Daily Archives: August 17, 2009

Since the Yankees took three-of-four from the A’s in the Bronx in late July, Oakland has gone 11-9 including a split with the Red Sox and taking three of four from the now-Wild-Card-leading Rangers. Of course, the Yankees have gone 14-6 over the same stretch with half of those losses coming on the south side of Chicago as the calendar turned to August and are 5-1 against the A’s on the season.

Still, the A’s are suddenly doing something they hadn’t done all season: scoring runs. In April, May, and June, the A’s averaged 4.21 runs scored per game. In July and now half of August, they’ve scored 5.22 runs per game. What the heck happened?

The most obvious thing is Mark Ellis, who returned from the disabled list at the end of June and has hit .313/.342/.520 since, pushing Adam Kennedy to third base. Ellis thus replaces the A’s non-Kennedy third basemen, who hit a combined .195/.284/.324 in 292 plate appearances. That’s a huge upgrade at that spot in the lineup, one highlighted by his throwback walkoff in yesterday’s game. The A’s are also getting a ton of production from Rajai Davis. Since taking over in center field after Matt Holliday was traded to St. Louis (with Scott Hairston sliding over to left), Davis has hit .373/.429/.533 and stolen 11 bases in 12 tries. Less dramatically, Cliff Pennington (.296/.333/.407) has thus far been a slight upgrade on Orlando Cabrera (.280/.318/.365). I’m not sure that that adds up to a full run per game, but those are the big upgrades you might not necessarily see when looking at their lineup below.

Again the Yankees have the A’s beat, having scored 5.57 runs per game in July and August, but when you consider the disparity in the two team’s home ballparks, it’s shocking that the A’s offense has come that close to matching the Yankees over a full month and a half of the season.

As you may have noticed, the Yankees have won 12 of their last 14 games and 13 of their last 15 series. Tonight they look to keep that ball rolling by pounding recent bullpen castoff Brett Tomko, who was released just before the trading deadline after posting a 5.23 ERA in 15 relief appearances for the Yankees and has since posted a 7.94 ERA in two starts and one relief outing spanning 5 2/3 innings for the A’s Triple-A team in Sacramento. Said Girardi of Tomko after Sunday’s game, “I think we have an idea of what he’s going to do.”

Opposing Tomko tonight will be A.J. Burnett, who has turned back into A.J. Burnett in August after an awesome run of eight straight quality starts in which he went 7-1 with a 1.68 from mid-June to the end of July. Burnett’s last three starts have been a dud (4 2/3 IP, 7 R, L), a gem that still managed to include a ton of walks (7 2/3 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 6 BB), and something in the middle that included a lot of strikeouts, but also a game-tying wild pitch (6 IP, 10 H, 3 R, 7 K, 3 WP, ND).

Matsui’s out after having his knee drained during yesterday’s game. Derek Jeter will get his hits at DH, not shortstop tonight as Ramiro Peña gives him a half-day off on the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum field which has been battered by preseason football.

Update: Aaron Cunningham is the player sent down to make room for Tomko, leaving the A’s with a three-man bench.

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The biggest flaw I’ve got running this site is updating the links. There have been so many new Yankee blogs in the past few seasons and we are still woefully behind the times in terms of providing a full listing. I will make sure to change this and apologize to the quality blogs out there that aren’t listed on the blogroll. It’s me, not you.

Anyhow, I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but River Avenue Blues, continues to do a great job. The first quality a good blog needs is reliability. Was Watching, YFSF, No Maas. They are all different but they keep showing up.

I dug this recent River Ave. piece on Johnny Damon:

Damon is currently enjoying the best season of his career at age 35. He’s two shy of tying his career high of 24 homers, which he set in his first year in pinstripes. His .532 SLG and .240 IsoP are far and away career highs, ditto his .894 OPS and 11.1% walk rate. Oh sure, Damon’s getting a ton of help from the New Yankee Stadium this year (.979 OPS at homer vs .803 on the road), but HitTracker says that every one of his homers would have been gone out in at least one other park, and 15 of his 22 homers would have left the yard in at least 20 big league ballparks. Even if you want to discount the 57 home games he’s played this year from his career production, it’s like taking a cup of water from the ocean.

When I first heard about Judd Apatow’s latest movie, Funny People, I cringed. The movie poster didn’t help any.  This one is billed as his “serious” movie, the one with ambition, Annie Hall as told by James L. Brooks. But I figured that I enjoyed the 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up–not to mention the terrific, short-lived TV show Freaks and Geeks–enough to give it a shot.

