Clown Town.
Whadda bunch of mooks. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the Yanks on Saturday night as they got torched 12-5 in Baltimore. Phil Hughes gave up eight runs and didn’t make it out of the second inning. Homers by Damon, Teixeira, and Swisher made it somewhat more respectable, but the Yanks were never in this one.
Frustrating…
Well, you might as well look at this for some comic relief.
Beautiful stuff from CC Sabathia last night. Alex Rodriguez’s first inning homer was tremendous and it was oh what a feeling fun to see the Yankees win a game.
Phil Hughes makes his third start tonight. Be nice to see the Yanks go on a run here.
Ya heard?
Today’s news is powered by Mariano Rivera giving us a tour of his restaurant:
Before Friday’s game, Damon and Jeter spoke about age, baseball and performance, although the conversation segued into an individual’s ability to play despite age.
Jeter said he hadn’t even thought about retirement. “I’m 35 years old,” he said. “That’s something that hasn’t even crossed my mind.”
Damon said his goal was to play for another four or five years, get 3,000 hits and maybe reach the top 10 in runs scored.
“I definitely don’t want to struggle in this game, so I think once struggle starts happening on an every-day basis, and I can’t get out of it, that’s the time,” Damon said. “I would love to play until I’m 39. I’ll go into the off-season, have my big 40th birthday and be done with it.”
Individual performance is one thing. Individually, Damon, Jeter, Posada, Pettitte and perhaps even Rivera can play effectively for several more seasons. That’s not the Yankees’ issue and it hasn’t been the issue since they won their last World Series title.
The Yankees’ problem is that, while many of the teams around them — most notably the Rays — have gotten younger, the heart and soul of the Yankees is aging. That’s something that even Rodriguez’s return cannot cure.
It’s really incredible to think about the makeup of the Yankees’ roster right now. Over and over, the Yankees meet the salary demands of older players, tossing extra years and dollars on the pile. It hamstrings them constantly.
Was anyone else going to sign Rodriguez through 2017? Or Jorge Posada through 2011? Maybe the Mets would have done that for Posada. But considering his age — he turns 38 in August — maybe the Yankees should have let them. And what do they do when Derek Jeter needs a new deal after 2010, when he’ll be 36?
Then there’s Teixeira, who was 0 for 5 on Thursday and will swap home boos for road boos on Friday at Camden Yards. Asked about Teixeira’s struggles on Thursday, Manager Joe Girardi said: “I think it’s probably magnified because we’re losing. If we were winning, I don’t think there would be as much focus on what he’s done.”
Alternate post titles:
*Catchers? We Don’t Need No Stinking Catchers!
*Carsten Charles in Charge (I was proud of myself for a second there, but yeah, it’s been done).
This afternoon I told Alex that the way things were going, A-Rod return or no A-Rod return, for tonight’s recap I could probably cut and paste one from earlier this week, and just replace “Rays” with “Orioles”. He wrote back: “Dude, CC is gunna toss a gem and Alex is gunna hit a homer.”
Well… yep. That’s the Twitter version (or this is I guess), and the Yankees snapped their five game skid with a fast and clean 4-0 win over the Orioles, thanks to a complete game four-hit shutout courtesy of C.C. Sabathia.
On the first pitch of Rodriguez’s first big-league at-bat of the season, the prodigal 3B knocked a nice parabola of a home run into the left field stands and gave Sabathia a three-run cushion before he even got to the mound, and the way C.C. was throwing tonight that was plenty. Rodriguez took a second to enjoy the moment, not that I can blame him, and the dugout went nuts, which made me think that however much his teammates might dislike him, they seem to like winning more. The first “A-Bomb! From A-Rod” (TM John Sterling) of the ’09 season gave the Yankees their first lead since last Saturday. Yeesh. If the team was trying to set up A-Rod’s big dramatic redemption, they could hardly have come up with better storyboards.
Sabathia was pitching to Francisco Cervelli tonight, because this year “Yankee catcher” is a job title connoting about as much longevity as “Spinal Tap drummer.” They’d never worked together before except for a couple of spring training bullpen sessions, but they sure seemed in synch, at least after a bumpy first inning (which Cervelli helped cut short with a caught stealing). After that Sabathia got scarily efficient, with an eventual total of 8 Ks and one walk with 113 pitches over the nine innings. He looks sloppy on the mound – the crooked brim and baggy uniform, not buttoned all the way – but when he’s on, his pitching is precise. After that first inning he breezed through until the ninth, when he gave everyone heart palpitations with two leadoff hits before snagging three all-business swinging strikeouts in a row to end the game.
The Yankees had a mini-rally in the fourth, but didn’t score after Nick Swisher got picked off third – in fact Swisher got back to the bag in time, but was called out because third base coach Rob Thomson had shoved him in the right direction. I have to admit I had no idea that was against the rules, not that I’d ever really thought about it before. Good thing I’m not a third base coach.
Later in that inning, Cervelli snagged his first hit, and in the seventh he walked and scored the Yankees’ fourth run when Damon doubled him home. I like Cervelli but if you walk him to lead off an inning, like Bob McCrory did, you should probably be fined or something. Still, I’m pulling for the kid, mainly because I don’t know who Kevin Cash is and don’t care to find out. The only thing I want to watch Cash do is star in a Monument Valley western with Cody Ransom.
Anyway, Cervelli, who somehow managed to make it through the game without spontaneously combusting, was pumped when the Orioles’ last batter struck out, as were his teammates. The Yankees lined up to enthusiastically hug Sabathia, which I imagine is what most fans watching at home wanted to do to him, too, after this past week.
