Blog Archives

So what the hell happened in Kansas City? Steven Goldman offers his two cents on today’s Pinstriped Blog. Joe Torre says it all comes back around to starting pitching. If you ask me, the pitching wasn’t the problem. Yes, you’d like to see the Yankee starters dominate a hapless offense such as the Royals’, but the 4.00 ERA they posted over three games is more than half a run better than the staff’s season mark and Torre didn’t have to use his bullpen much at all (2 2/3 innings of Sturtze, 1 of Gordon).

No, I blame the offense. This team is simply giving away outs, be it by starting Tony Womack and Ruben Sierra, a series of awful baserunning blunders, or simply by hacking their way into outs at the plate. The last of those is enough to make one wonder if Don Mattingly will ever get any heat from the local media. Don’t get me wrong, I love and respect Donnie baseball as much as any pinstripe-blooded Yankee fan, but back when the Yankees were looking for a hitting coach after losing the 2003 World Series, I wondered if Donnie’s personal history of contact hitting was less than ideal for a team built around working the count, drawing walks, and knocking them home with big blasts. Though I was very pleased when Mattingly was hired less than a week later, and thrill to the site of Donnie with his beat-up little black book consulting hitters before and after at-bats, I still wonder.

Heading into Minnesota, the Yankee bats get a break, as they will miss both Johan Santana (who struck out 14 Indians last night) and Hometown Brad Radke, who has walked just three men all season. But then again, to an offense that just scored a grand total of three runs against D.J. Carrasco, Ryan Jensen and the Royals bullpen, Kyle Lohse, Joe Mays and Carlos Silva could just as easily be Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz.

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The Yankees try to salvage their dignity tonight against the Royals as Carl Pavano looks to do the same following the pasting he took at the hands of the Red Sox on Saturday (five runs on eleven hits in 3 2/3 IP). In his way stands . . . Ryan Jensen?

The 29-year-old Jensen failed to stick in the Giants’ rotation a few years back, posted a 5.36 ERA in triple-A Fresno last year before being released by the Giants over the winter. Filling an injury hole in the Royals rotation, he’s thus far made two starts for Kansas City: 2 runs on 3 hits and 3 walks in 5 IP for a win over the Cardinals (not bad!), and 7 runs on 8 hits and a walk in 3 1/3 against the Angels (bad!).

The Yanks sure could use a win tonight going into a weekend series against the Twins, and the offense really needs to get going heading into Minnesota, even if the Yankees did get a huge break by drawing the bottom three Twins starters this weekend.

To that end, Joe Torre held yet another team meeting after last night’s game, in large part due to the terrible approach his hitters were displaying at the plate. Quothe Joe afterwards:

I didn’t like what I saw. I didn’t see a lot of patience. It just didn’t feel like we were having good at-bats. I’m trying to find a different way to say it, but we didn’t make [the opposing pitchers] work like we normally do. It’s something I’m surprised about and certainly it’s no fun watching it.

Indeed, going into the ninth inning down three runs, each of the first four batters swung at the first pitch, with only Robinson Cano having a positive result from that swing. On the night, the Yankees made seven outs on the first pitch of an at-bat.

He also seemed frustrated with the teams’ general lack of heads-up play adding, “We’ve got to think better than we think.” Here’s hoping they have their thinking caps on tonight.

The Yankees haven’t lost on my man Alex’s birthday since 2001, but they did so last night against the pathetic Kansas City Royals, dropping the game 3-1 and in turn giving the Royals just their fourth series win on the season (the others coming against the Angels, Indians, D-Rays).

Randy Johnson again failed to dominate, allowing 9 hits including a two-run first-inning home run on a flat slider to Emil Brown. Overall, it was Johnson’s best start in his last four tries, as he went the distance, striking out seven against just one walk, needing just 104 pitches to get through eight, 68 percent of which were strikes. But one must remember that he was facing this line-up:

Angel Berroa
David DeJesus
Mike Sweeney
Emil Brown
Tony Graffanino
Matt Diaz
John Buck
Terrence Long
Joe McEwing

Facing those nine, Johnson allowed three runs in his first three innings, which would prove to be all the Royals needed.

The Yankee bats were pathetic, announcing the official arrival of a team-wide slump that has seen them score just seven runs in their last four games. Their only real threat against D.J. Carrasco, who picked up his first win as a major league starter, came in the first.

Leading off the game, Jeter worked Carrasco for seven pitches before flying out. Matsui, batting in the two-spot with Tony Womack on the bench, then singled on Carrasco’s 15th pitch and Sheffield walked on the next four. With two on and just one out, Carrasco then got two called strikes on Alex Rodriguez before getting him to fly out to right and Jorge Posada followed with a two-pitch groundout to first.

Brown touched off on Johnson in the bottom of the inning (and I do mean “touched off,” his shot was a no-doubter that splashed down in the fountain in left) two outs after a perfectly placed lead-off bloop double just inside the foul line in shallow right by Angel Berroa. That was about all she wrote.

