burnett almost felt like an open audition for a spot in the Yankees 2009 rotation. I’m happy to report, Phil Hughes passed the audition. Hughes had a nasty curve working last night and used it to great effect, neutralizing yet another dominant outing against the Yankees by Burnett. After lasting just four inefficient innings in his return to the majors his last time out, Hughes stretched 100 pitches (71 of them strikes) across eight full innings, striking out six (all on curveballs), walking none, and allowing just two runs on five hits. Hughes was actually beating Burnett 2-1 with two outs in the bottom of the seventh, but Scott Rolen shot a 1-1 curve over the wall in left center to knot it up at 2-2. Hughes, who was hoping to pick up his only major league win of the season, was furious at himself for allowing Toronto to tie the game, but settled down to retire the next four batters and pass the game to the bullpen.

After Jesse Carlson and Jose Veras swapped zeros in the ninth, Juan Miranda, who started at first and picked up his first major league hit in the fourth, led off the tenth with a double. Chad Moeller failed to bunt Miranda to third, but wound up working an eight-pitch walk, passing the buck to Brett Gardner, who bunted the runners up on the first try. Carlson hit Robinson Cano with his next offering to load the bases, and Bobby Abreu cashed it all in with a grand slam that handed the Yankees a 6-2 win. Sidney Ponson, of all people, pitched a 1-2-3 bottom of the tenth to seal the deal.

“One good outing isn’t going to erase an awful season with injuries and being in the minor leagues,” said Hughes, “but it’s good to end on a positive note and carry that over into next year.” Hughes didn’t get the win, but he shaved 1.3 runs off his season ERA. He finishes the year having thrown just 69 2/3 innings between the majors and minors and will go on to pitch in the Arizona Fall League in order to get his innings total up to a higher baseline for next season, though he’s unlikely to get past 100 innings all together, even with the AFL work.

Still, Hughes looked great last night. Joe Girardi said, “he did everything right tonight.” His curveball, which is his put-away pitch, was monstrous, and the cutter he developed this summer is already rivaling his four-seamer. When Hughes is able to locate the latter, he should be able to dominate the way we’ve all expected him to, which was exactly the case last night. Phil Hughes needed that start, and the Yankees needed that start. True, one good outing won’t erase the lost season that preceded it, but it served an important reminder that Hughes is still one of the top pitching prospects in the game.