Daily Archives: August 27, 2009

My good friend Steven Goldman called Tuesday night’s loss to the Rangers the most annoying game of the year due to Joba Chamberlain’s struggles with two outs and the botched Nick Swisher bunt that appeared to kill the ninth-inning rally. Having held off on assigning that title, I’ll slap it on Wednesday afternoon’s contest.

What do you imagine the final score would be of a game in which A.J. Burnett struck out a season-high 12 Rangers and allowed just two hits, and the Yankees put 14 men on base? Would you believe 7-2 Rangers?

The Yankees staked Burnett to an early 1-0 lead when Johnny Damon walked, stole second, and scored on a Mark Teixeira single in the bottom of the first. Burnett responded by retiring the first 11 men he faced. Then, suddenly, with two outs in the fourth, he walked Josh Hamilton and Nelson Cruz and gave up a three-run home run to Ian Kinsler on a first-pitch fastball.

That was the game. After Damon scored, Rangers starter Dustin Nippert walked six more men, but the Yankees stranded three in the first, one in the second, two in the third, two in the fourth, two in the seventh, and two in the ninth, scoring just one more run along the way.

All together, the Yankees went 2-for-12 with runners in scoring position, both hits coming off the bat of Mark Teixeira, who singled Jeter home in the fourth. The Yankees drew eight walks, but didn’t manage a single extra-base hit, and two of their six singles didn’t leave the infield. They also struck out ten times, three each against Nippert (in 3 2/3 innings), Jason Grilli (in 2 1/3), and lefty C.J. Wilson (in 2), and once against closer Frank Francisco in the ninth.

Burnett left after six innings and 105 pitches, yeilding a 3-2 deficit to Phil Coke. Coke’s first three batters doubled, bunted for a hit, and homered, boosting the Texas lead to 6-2. The home run, by lefty Chris Davis, was the sixth Coke has surrendered to a lefty this year. Coke has otherwise dominated southpaw batters (.196 average, .224 OBP), but the nine home runs he’s allowed this year to batters of all types have given him a Farnsworthy rate of 1.57 HR/9, moving him ahead of the broken Chien-Ming Wang as the most homer-prone pitcher to throw more than 40 innings for the Yankees this year.

The Rangers scored all seven of their runs on homers in this game, with Kinsler rubbing it in with a two-out, 1-2 solo homer off David Robertson in the eighth to set the final score. Meanwhile, over the final five innings, the Yankees managed just a walk and two singles, only one of which left the infield.

With that, the Yankees dropped a series at home for the first time since the Nationals were in town in mid-June. It was just the second series loss for the Yankees since the All-Star break. The other was to the White Sox, who come into town on Thursday having salvaged the final game of a four-game set against Boston on Wednesday to protect the Yankees six-game lead.

The Yankees have scored 47 runs over their last five games. That works out to 9.4 runs per game. They’ve scored a minimum of eight runs in four of those five contests, all of which have come against the top two teams in the Wild Card race. That’s what 28-year-old righty Dustin Nippert has to contend with this afternoon.

Nippert has made just seven previous starts this year. Just one of them was a quality start. This is just his fifth start in regular rotation. In the previous four the Rangers have gone 1-3 despite Nippert’s average 4.50 ERA and strong strikeout rate.

Nippert goes up against A.J. Burnett, who is coming off his miserable outing in Boston. In August, Burnett has sandwiched three quality starts between two total stinkers in which he’s given up 16 runs in 9 2/3 innings.

Jose Molina catches Burnett this afternoon, but not because of the head-butting A.J. and Jorge Posada were doing in Boston. Molina was scheduled to catch today’s day-game-after-night-game regardless of the pitcher, and the foul ball Posada took off his left ring finger last night cinched it. The rest of the lineup is the usual suspects, with Johnny Damon returning to left field.

Interesting piece on “walk-off” stats by Larry Granillo over at the Baseball Analysts.

Walk on by, keep it movin’.

Today’s news is powered by . . . a baseball-themed Tex Avery cartoon:

• No Peavy this weekend:

The chances of Jake Peavy making his first start for the White Sox on Saturday are remote, team sources said on Wednesday.

Pitching coach Don Cooper said that Peavy was unable to throw his side session on Wednesday due to lingering effects of being hit by a line drive in his last rehab start on Monday. The right-handers is still getting treatment on on his pitching arm, which had some swelling and soreness.

(more…)

I’m a bit out of the loop, since I just got back from a week in England – I apologize in advance. No cell phone or laptop, away from the internet, I completely missed all the baseball news… well, okay, I borrowed my friend’s computer a time or two during the Red Sox series, but just for a minute. So I’m still catching up on everything that happened while I was gone (did someone mention a timely bunt Tuesday night?). Ask me anything about England’s recent cricket victory over Australia, though!

The Yankees, as is their wont these days, bounced back from last night’s loss with a 9-2 win over the Texas Rangers. New York scored three in the second, then blew the game open with five more in the seventh, and every starter had at least one hit except Melky Cabrera (even he had a lovely bunt). The Yanks also got some reassuringly solid pitching after their recent rough-ish patch; Andy Pettitte went seven innings and allowed just two earned runs, with seven strikeouts and three walks.

Rangers starter Derek Holland actually pitched pretty well for someone who was charged with six earned runs, but he paid for just about all of his mistakes. The Yanks’ big blows were Jorge Posada’s three-run homer in the second, Jerry Hairston Jr.’s solo shot in the fourth, and the seventh-inning onslaught that began with a poor defensive play and a Robinson Cano double, and ended some time later with a Mark Teixeira single off of Jason Jennings. Brian Bruney’s eighth inning outing was good enough under the circumstances, and Phil Coke tied the bow around the night.

I found myself thinking today, reading about Oliver Perez’s season-ending trip to the DL, that I need to start writing more about the Mets, because their season has been so fascinating (in a horrific way, but still), while the Yankees right now are extremely pleasant to watch but just don’t give you a ton of juicy material. Don’t worry – as soon as the thought flickered across my brain I spat three times and knocked on all the wood in my apartment.

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Side Note: I had always previously assumed that cricket was at least somewhat related to baseball – since, after all, it involves a pitcher and a batter and fielders – and that I would therefore be able to follow it a little bit, even just vaguely. This turns out not to be the case at all. For example, this is what the scoreboard looked like at last Thursday’s club game at Lords:

The six in “308 for 6” refers to six wickets, in case you were wondering – I sure was. It took three or four different British friends and acquaintances explaining the rules to me before I began to get the idea, and I’m still fuzzy on a number of details. Also, the big England vs Australia game was a “test match”, which usually last five days, although this one only went four; can you imagine watching five straight days, nearly eight hours per day, of one Red Sox-Yankees game? Some of my favorite Banter commenters would have to be hospitalized.