Daily Archives: June 16, 2010

The good news out of Wednesday night’s game is that, through the first seven innings, every Yankee hit was a homer, Alex Rodriguez returned to the lineup and contributed and RBI double, and the bullpen was dominant, pitching in 5 2/3 scoreless innings allowing only a walk and striking out six.

If 5 2/3 innings from the bullpen sounds suspicious, you’re beginning to figure out the bad news. Here’s another clue for you all: the relievers were Boone Logan and Chad Gaudin, the last two men on the Yankee bullpen depth chart.

Yup, A.J. Burnett got lit up and bounced after just 3 1/3 innings, burning through 87 pitches (just 55 percent of them strikes) and leaving the Yankees in a 6-1 hole half-way through the fourth inning. Burnett simply had no command of his pitches, particularly his fastball, as he walked four men, hit a fifth, and uncorked a wild pitch in his short stint. When he got the ball over the plate, he gave up a bases-clearing bases-loaded triple to Shane Victorino to blow the game open in the second, and back-to-back solo homers by Ryan Howard and Jayson Werth to start the third.

The first run Burnett allowed came after 38-year-old Raul Ibañez walked on five pitches then stole his first base of the year, giving Burnett the most stolen bases allowed by any pitcher in the majors thus far this year. Burnet allowed 23 steals in all of 2009, but has already allowed 19 this year, the 19th coming in the fourth inning after Victorino led off with a five-pitch walked then stole second.

Placido Polanco followed Victorino with a fly out, then Chase Utley hit a hard shot down the first-base line that Mark Teixeira smothered only to discover that Burnett broke late for first base and wasn’t there to take the throw. Certainly Burnett couldn’t have anticipated Teixeira’s fine play, but it seems like more than a coincidence that Joe Girardi chose that moment to take Burnett out of the game to heavy booing from the Yankee Stadium crowd.

Logan stranded Victorino and Utley, but the story of the game was Jamie Moyer, who was flat out dominant. Other than solo homers by Robinson Cano in the second and Jorge Posada in the fifth, Moyer didn’t allow a baserunner until the seventh, when Alex Rodrguez drew a one-out walk and was promptly erased by an inning-ending double play. With two outs in the eighth, Kevin Russo reached on an infield single that scooted under Polanco’s glove at third and was fielded too deep in the hole by Wilson Valdez for Valdez to record the out. Brett Gardener then flied out to end the inning.

That was it. That was all the Yankees managed in eight innings against Moyer, who at 47 years and 211 days became the oldest pitcher ever to record a win against the Yankees, trumping Phil Niekro, who picked up a win against his former mates in a rare relief appearance in the second game of a double header back on August 1, 1986. Ron Guidry took the loss for the Yankees in that one and Pat Tabler scored the winning run for the Indians on Julio Franco’s double. Three days earlier, Jamie Moyer pitched a gem for the Cubs to beat the Mets at Shea, the first game he ever pitched in New York. Yankee manager Joe Girardi (who, like YES announcers Paul O’Neill and Al Leiter and four of Girardi’s coaches, is younger than Moyer) was in his first year of pro ball at low-A Peoria at the time. Most impressively, Moyer’s performance was only his second best of the season, just outranking his complete game against the Padres on June 5.

Moyer threw 106 pitches in those eight innings and, despite a four-run lead, Phillies manager Charlie Manuel used the opportunity to give his closer, Brad Lidge some work. Facing the top of the order, Lidge got two quick outs (one on a high called strike three to Derek Jeter that was well within the rulebook strike zone but above where umpires typically call strikes, much to the chagrin of pitchers and myself), but Mark Teixeira drew a two-out walk, launching a rally that got Jorge Posada to the plate as the tying run only to strike out on one of the 900 sliders Lidge threw in the inning. Game over, Phillies win 6-2. Rubber game tomorrow. Andy Pettitte on the hill, I like the Yankees’ chances.

The Yankees look for a quick series victory over the Phillies tonight as A.J. Burnett takes on 47-year-old Jamie Moyer.  Moyer has been all over the place this season. On May 7, he became the oldest pitcher in major league history to throw a shutout, blanking the now-first-place Braves on two hits and no walks. In his last start, he gave up nine runs to the Red Sox before recording an out in the second inning, getting the hook four batters into the second. In between those two extremes, he posted a 3.51 ERA with three quality starts and one complete game in five tries but went just 2-3 due to the slumping Phily offense. Moyer has struck out just four men in his last four starts while inducing just one double-play.

As for Burnett, as I wrote in my “Howzit Goin’?” on Monday, despite the feeling that Burnett has been struggling (he allowed ten runs over 12 2/3 innings in his last two starts), on the season, he’s actually performing right in line with his career numbers (2010 ERA: 3.86; career: 3.84). His strikeouts are down, but so are his walks and wild pitches. This is A.J. Burnett: erratic, but generally effective. Just look at how he fared against the Phillies in the World Series last year:

Game 2: 7 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 2 BB, 9 K
Game 4: 2 IP, 4 H, 6 R, 4 BB, 2 K, 1 HR, 1 HBP

I’m mostly impressed that he’s managed to avoid the DL in nearly a year and a half with the Yankees.

As Alex reported earlier, Alex Rodriguez returns to the lineup, but only as the DH as Joe Girardi didn’t like what he saw from Alex’s lateral movement during drills on Tuesday. Kevin Russo finally gets a start at third base against a righty, just his second start at third this season. With Rodriguez at DH, Jorge Posada moves behind the plate as Russo effectively replaces Francisco Cervelli as the eighth-place hitter. Nick Swisher returns to the two hole. The full lineup can be seen in Alex’s post below.

