Daily Archives: March 22, 2010

The Yankees and Phillies combined for 16 runs on 24 hits, 15 of the latter for extra bases including Wilson Valdez’s two-run game-winning home run off Phil Hughes, as the Phillies won 9-7 on Monday. Earlier in the day, Hughes’ rival for the fifth-starter job worked five innings in an intrasquad simulated game. Also, the Yankees made a bunch of cuts. More below . . .

Lineup:

L – Brett Gardner (LF)
L – Curtis Granderson (CF)
S – Mark Teixeira (1B)
S – Nick Swisher (RF)
R – Francisco Cervelli (C)
S – Ramiro Peña (SS)
R – Kevin Russo (3B)
R – Eduardo Nuñez (2B)
R – A.J. Burnett (R)

Subs: Juan Miranda (1B), Russo (2B), Reegie Corona (2B), Jorge Vazquez (3B), P.J. Pilittere (C), David Winfree (RF), Greg Golson (CF), Jon Weber (LF)

Pitchers (IP): A.J. Burnett (4), Royce Ring (1/3), Phil Hughes (4 1/3)

Big Hits: A two-run, two-out homer by Mark Teixeira off Cole Hamels. Teixeira went 4-for-4 in the game, adding a double and two singles for eight total bases. A triple by Ramiro Peña (2-for-4). Doubles by Tex, Curtis Granderson (2-for-3, BB), Kevin Russo (1-for-4), Eduardo Nuñez (1-for-3), and Jon Weber (1-for-1 and now hitting .571 on the spring with four doubles but no other extra base hits and no walks).

Who Pitched Well: Royce Ring retired the only man he faced, lefty Raul Ibañez. So there was that.

Who Didn’t: A.J. Burnett started the game by giving up a double to Jimmy Rollins and a two-run homer to Placido Polanco on his way to a five-run first-inning. Though he didn’t allow a run in his next three frames and struck out four, he was responsible for seven hits, three walks, and a wild pitch. Phil Hughes reportedly impressed, walking no one, striking out six, and continuing to work with his changeup, getting one of those Ks with the pitch. Still, he gave up three home runs in his 4 1/3 innings, including a two-run walk-off by Wilson Valdez. Reports were that the wind was blowing out and that Valdez’s homer and the solo shot by Dane Sardinha were both wall-scrapers. Still, I have a hard time putting a pitcher who gave up 16 bases off hits, including a game-winning homer, in the above category. Can we get a ruling on this?

Meanwhile, in the intrasquad simulated game: Facing a lineup that included Randy Winn, Jamie Hoffmann, Mike Rivera, Juan Miranda, Jon Weber, Marcus Thames, Reid Gorecki, and Greg Golson, Joba Chamberlain gave up two runs on six hits and a walk while striking out just one in five innings. Those two runs came in the fourth which opened with a Gorecki double, a Hoffmann walk, and a Miranda double that drove in both runners. Outside of that three-batter sequence, Joba was sharp, getting tons of ground balls and a few infield-pop ups. He got four outs in the bottom of the fifth and just two of the 16 outs he recorded came on fly balls to the outfield, while six of them came on ground-ball double plays. Still, that lone strikeout is discouraging. I can’t say I feel much better about Chamberlain’s outing than I do about Hughes’, though both actually pitched pretty well, or so it seems.

Ouchies: Mike Rivera has a sore hamstring.

Cuts: Between Sunday and Monday, the Yankees farmed out ten players and dumped one other. They are:

Jamie Hoffmann, the Rule 5 pick received via the Nationals in exchange for Brian Bruney was returned to the Dodgers, putting an end to a complete waste of everyone’s time. Hoffmann hit .130/.259/.174 in 23 spring at-bats.

Reegie Corona, who will play second base in Double- or Triple-A depending on where Kevin Russo winds up.

Eduardo Nuñez, who will play shortstop in Double- or Triple-A depending on where Ramiro Peña winds up. Both Nuñez and Corona are on the 40-man roster and were optioned down.

Jorge Vazquez, who could actually wind up playing third base in Scranton, but more likely will split first base and DH with Juan Miranda and Jesus Montero’s days off from catching.

Brandon Laird, who should play third base in Double-A.

Colin Curtis, who impressed in camp with a supposedly rebuilt swing, going 6-for-12 with a double and two homers and two talks against just one strikeout, that after hitting .397/.472/.731 in 78 at-bats in the Arizona Fall League. Still, he should have to prove it in the unfriendly hitting environment of Trenton before anyone really takes the 25-year-old busted prospect seriously.

Reid Gorecki, who will likely be the fourth outfielder in Scranton.

Jesus Montero, who will be the starting catcher in Triple-A and be given serious consideration as a mid-season DH replacement should Nick Johnson’s annual DL stay be a long one.

Austin Romine, who will be the starting catcher in Double-A and could move up to fill Montero’s spot in Triple-A if/when Montero gets the call.

Jason Hirsh, who impressed in camp, striking out five in 3 2/3 innings with a hit batsman as the only blight on his record. He will be in the Triple-A rotation and should be on the short list of pitching replacements for both the rotation and bullpen.

