Daily Archives: July 3, 2009

It wasn’t spectacular, it wasn’t especially memorable, but the Yankees 4-2 win over the Blue Jays on Friday afternoon at Yankee Stadium was satisfying, a fine way to follow-up Thursday’s clunker. Roy Halladay will pitch the Yankee Doodle Dandy affair tomorrow, so today’s “w” was a good start to this four-game series.

AJ Burnett had good control and threw seven strong innings, allowing just two runs on six hits and a couple of walks.  His record is now 7-4 with a 3.83 ERA. The two Phils–Coke and Hughes, teamed-up to get three outs in the eighth and That Man Rivera, the old gunslinger, pitched a one-two-three ninth, striking out two batters. Robinson Cano and Alex Rodriguez hit solo homers to bookend the Yankee scoring–they got two more on a bases loaded walk and a wild pitch.

Just before Rodriguez homered into the right center field seats, I ate a couple of sour cherries that I bought last week. They were plump and juicy, like a fat grape, but the taste was pure cherry–tart and sour. It was almost carnal and I savored them as I watched the dinger. How sweet it is, I thought. It got even sweeter watching Rivera, the most graceful, elegant and efficient player I’ve had the pleasure to watch.

It doesn’t get old. In fact, Rivera is like a fine wine–each outing seems even sweeter now more than ever before. To think, he suffered blowing a save in Game 7 of the 2001 World Serious. That game could have finished a guy, buried his career, even a player of Rivera’s stature. Instead, he got better after that. He’s older, he’s given up some runs this year but he’s whiffed 42 batters in 33.2 innings. Oh yeah, he’s walked three guys.

Has any player ever given us Yankee fans the same feeling that Rivera has? I think not. He’s “the one.” We all know enough to be grateful. We’ll never see the likes of him again.

I said my piece on the Blue Jays’ hot start on SI.com when the Yankees were in Toronto in mid-May, so let’s see how things have changed since then.

Entering their series with the Yankees on May 12, the Blue Jays were 22-12 (.647), the best record in the American League at the time. Since then, they’ve gone 20-26 (.435) and fallen back to their expected place as the fourth-best team in the AL East.

At the time, I pointed to the unexpected health of the Jays’ starting nine as one reason for their early-season success, saying “Injury seems sure to strike the offense at some point, and several of the team’s batting averages, including [Aaron] Hill’s .346, catcher Rod Barajas’ .307 and platoon left fielder/utilityman Jose Bautista’s .311 seem sure to regress.”

The starting nine has stayed healthy, but Hill has lost 45 points off his average, Barajas has shed 40 points, and Bautista has lost 57. Hill was the Jays’ best hitter in the early going, but since going 2-for-4 with a homer in the first game against the Yankees on May 12, he’s hit just .255/.294/.452. Barajas has hit .228/.267/.378 since the start of the Yankees series; Bautista .191/.353/.309.

Scott Rolen, on the other hand, is hitting like he did before his shoulder problems derailed his path to the Hall of Fame. Rolen went 6-for-11 with three doubles against the Yankees and has hit .341/.405/.508 since, though with just six homers on the season. Accordingly, Cito Gaston has moved him back to the cleanup spot after having demoted him from that spot upon taking over for John Gibbons last June. Adam Lind and Lyle Overbay have also maintained their hot starts, the latter by virtue of not having to face left-handed pitching thanks to the presence of platoon partner and Yankee killer Kevin Millar. Marco Scutaro has come back to earth a bit, but has hit a still-respectable (for a fine fielding shortstop) .290/.364/.403 since the Yankee series and still leads the league in walks (though Nick Swisher is in hot pursuit).

On the flip side, Alex Rios and rookie slugger Travis Snider weren’t hitting in mid-May, and they’re still not. Rios, another Yankee killer, still managed to go 4-for-10 with a double and a homer against the Yankees in May, but has hit just .256/.311/.421 since. Snider was demoted to Triple-A then aggravated an old back injury and has since been replaced by former Yankee David Dellucci, who was released by the Indians at the end of May and signed a minor league deal with the Tribe. Dellucci was just called up this morning.

As for the pitching, I raised red flags about the unsustainably low opponents’ batting averages on balls in play being recorded by starters Scott Richmond and Brian Tallet, and relievers Jason Frasor, Jesse Carlson, and Bill Murphy. Richmond, who starts Sunday, was bounced by Yankees in the second inning on May 13, but rebounded with seven shutout innings against the White Sox and has posted a 3.18 since his Yankee disaster. His season BABIP has actually dropped a point over that stretch. Similarly, Tallet, who starts this afternoon, has been solid with a 4.30 ERA over his last nine starts while his BABIP has also shifted just one point (up to .228).

The rotation suffered from Roy Halladay’s DL stay, but Halladay is back and will pitch on Saturday, still leading the majors with ten wins. Meanwhile, the return of former first-round pick Ricky Romero has further solidified the rotation. Romero will bring a 20-inning scoreless streak into Monday’s game and has posted a 1.91 ERA in six starts since the calendar flipped to June.

As for those relievers, Frasor’s BABIP has increased by 54 points, but that hasn’t hurt his bottom line much. Carlson’s BABIP has increased 85 points, as has shown up in his performance as he’s posted a 7.32 ERA since the start of the Yankee series. Murphy was optioned to Triple-A right after the Yankees left town.

