Daily Archives: June 26, 2010

You couldn’t really have asked for much more than Friday night’s game delivered: a tense pitching duel; Alex Rodriguez coming up big in what for him was a grudge match against his former skipper; a little bit of hit-batsman antagonism with Vicente Padilla, but everything kept safely below the waist; CC Sabathia coming up big and striking out his last man in the eighth; Mariano Rivera coming in to face Manny Ramirez, who had an RBI single and a dropped fly ball earlier in the game, and striking out the side to pick up the save with no margin for error in a 2-1 win. It won’t get better than that, so I hope you all stayed up for it.

In fact, with A.J. Burnett on the mound this evening, things could get a lot worse in a hurry. Burnett has gone from poor to awful in June, providing a counterweigh to Sabathia’s strong month by going 0-4 with a 10.35 ERA in four starts while allowing nine home runs in just 20 innings pitched, inflating his season ERA by a run and a half in the process. Part of Burnett’s inconsistency is that you don’t expect his struggles to last long, either, but it seems as though each of Burnett’s starts this month has been worse than the last (not exactly true, but close), and with Dave Eiland on leave for a personal matter there are some have begun to wonder if Mike Harkey isn’t up to the task of getting Burnett back on track, while others, including the general manager, are wondering if Burnett is tipping his pitches.

To make matters worse, the pitcher opposing Burnett this evening, Hiroki Kuroda, is just the kind of crafty, off-speed groundballer prone to giving the Yankees fits. Even if he wasn’t, his success this season speaks for itself (3.06 ERA, 2.92 K/BB, career-best 7.1 K/9). In stark contrast to Burnett, Kuroda has been aces in his last three starts, the last two of which have come against the best offense in each league, the Reds and Red Sox, in those teams’ hitting-friendly ballparks. In total, Kuroda has posted a 0.95 ERA with 23 Ks in 19 innings against just four walks and no homers in those three starts (the third of which came at home against the Cardinals, who have some dangerous hitters themselves). That line works out to a 10.9 K/9 and 5.75 K/BB to go with that sub-1.00 ERA and 0.89 WHIP.

Gulp.

Jorge Posada, who fouled a pitch off his healing right foot last night but stayed in the game, gets the night off. Francisco Cervelli hits seventh ahead of Brett Gardner and Burnett. Curtis Granderson remains in the two-hole. Nick Swisher bats sixth.

The good news is that, if the Yankees do drop this game, as it seems they’re likely to do, it sets up a hell of a rubber game on ESPN tomorrow night with the Dodgers’ young lefty ace Clayton Kershaw facing off against veteran southpaw Andy Pettitte, who thus far is having his finest season as a Yankee at the age of 38. Well, that and the fact that you won’t have to stay up ’til 1am to watch the carnage tonight.

I am not a soccer fan, not by any stretch, but I’m incredibly fired up about today’s World Cup match.  We’re a bit late posting this thread, but feel free to pull up a chair as you watch the U.S. boys take on Ghana.

There is no higher…

Very hot, very hot.

It’s as hot outside as Mattingly was last night after the last out.

Keep cool.

[Picture by Bags]

Stephen Dunn/Getty Images

When I was a young boy growing up in Southern California but obsessed with a team that played three thousand miles away, I often went to sleep listening to Dodger games.  In those dark days of the early 1980s when not even George Jetson dreamed of the internet, there were three ways that I could get a Yankee score.  One, I could wait until the next day and read about it in the morning paper; two, I could wait for the sports report on the local news at about 11:20 and hope they included out of town baseball scores; or three, I could listen to the Dodger game and hope I could stay awake to hear the scoreboard recap.

I usually chose option number three, which meant that I would lie in bed and listen to Vin Scully spinning yarns about Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays and Stan Musial.  Thirty years later, I sometimes watch Dodger games — not for the game, but to listen to Scully.  And so when faced with the choice this afternoon between spending ninety minutes in traffic and $300 in tickets to take the family out to Chavez Ravine, or watching the game on the couch with Vin Scully on the mic, I chose Scully.  (The added bonus being that I could spend the afternoon rearranging the garage, much to my wife’s delight.)

Leading up to this series, I focused completely on all the feel-good stories.  Grandpa Joe Torre would get to see the four kids he raised into Hall of Famers (I know you want to quibble with that, but that’s not really the point), Captain Don Mattingly would pose for photos with Captain Derek Jeter, and people like Tommy Lasorda and Reggie Jackson would have good fun recounting past battles.  What’s funny to me is that I didn’t remember the snarky angle — Alex Rodríguez would be on the same field as Torre, the guy who sold him out to SI’s Tom Verducci in September of 2006, dropped him to eighth in the lineup in an elimination game a month later, and then finished the job by going back to Verducci for last year’s tell-all, The Yankee Years.  Even if I forgot all this, the Associated Press did not, as almost half of their game recap focused on the Torre-Rodríguez rift.  (For the record, I love Joe Torre, but I hate the way he handled A-Rod.)

But there was an actual game played on Friday night, and it was a good one.  On the Dodger side, things started out nicely as they scratched out a run against CC Sabathia in the first inning with a lead-off walk and stolen base by Rafael Furcal, a ground ball to first by Andre Ethier to move him to third, and an RBI-single to right by our old friend Manny Ramírez (more on him later). (more…)