Daily Archives: July 23, 2009

The O’s could hit a little, but not pitch. The Yankees swept them. The A’s, who have a nearly identical record, can pitch a little, but not hit. The Yankees welcome them to the Bronx tonight for a four-game set that has the Bomber faithful salivating at the thought of their team extending their perfect 6-0 second-half record and building on their two-game lead over the Red Sox in the AL East and game-and-a-half lead over the red-hot Angles for the best record in the league.

The A’s arrive with the third weakest offense in the American League, and one which just lost ex-Yank Jason Giambi to the disabled list via a strained hamstring. Not that Giambi was hitting (.193/.332/.364 on the season), but he was tied for second on the team in homers with 11 and would have had fun trying to lift balls into that jet stream to right field (you just know J-Bombs is miserable over missing these games). Matt Holliday is doing what everyone expected he’d do, hit like his career road split, which is still good enough to make him the A’s best bat. His closest rival is replacement third baseman Adam Kennedy, who was released by the Cardinals in February, dumped on the A’s by the Rays after spring training, and spent April in the minors.

As for the A’s pitching, it’s typically park influenced. The A’s staff has a 3.83 ERA at home, but a 4.75 mark on the road. Accordingly, the A’s are a .391 team outside of Oakland. The A’s rotation currently consists of three lefties and four rookies, but the most effective left-handed rookie starter they’ve had this season, stirrup socked fashion plate Josh Outman, has been lost to Tommy John surgery.

The Yankees will face Brett Anderson, the most heralded of the rookie lefties, tomorrow. Anderson gave up five runs in 5 1/3 innings in the Yankees 16-inning win over the A’s in April, but has turned it on of late and enters tomorrow’s contest with an active streak of 21 scoreless innings and a 0.34 ERA and 0.68 WHIP over his last four starts. Saturday brings rookie lefty Gio Gonzalez, part of Oakland’s return for Nick Swisher. Gonzalez is Outman’s replacment and his four major league starts this season have been evenly split between decent and disaster, his last seeing him cough up 11 runs on on ten hits, including four homers, in just 2 2/3 innings against the Twins. Sunday brings non-rookie lefty Dallas Braden, who is the ripe-old age of 25. Braden has been the A’s most consistent pitcher having delivered quality starts in 14 of his 20 starts and maintaining his 3.40 ERA both at home and on the road. He’ll face Sergio Mitre.

Tonight, the Yankees will face one of the A’s two rookie right-handers in 22-year-old Vin Mazzaro, a Hackensack, New Jersey native and graduate of Rutherford High School who relies on a hard, heavy, mid-90s sinker. Mazzaro joined the rotation in June and got off to a fine start with four quality starts, but things have gone downhill from there, bottoming out with the eight runs he allowed in three innnings against the Angels his last time out. The A’s have lost Mazzaro’s last seven starts, with Vinnie taking the loss in six of them. In fact, the A’s haven’t won a game in which Mazzaro has given up a run all year (Mazzaro’s first two starts, both wins, saw him pitch 13 2/3 scoreless innings).

Maz has his work cut out for him tonight as he’s facing not just the major league’s best offense in a hitting-friendly environment, but CC Sabathia coming off seven shutout innings against the AL Central-leading Tigers his last time out. CC wasn’t as good as his numbers in that last start, however, as he walked three, hit a batter, threw 51 pitches in the first two innings, and had just two 1-2-3 innings. CC who started against Anderson in that 16-inning monster back in April and had one of his worst starts of the year, allowing seven runs in 6 2/3 innings while walking five. He’s come a long way since those early struggles, however, and will be looking to build some second-half momentum tonight.

Tonight’s lineup includes Hinske in right, Gardner in center, and Matsui at DH.

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Because on any given day something great can happen.

Like this.

What does it all mean?