Apatow’s third movie has more in common with Brooks than Allen but in the best possible way because Apatow likes people and isn’t afraid to show it. He has great affection for his characters and his movies are unashamedly earnest. (He’s anti-snark.) This is Apatow’s defining quality as a filmmaker. His movies are filled with small surprises, the interplay between the actors (he loves his actors). Funny People is too long but I didn’t mind the meandering pace. It lags in spots. Some of the story is hard to believe. The women don’t have great parts. Apatow has the tendency to simplify complicated relationships and the characters often come across as thin. There is something facile about his world view at times–things work out in his movies in a way that feels too neat.

But still, there is an emotional directness in Funny People, a movie that seems more autobiographical and personal than Apatow’s first two movies, that is winning. Leslie Mann, the director’s wife in real-life, has an under-written role, but does the most with it, with great comic timing.

I think Seth Rogan is miscast in the role of Adam Sandler’s protoge–he is limited as an actor–but far from terrible because he has such a warm presence. And I don’t think that Sandler has the depth to hit the emotional high-notes–he tightens-up, and is flat when he’s asked to bare his soul to Mann–but he too is far from terrible. Often, especially when he’s with Rogan, he nails the character, which is loosely based on his own life.

But this movie is about Apatow, not Sandler, and Sandler doesn’t have the winking self-satire chops of Jack Nicholson in his prime–it doesn’t feel as if he’s revealing anything of himself through this character.  (His character is a stand-in for Apatow and in many ways, the movie feels like a loving apology to his wife and kids for being a filmmaker–aka a selfish bastard.)

But Sandler is watchable. The whole movie is. It is flawed and has its limitations but it is like good comfort food: designed to make you feel good (especially if you like dick jokes). It is the best-looking Apatow movie; the editing is crisp. There are a few too many self-aware music sequences but that’s easy to forgive. Oh, yeah, and it’s funny. The most effective stuff in the movie may be the side-plot with Rogan and his self-involved roommates, played by Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman. And Eric Bana is terrific in a small role.

Apatow’s movies are about how American men don’t want to grow up. He is not edgy; he believes in happy endings. He’s a sap really, but too knowing to be sappy. He is a moralist and his characters are trying to do the right thing. If they treat each other badly they usually feel cruddy about it and apologize. Are happy comedians fun to watch? Not for everyone and I can see why this movie has drawn such strong reactions, pro and con. But is it the worst thing in the world to watch to see people want to treat each other well and live happily ever after?

Not if they are still funny.

Today’s news is powered by baseball-playing robots:

• Hideki’s knee acting up:

Hideki Matsui was held out of the New York Yankees’ lineup on Sunday, got his swollen knee drained and will likely miss at least one more game.

Manager Joe Girardi said after New York lost for just the second time in 14 games on Sunday, 10-3 to Seattle, that the designated hitter will have his surgically repaired knee reevaluated on Tuesday to see if the 35-year-old can play the second game of a series at Oakland. That’s New York’s next stop on its season-long, 10-game road trip.

“That is why we are careful with him, because he is really important to our lineup,” Girardi said.

Matsui had his second two-homer game of the season and a season-high five RBIs on Friday. He spoke afterward with huge ice packs on both knees, then sat out Saturday.

• Tom Terrific on the Joba Rules/Map:

“Tell me, how does a pitcher get to the next level unless he’s tested under fire?” (Tom) Seaver asked. “Where are you going to find the next Bob Gibson or Nolan Ryan or Steve Carlton unless a young pitcher is pushed? You won’t.”

. . . “[The Yankees] probably have a lot of money invested in Chamberlain, it’s a financial thing and they want to protect him. But he won’t reach his baseball limit this way.”

Seaver’s rejection of the innings limit is based on a single premise: A pitcher builds his arm by throwing, not resting. Seaver cites his own body of work as proof. At 23, the same age as Chamberlain, Seaver threw 277 innings and zoomed up to 290 innings only two years later in 1970.

By contrast, the Yankees are carefully rationing Chamberlain’s final 32 innings before he reaches his cutoff at 160. While Seaver considers such coddling counter-intuitive, if not damaging, the Yankees say the old-schoolers are just plain wrong.

. . . What Seaver probably doesn’t know, say the Yankees, is that Chamberlain threw only 100 innings in 2008. There are numerous examples of young pitchers who’ve been injured after increasing their workload by more than 30 innings the following year.

. . . “What really galls me is seeing a pitcher taken out of game that he’s dominating the opposing team,” Seaver said. “These people today don’t understand what it means to walk off the mound after holding the other team down for nine innings, the feeling of triumph for your own team — and the effect it has on the players in the other dugout.

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