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Despite the Yankees’ current three-game losing streak (against the rival Red Sox and rotten Royals, no less), I’m not particularly alarmed about how this team is playing. Win ten in a row here, lose three in a row there, that’s more than acceptable. That said, there is no excuse for this team not to take the remaining two games of this series in Kansas City.

Joe Torre will be back in the dugout tonight, having served his one-day suspension resulting from the Quantrill-Tigers incident yesterday. Quantrill himself remains suspended for the duration of this series, which shouldn’t matter much as he could use a break after his disastrous appearance on Sunday and Tanyon Sturtze, who worked one scoreless inning last night, is the only Yankee reliever to have pitched since then.

Meanwhile, Alex Rodriguez and Hideki Matsui got the park early yesterday to work on defense and hitting respectively. Matsui, whose drills focused on hitting off of a tee, responded immediately last night with his first homer since the Cretaceous Period (a.k.a. April 8). Rodriguez’s results will reveal themselves over a longer period, but he did look good in the field last night.

The Royals are skipping the atrocious Jose Lima (8.13 ERA, 15 homers in 11 starts) tonight in favor of D.J. Carrasco, who has two quality starts in three attempts this season (the exception coming against the Orioles), but just five strikeouts in 17 2/3 innings (he’s a contact/groundball type). Randy Johnson, who will take the hill for the Yanks, really needs to have a dominant outing having allowed 28 hits and struck out just 8 (against five walks) in his last three starts combined (18 2/3 IP), and there’s no better team to do that against than the 2005 Kansas City Royals.

As always . . .

Baseball is a fickle game. On any given day, the worst team in the major leagues can beat the best team. On any given day the worst hitter in the game can go 4 for 4 and the best 0 for 5, while the best pitcher can take the mound without his stuff and get rocked as the worst finds an unfamiliar feel and pitches a complete game shutout. A large part of this is that baseball, more than any other sport, is a game dependent to a large degree on luck. It’s the line-drive right at a fielder versus the weak grounder that finds a hole, the hanging curve that’s taken for a high strike versus the one with a sharp break and great placement that gets deposited in the seats.

These are all reasons that the two tremendous losses the Yankees suffered at the hands of the Red Sox this weekend (total score, 24-3) don’t really bother me all that much. It was clear that Pavano and Mussina simply didn’t have it and that Clement and Wells (who found that famous curve after the first inning on Sunday) did. In and of itself, that doesn’t really reveal any essential flaws in this Yankee team other than the fact that they were simply off their game two days in a row. Consider the following:

Tuesday through Thursday the Tigers are swept by the Yankees. Friday through Sunday the Orioles are swept by the Tigers. Saturday and Sunday the Red Sox humiliate the Yankees. Monday night, the Red Sox get crushed by the Orioles (8-1).

There’s no logic to that. As of this afternoon, the Orioles are the best of those four teams (.620 winning percentage), the Tigers the worst (.479) and the Red Sox and Yankees are tied, four games behind the O’s in second place in the AL East with .540 winning percentages. One or two, or even three-game sample sizes are simply not enough to determine the relative quality of two or more teams. Heck, take the seven days since Tuesday:

Orioles 5-2
Yankees 4-2
Tigers 3-3
Red Sox 2-5

Then there are these guys:

Royals 0-6

Yeah, they’re that bad. But given the nature of the game, even the Royals, who are indeed the worst team in baseball (.260 winning percentage, even worse than the Colorado Springs Sky So . . . er, Rockies at .286), win a game every now and then (once every four days or so, to be precise). Having been without an official manager since Tony Peña resigned exactly three weeks ago today, the Royals have just hired Buddy Bell, who will manage his first game for Kansas City tonight. With a new skipper in the dugout and their best pitcher on the mound, the exciting young phenom Zach Greinke, it wouldn’t surprise me to see the Royals stop that six-game losing streak tonight despite being clearly overmatched by the invading Yankees. That’s just how this game works.

That said, the Yankees should feast on the Royals over the next three days, which would be a nice way to kick off the year’s longest road trip (12 games in four cities).

More on the Royals themselves below the fold.

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When the Yankees won ten in a row against the lowly A’s and Mariners (who currently have the second and third worst records in the AL) there were many observers, myself included, who felt that the true test of this Yankee team would be what they did next, particularly against the rival Mets and Red Sox. Well, since returning from the west coast, the Yankees have won six of seven including two of three from the Mets and their last five straight. The most recent of those victories came last night at the expense not only of the rival Sox, but against a pitcher who always seems to have their number, knuckleballer and would-be 2003 ALCS MVP Tim Wakefield, who was 3-0 with a 1.34 ERA in last six regular-season starts against the Yankees.

Opposing Wakefield on the mound was Randy Johnson, who has yet to turn in the sort of dominating performance the Yankees expected they’d get routinely when they traded twenty percent of their starting rotation and their Catcher of the Future for him in January. Last night was no different. Despite dialing his fastball up to 95-96 miles per hour for the first time all season, Johnson struggled with his control and threw far to many hittable pitches. Fortunately, he was able to get out of the almost constant trouble he got himself in.