Fiorello LaGuardia reads Dick Tracy:

Many years later, Double D and Steinski sample LaGuardia on their Lesson records:

Then, Prince Paul nabbed the bit on the first De La Soul record (dig the weird video mix):

Mark Lamster, a longtime friend of Bronx Banter, has a long piece on the two new NYC ballparks over at Metropolis magazine:

For a certain kind of baseball enthusiast, the ultimate measure of these two parks rests on how they actually play. The new Yankee Stadium is a simulacra of the old, with dimensions that are roughly the same but different enough that it performs quite differently. (For the spectator, this lends it either an eerie cast or a pleasant familiarity.) In practice, shorter and closer outfield fences, a reduction of foul territory, and concourses open to the wind make Yankee Stadium one of the most hitter-friendly parks in baseball. Though the old yard always favored powerful lefties like Ruth, it now seems to favor anyone who shows up with a bat: its home-run rate is by far the highest in baseball. This has made it something of a laughingstock among seamheads, but what real detriment the hitter-friendly contours might pose, beyond making games longer, is a matter for debate. Some experts believe that hitters’ parks place undue stress on team pitching staffs, thereby reducing their chances at postseason success. Attendance, however, traditionally supports the validity of the league’s nineties-era marketing slogan: “Chicks dig the long ball.”

Regardless of gender, fans who want to see home runs would do well to avoid Citi Field, which seems as hostile to dingers as Yankee Stadium is friendly to them. Despite the Mets’ potent bats, their new home, with its prairie-scaled expanses, suppresses offense like no other in baseball. “The distances in the outfield and the power alleys, that’s where you can have some fun in establishing dimensions,” Barnert says. “You can create some unique areas where the ball can rattle around a bit.” It is that creativity, however, that many purists find aggravating. “It’s just so contrived,” says Jay Jaffe, a writer for Baseball Prospectus. “It drives me crazy.” The dimensions of the classic ballparks on which the Populous stadiums are modeled (such as Ebbets Field) were the product of their constrained urban lots. But Citi Field was built in the middle of a parking lot. And therein lies the strange paradox of the Populous stadiums: though they are painstakingly manufactured to appear idiosyncratic, the willfulness of their design is inescapable; and now that there are nearly 20 of them around the league, their heterogeneity has come to seem altogether homogenous.

When I first started attending games on my own, some 20 years ago, a ticket to the Yankee bleachers cost $1.50, pocket change even for a kid on a tight allowance. That same ticket now costs $14: not an unreasonable sum, but more than a movie and enough to keep a student on a limited budget from making it too much of a habit. The new stadium, for that matter, doesn’t beg that kind of relationship. It’s a special-occasion place, somewhere to visit a couple of times a season. Why empty your wallet for an entertainment event that might not be entertaining? (Even the best teams lose roughly 40 percent of their games.) When you’re stuck in the nosebleed seats, and a beer, a dog, and a bag of peanuts cost upward of 20 bucks, thoughts of exploitation inevitably percolate through the mind. It is in those moments that the fan-team compact seems hopelessly broken, and one begins to wonder about the difference between being a fan and being a chump. Sometimes it seems like there’s no difference at all.

Lamster’s second book, Master of Shadows, The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens is due out this fall. Dude, talk about well-rounded. Lamster is one of the best and brightest and I’m proud to call him a pal.

Today’s news is powered by . . . “You’re a Good Man, Carl Pavano AJ Burnett Charlie Brown”

• Joe Posnanski offers up the top 100 players you’d want if you had to win THIS year.  A-Rod still finds himself in the top ten:

6. Alex Rodriguez, 3B, Yankees
Disastrous first half splattered with injuries, rumors and a low batting average … and the guy STILL has a 145 OPS+, good for seventh in the AL.

• John Perrotto details a slightly-worried Joe Girardi:

The Yankees called up right-hander Sergio Mitre from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to start Tuesday night, and he beat the Orioles despite allowing four runs in 5 2/3 innings. However, Girardi worries what might happen if the Yankees lose another starter, particularly since right-handers Phil Hughes and Alfredo Aceves have been converted to relievers this season to strengthen a shaky bullpen. “If we have another injury, where do we go?” Girardi said.

• Christina Kahrl has some rotation concerns:

The problem is that the rotation in general hasn’t done very well. Consider Support-Neutral performances of the rotation (expected winning pct. assuming league-average run support):  only CC Sabathia‘s delivering anything like what you’d expect or pay his price for, providing a .560 Support-Neutral Winning Percentage and a dozen quality starts (through six innnings) in 20. A.J. Burnett‘s .527 SNWP is good enough to rate second on this team, but it might also understate his value down the stretch, since he’s given the club 13 quality starts in 19, including in eight of his last nine. But then things get less happy; Andy Pettitte (.476) is pitching in a way that suggests his next elaborate off-season mulling of retirement won’t involve anyone waiting on his doorstep, while Joba Chamberlain‘s upside might obscure that his work this season (.474) is the stuff fourth starters are made off.

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