Dustin Moseley, who posted a 9.95 ERA in camp and, in my opinion, doesn’t deserve a spot in the Scranton rotation, though he seems to be in line for one.

For more on these 11 players, see my campers post.

Battles: The battle for the backup infield spot is now clearly down to Ramiro Peña and Kevin Russo. Peña is the defense-first choice. Russo is the offense-first choice.

The battle for the fifth outfielder spot is now down to Marcus Thames, David Winfree, and Greg Golson. Jon Weber is still in camp and has hit well, but he’s a left-handed hitter and the Yankees want someone who can spell the lefty-hitting Curtis Granderson and Brett Gardner against lefties (though Gardner doesn’t need a platoon partner). Winfree is hitting .278 with just one walk and no extra-base hits. Thames is hitting .107 with just one walk and no extra-base hits. Both are non-roster players. Golson, whom I didn’t think was a legitimate contender, has hit .300 with two walks and three extra-base hits and is a strong defensive center fielder to boot. Golson could use more development time to reach his potential, but he has only struck out four times in 20 spring at-bats and is already on the 40-man roster.

The only non-roster pitchers still in camp are Royce Ring, who is challenging Boone Logan for a second-lefty job that probably doesn’t exist, Amaury Sanit, the Cuba defector, and Zach Segovia. None of those three has been charged with a run yet this spring, but I don’t expect any of them to make the team.

Broadway Boogie Woogie, By Piet Mondrian (1942-3) 

I always hear this song in my head when I look at this picture.

Chad Jennings has the skinny on today’s exhibition game; Joe Posnanski has the latest on Joe Mauer, the Twinkie Kid.

To fantasize, or not to fantasize?

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with fantasy baseball. The first few years I did it – 2003, 2004, somewhere around there – it was downright valuable; for someone like me who was used to just watching the Yankees and Mets, it forced me to familiarize myself with the mid-level players on other teams that I otherwise wouldn’t have known much about. Willy Taveras, whatever his flaws, will always have a place in my heart thanks to his unexpectedly non-sucky 2005 season; Aaron Harang remains a target of my misplaced resentment ever since his 6-win, league-leading 17-loss 2008 season crippled my Brooklyn Excelsiors. (Pretty much my favorite part of fantasy baseball, of course, is naming my team. My Little Lebowski Urban Achievers had a particularly successful run in the middle of the decade).

Too often, though, I’ve been That Person: the one who gets busy or forgetful or just frustrated with a lousy roster or bad luck, and abandons her team sometime in late July, allowing it to float gently to the bottom of the standings. Nobody likes That Person. But when I get stressed out, or just distracted by a shiny object, my fantasy team will be the first thing jettisoned. So perhaps, this year, I should leave it to those with more devotion, or at least longer attention spans. Maybe I can convince someone else to let me name his or her team.

Even if it may not be for me anymore, it would seem to go without saying that there’s nothing wrong with fantasy baseball. And yet, last night I came across Ron Shandler’s Huffington Post piece about a new fantasy baseball documentary:

There is a segment in the new documentary film, Fantasyland, when several esteemed baseball media veterans rail against fantasy baseball….

Mike Francesa of WFAN, Phil Mushnick of the New York Post and Hall of Fame writer Murray Chass are classified as “The Naysayers.” They think fantasy baseball is “foolish” and “ridiculous.”

(Mike Francesa, Phil Mushnik, and Murray Chass. You know that popular interview question, “Name the three people you’d most like to have dinner with”? This reads like the answer to the opposite of that question. Welcome to Brunch in Hell.)

Is fantasy baseball “foolish” and “ridiculous”? Maybe, but then, isn’t baseball itself? It’s no sillier than most of the things we do for fun. (Let’s pause here for a moment to allow Murray Chass time to Google the word “fun”). Obviously you can take a fantasy fixation too far – one of the cardinal rules of sports blogging is: No one cares about your fantasy team. But no one cares about the dream you had last night, either; that doesn’t mean it has no meaning for you.

Anyway, this got me thinking: is baseball really so different from fantasy baseball? I may not have a team this year, but I’ll watch a collection of players perform, and I’ll hope that they hit well and pitch well, and if they do better than another collection of players, it will make me happy, even though the tangible benefits to my daily life are nonexistent. Obviously, given the choice, I’ll choose flesh-and-blood baseball over fantasy baseball any day of the week, but let’s not kid ourselves: fandom is essentially irrational, except insofar as it gives us pleasure. Hell, at least in fantasy baseball, you can win some money.

I really dig this lady (and her cookbook too).

Jules Feiffer

From David Carr’s review in the Sunday Book Review:

Truth in the matter of memoir has always seemed evanescent and, more often lately, either elusive or absent. Memories of the self are often in service of other agendas, including the settling of scores and the creation of a hero where a mere man once stood.

Those questions, and the recent travails of the genre, seem at great remove to the reader of “Backing Into Forward,” by Jules Feiffer. Reading Feiffer, you know where the truth lies because it is there on every page — resonant, self-­lacerating and frequently hilarious. How else to explain Feif­fer’s frank admissions that he could not stand his mother, even dead; that he coveted the success of peers; that he reflexively courted fame and the famous; and that the mysterious Woody Allen was not really so mysterious to him?