According to Chad Jennings:

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Jorge Posada C
Curtis Granderson CF
Kevin Russo 3B
Brett Gardner LF

Grandmaster of the day…

Neil Adams

Wait, did I bury the lede?

There’s no shortage of good boxing movies. We’ve talked about that in the past. But what about laughs? Welp, dig these two funny boxing scenes from the masters: Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Watching them again, they are a decent example of how different Chaplin and Keaton were stylistically.

First, from City Lights:

And from one of Keaton’s lesser features, The Battling Butler:

I caught this little primer by rapper-turned-actor Common (formerly Common Sense) in the L.A. Times Magazine on the differences between the acting and rapping. I clicked on it not expecting much, but it’s actually a good read.

Dig…

Another boxing beat:

…For the Brown Bomber:

Nineteen-sixty-eight is remembered in mostly reverential terms as “The Year of the Pitcher.” But at the time, Roger Angell complained about the lack of hitting in The New Yorker and dubbed it “The Year of the Infield Pop-up.”

Our man Cliff takes a look at ’68 and other dominant pitching years, over at SI.com. One surprise–1997:

Just because offenses dominated in the late ’90s doesn’t mean there wasn’t great pitching going on. Between the strike year of 1994, when 4.92 runs were scored per game, and 2000, when the era peaked with 5.14 runs scored per game (the most since 1936), 1997 represented a relative low point for run scoring with “just” 4.77 runs crossing the plate per contest. The sheer quantity of star pitching talent on display that season, the last before the most recent round of expansion and the homer-happy season of 1998 was staggering.

Start with the Braves’ rotation headed by future Hall of Famers Greg Maddux (19-4, 2.20 ERA), Tom Glavine (14-7, 2.96 ERA), and John Smoltz (15-12, 3.02 ERA, 241 K’s) and complimented that year by a career year from lefty Denny Neagle (20-5, 2.97 ERA). Those four men combined for a 2.80 ERA over 962 innings (an average more than 240 innings per pitcher). None of them took home the Cy Young award, however, as that was claimed by a breakout season from 25-year-old Expos righty Pedro Martinez (17-8, 1.90 ERA, 305 K’s). Despite those 305 punchouts, Martinez finished second in the league in strikeouts to the Phillies’ Curt Schilling (17-11, 2.97, 319 K’s), marking one of just six seasons in baseball history in which two pitchers each struck out 300 men. Schilling’s 319 strikeouts remain a record for a right-handed National Leaguer.

So much for that pitchers’ duel.

In 13 starts this season prior to Tuesday night, Roy Halladay had allowed more than two earned runs in just two of them and allowed a total of three home runs on the entire season. Tuesday night, he matched his season worst six earned runs allowed with four of those runs scoring in a trio of Yankee homers that doubled his season total.

I’d like to know who saw that coming.

Halladay cruised through the first on ten pitches, eight of them strikes, then got Robinson Cano to ground out on an 0-1 count to start the third, but Nick Swisher followed with a single and everything went to pot for the Phillies’ ace after that.

Jorge Posada drew a four pitch walk and Brett Gardner tattooed a hanging slider into the right-center-field gap for a two-RBI triple (aided slightly by Shane Victorino bobbling the ball at the wall). In the third, Curtis Granderson led off with a solo homer, and after Mark Teixeira flew out, Robinson Cano doubled to right-center on the first pitch he saw. That brought Swisher back around and on a 2-0 count, he cracked a two-run homer to give the Yankees a shocking 5-0 lead over Halladay with one out in the bottom of the third.

Halladay settled down a bit with a 1-2-3 fourth, but with one out in the fifth, Teixeira snuck a 1-2 pitch just inside the foul pole down the right-field line, hitting a ducking YES cameraman in the back with a solo home run of his own. The Yankees made some noise against Halladay in the sixth as well, loading the bases with two outs but failing to push across another run.

CC Sabathia, meanwhile, didn’t allow a hit until the fourth inning, though things got dicey at that point. Utley led off the fourth with a bouncer that Sabathia stabbed at with both hands, deflecting the ball enough to give Utley a hit. Placido Polanco followed with another single and on a 1-2 count, Sabathia hit Ryan Howard to load the bases. Jayson Werth and Raul Ibañez followed with RBI singles.

With the bases still loaded, two runs in, and no one out, Ben Francisco hit a would-be double play ball to a far-ranging Mark Teixeira in the second-base hole. Teixeira could have come home with his throw to try to get the slow-footed Howard on what still might have been a close play, but he opted instead to start a 3-6-1 double play, trading Howard’s run for a pair of outs. Only Sabathia never broke for first base and the Yankees had to settle for a single out as Howard scored to cut the Yankee lead to 5-3.

Sabathia picked himself up by getting the next two men out, but then got into more trouble in the fifth when with one out, Utley singled, was replaced by a Polanco fielder’s choice, Ryan Howard drew a five-pitch walk, and both runners move up on a wild pitch. That last might have been a blessing as it allowed Sabathia to turn a 2-0 count on Werth into an intentional walk, after which he got Ibañez to ground out to leave the bases loaded.

That was the end of the excitement. Sabathia retired the last seven men he faced and David Robertson and Chan Ho Park each tossed a scoreless inning, a Robertson walk to Ibañez being the only blip, as the Yankees padded their lead against the Philadelphia bullpen by plating a pair of hit-batsmen on a two-out Francisco Cervelli single in the seventh.

Yankees win 8-3 as the Phillies drop the one game in this series they had to have. With the pitching matchups favoring the Bombers the next two nights, suddenly a sweep is not out of the question. Then again, as Halladay proved on Tuesday night, anything can happen.