The man Murphy made room for was B.J. Ryan, who has posted a 3.14 ERA since coming off the DL, but with more walks than strikeouts and without a single save opportunity. Those opportunities were going to Scott Downs, but he’s replaced Ryan on the DL, leaving the closing duties to Frasor and his tight-rope act and 2007 closer Jeremy Accardo, who started the year in Triple-A after a forearm injury ended his 2008 campaign prematurely.

All of that adds up to . . . well, the fourth-best team in the AL East, just like everyone thought.

A.J. Burnett faces Tallet today in the first game of an unusual, wrap-around, Independence Day weekend series in which all four games will start at 1:05pm. Burnett gave up five runs in 7 2/3 innings to his former team on May 12, but has been nails in his last three starts posting this line: 20 1/3 IP, 10 H, 2 R (1 ER), 10 BB, 26 K, 0.98 WHIP, 0.44 ERA. Amazingly, A.J. lost one of those three starts, having matched up against the ace of his other former team, Josh Johnson of the Marlins.

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I’ve spoken with a few people recently who are jazzed-up to see Michael Mann’s new movie, Public Enemies. I admire Mann as a director though I find his movies humorless and grim. He makes serious-minded pulp. Public Enemies? Why not? I like a good genre movie as much as the next guy. Then I read a few reviews that were not impressed with the movie and figured, eh, I can skip it.

Writing in today’s New York Times, Manohla Dargis, who like the great Pauline Kael is prone to writing effusive, adoring reviews when she falls for a movie, has a different take:

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills.

…When not in pirate drag, Mr. Depp can be a recessive, even inscrutable screen presence, which is crucial to his strengths and performative limits. He’s a cool cat, to be sure: veiled and often most memorable when he’s staring into space while the camera soaks in his subdued but potent physical charms. He might have made a great silent star, as earlier roles suggest. Part of his initial appeal was that he seemed almost Garboesque in a movie world that increasingly makes no room for sacred idols.

Mr. Depp looks good as Dillinger — few contemporary actors can wear a fedora as persuasively — but the performance sneaks up on you, inching into your system scene by scene. The same holds true of “Public Enemies,” which looks and plays like no other American gangster film I can think of and very much like a Michael Mann movie, with its emphasis on men at work, its darkly moody passages, eruptions of violence and pictorial beauty. Mr. Mann’s digital manipulations, in particular, which encompass almost pure abstraction and interludes of hyper-realism, is worthy of longer exegesis, one that explores how this still-unfamiliar format is changing the movies: it allows, among other things, filmmakers to capture the eerie brightness of nighttime as never before.

I’m particularly curious about how the film looks. Richard Corliss thinks it comes off as cheap:

Shot and projected digitally instead of on film, the picture gains in gradations of night shades but loses in visual clarity. Some shots look like iPhone photos enlarged to 50 feet; any sharp camera movement results in a blur.

Is it ground-breaking or cheesy? Hmmm.

A brief one heading into the holiday weekend:

• Catching conundrums:

. . .  although (Joe) Girardi said the Yankees have not yet begun discussing what to do with (Francisco) Cervelli once (Jose) Molina returns, it’s unlikely that they would carry three catchers.

“We’ll cross that bridge when it comes,” Girardi said. “Our roster has one infielder and has a couple extra outfielders, but we’ll cross that bridge when it comes.”

Though Cervelli has shown extraordinary growth in his first extended stint in the big leagues, he is still just 23 years old and would presumably benefit more from playing every day in Triple-A than from catching sporadically in the Majors. The Yankees, meanwhile, are paying Molina well — more than $2 million this season — to be their backup.

• PeteAbe has a nice appreciation of Ken Griffey, Jr.:

If you’re a fan of baseball history, you had to appreciate watching Ken Griffey Jr. hit a home run at Yankee Stadium last night.

It was No. 621 in his career, 39 shy of Willie Mays. The new Stadium also became the 44th park he has homered in, one short of the record held by Sammy Sosa . . .

It’s hard to believe, but Griffey has received only one vote in the MVP balloting in the last 11 years and has been an All-Star twice in the last decade. He’s like a cameo of his greatness.

Griffey is a guy that the young players in the clubhouse were thrilled to see, much like Chipper Jones. In a game lacking heroes, those are two players you can respect.

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I watched last night’s game from the Todd Drew Memorial box high above home plate. It was a warm, muggy night. There was lightning and thunder before the game, which was delayed for thirty minutes, but just a few drops of rain. The Yanks were poised for a sweep but CC Sabathia offered up a stinker and the Yanks lost to the M’s 8-4. Sabathia just couldn’t put hitters away. He got to two strikes then then faltered. Franklyn Gutierrez, Kenji Johjima and Ryan Langerhans (5-6-7 in the order) hit the ball squarely against Sabathia each time up. Heck, even the lowly #8 hitter Chris Woodward had a couple of hits and a couple of RBI last night.

The Yanks scored four runs against Seattle’s starter, the slop-throwing Jason Vargas, who lasted all of four innings. But then Miguel Batista, Mark Lowe, and David Aardsma held them scoreless the rest of the way. Mark Teixeira made a throwing error and narrowly missed a line drive in the first inning off the bat of Ichiro, that wasn’t called an error, but from where we were sitting was a play he normally makes. Teix has been brilliant in the field this year but has made a few mistakes this week.

A game to forget for the Yankees. But at least I had the honor of watching them from Todd’s seats. This time I kept score and everything.