Ostensibly the memoir of an acclaimed cartoonist, “Backing Into Forward” is a portrait of a certain kind of New York during a specific era: the cultural and political foment of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

Last week, also in the Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote:

“Backing into Forward” provides the reader with a sharply evocative portrait of the author’s youth in the Bronx, where he says he grew up a terrified, cowardly child, who “sidestepped arguments, fled confrontations, pedaled away from fistfights.” And the book proves just as nimble at limning the literary world of Manhattan, where this “wry, self-effacing, hard-hitting lefty” soon made himself at home, and realized he could “hold my own with Alfred Kazin, Dwight MacDonald, Lillian Hellman, Kenneth Tynan, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Rahv,” to drop just a few household intellectual names.

Perhaps funniest of all is Mr. Feiffer’s self-deprecating, self-pitying account of his Catch-22-like stint in the Army during the Korean war: after faking a breakdown, he says, he managed to get himself appointed to the Signal Corps Publications Agency, where he spent all of his free time working on “Munro,” a long cartoon narrative about a 4-year-old boy who is drafted — a project, he now recalls, that “was to determine the direction of my work and my life over the next 50 years.”

To what does Mr. Feiffer, 81, attribute his long and varied career? His success, he writes in these pages, came from “lucking into the zeitgeist,” from the happy coincidence that the personal subjects of his Voice cartoons — anxiety, confusion, anger — resonated perfectly with the concerns of his audience: young urban hipsters, alienated by the repressive mores of the cold war years and unmoored by the tumult of the counterculture decades.

I’ve admired Feiffer’s work all my life without being a huge fan. But this book looks like a fun read.

This update is powered by . . .vintage Genesis:

• A rainout calls for some imaginative thinking:

. . . A rainout at George M. Steinbrenner Field on Sunday allowed the Yankees’ players to knock off early, but for the manager, it created — in his words — a mess.

While heavy rains pelted the tarpaulin outside, Girardi and pitching coach Dave Eiland huddled with a head-scratcher of figuring out how to make sure eight pitchers could get into action on Monday thanks to the canceled game.

. . . The solution, it was decided, was to create another game. After checking with other clubs to see if anyone could spare hitters to play an unscheduled split-squad game, the Yankees opted to create their own.

In front of thousands of empty blue seats and few other witnesses, the Yankees will field two teams at their home stadium on Monday morning. Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera and Damaso Marte will hurl for one squad, with Joba Chamberlain, Chan Ho Park and Dave Robertson firing for another.

Then in the game that is printed on the schedule, A.J. Burnett will start against the Phillies on MLB.TV at 1:05 p.m. ET in Clearwater, Fla., with Phil Hughes serving in relief.

Problem solved, providing Girardi and company one long morning and afternoon to evaluate Chamberlain and Hughes in the ongoing battle to complete New York’s rotation, a decision Girardi hopes to make by March 25 or 26.

• David Robertson may see more (and more important) action this season:

That baby-faced 24-year-old, Yankees manager Joe Girardi says, might pitch the eighth inning this year. Of course, this is the spring. Of course, this could be just the manager talking. And of course, the team still needs to hammer out it’s starting rotation and see where pitchers like Alfredo Aceves and Joba Chamberlain land.

But Girardi says he has enough confidence in Robertson – four runs in 3 2/3 innings this spring – to use him as a “guy who can pitch for us anywhere now.”

• Catching up with Chien-Ming Wang.
• Meet Kevin Towers.
• A-Rod can’t wait for his World Series ring.

(more…)

The Yankees and Tigers were rained out on Sunday, throwing the Yankees’ pitching plans into a bit of disarray given that they were already muddled by the need to dedicate innings to each of the fifth-starter candidates as well as the pitchers who have the staff made. A.J. Burnett was supposed to start Sundays’ game with Phil Hughes pitching in relief. They will now fill those roles in Monday’s game against the Phillies. Andy Pettitte, who had already been bumped from Monday’s game by the need to give Joba Chamberlain innings, was scheduled to pitch in a minor league game on Monday, but with Burnett and Hughes pitching against the Phillies, Pettitte’s game will now be an intrasquad contest between two teams of Yankee minor leaguers, and his mound opponent will now be Joba Chamberlain.

It seems telling that the Yankees are bumping Chamberlain to the intrasquad game, though I’m not quite sure what it tells us. I would think that, after Chamberlain’s early struggles this spring, the Yankees would be most eager to see him face a major league lineup and would rather let Burnett pitch in the minor league game. Are the Yankees showing excessive faith in Chamberlain by letting him face minor leaguers in what could be the most crucial start of the spring for him? Are they showing a lack of faith by not letting him face the major leaguers? Have they already reached a decision on Chamberlain without telling anyone? Am I reading too much into this? It doesn’t seem insignificant given that Joe Girardi has said he’d like to start eliminating pitchers from the competition this week and perhaps even choose a fifth starter by the end of the week.