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The Yankees and Red Sox kick off a three-game weekend series in the Bronx tonight. The Yankees are tied with the Blue Jays for second place in the AL East, 4.5 games behind the Orioles and 1/2 game ahead of the Red Sox. The two teams are tied in the loss column (the Yankees have one extra win). Both teams are within a win of their Pythagorean expectations, but the Yankees are a fraction of a win under and the Red Sox are a fraction of a win over, meaning the Yankees should be expected to increase their lead on the Sox given the performance of the two teams thus far this season. In their first six games against each other in April the Yankees and Red Sox each won their home series to split the six games right down the middle at three wins a piece.

The Yankees are currently five games over .500, their high-water mark for the season. The Red Sox were eight games over .500 back on May 11, having won 8 of their last 9 and 10 of their last 12 at that point. Since then they’ve gone 4-8 against the A’s, Mariners, Braves and Blue Jays, losing their series with the A’s and M’s and getting swept by the Blue Jays.

On the season, both the Yankees and Red Sox are having a mighty hard time against their intra division opponents:

Here’s the roster the Red Sox bring into the Bronx tonight:

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After pounding the Tigers into submission on Tuesday, the Yankees won a tidy 4-2 ballgame on Wednesday behind Chien-Ming Wang and then finished off the sweep with a nifty 4-3 comeback win behind Kevin Brown last night. Brown allowed just three runs on ten hits in seven full while striking out four and walking none (70 percent strikes) to earn his fourth-straight win. The big hit in the game was a two-run bomb by Alex Rodriguez in the fifth that brought the Yankees back from a 3-2 deficit.

Meanwhile, the Blue Jays finished off a sweep of their own . . . of the Red Sox. As a result the Yankees and Blue Jays remain tied in the AL East, but for second place, a half game ahead of the now fourth-place Red Sox, who come to the Bronx to night for a three game series.

The Yankees are now 15-2 over their last seventeen games and with a little more than a week having passed since the season passed the quarter mark, now seems as good a time as any to take a player-by-player look at how things are shaping up in Yankeeland. We’ll start today with the offense.

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I don’t have much to say in anticipation of tonight’s game. The Yanks are playing with house money having already taken the series from the Tigers and moved within 1/2 game of the Red Sox. The worst-case scenario (barring an injury) would have the Yankees enter the three game weekend series with Boston 1 1/2 games behind their rivals. Obviously a sweep would be nice, but with Kevin Brown facing Jeremy Bonderman, no one should lose any sleep if the Yanks drop one tonight to the Tiger’s young ace. That said, I’ll have one hand on my broom tonight.

Having literally beaten the Tigers about the head and neck in the first game of their current series, the Yankees must now face two of the best road pitchers in baseball, Mike Maroth (2.03 ERA seventh in the AL among pitchers with three or more road starts, 0.84 WHIP) and Jeremy Bonderman (1.50 ERA fifth in the majors, 0.58 WHIP, 20:1 K/BB) with the task of beating one of them to claim their sixth-straight series victory and avoid entering this weekend’s Red Sox series on two-game losing streak.

Speaking of the Sox, they fell to the Blue Jays last night on a walk-off home run by Reed Johnson (his second dinger of the game) off Alan Embree, allowing the Yankees (still tied with the Jays, of course) to creep within 1.5 games. Thus a series win against Detroit would also put the Yankees in position to pass the Scarlet Hosers with a weekend sweep regardless of what the Sox do between now and then.

And that’s the trick: winning series. In the new Pinstriped Bible, Steven Goldman lays out a game plan that just might work:

The current price of the wild card . . . [is] equivalent to 94 wins, so expecting the Yankees to get there would be equivalent to saying we believe that the team is capable of going 71-47 the rest of the way, a .602 pace. Forty-seven of those games will come against the Red Sox (13), Orioles (12), Angels (7), Twins (6), White Sox (6), and Cardinals (3). Say the Yankees win one more than the lose against those clubs. They would then need to win two-thirds of their remaining games to maintain that .602 pace.

In other words, split with the good teams (the Yanks are 3-3 against the Sox thus far this season, though the O’s and Angels have had their way with them), and win series against the rest. [Incidentally, Goldman’s book on Casey Stengel is finally available for purchase. Also recommended reading: his review of Star Wars: Episode III in today’s Pinstriped Blog]

Defending the home turf tonight is Chien-Ming Wang, who hasn’t pitched since last Monday when he set down eighteen-straight Mariners while picking up his second straight win. Wang was bumped from his scheduled start on Sunday against Pedro Martinez and the Mets in favor of Carl Pavano, who turned in a fine performance of his own after early-inning struggles.

We can now see that that move was made not only to get Pavano in against the Mets, but to get Mike Mussina (who started in front of Wang yesterday on five day’s rest) in against the Red Sox this weekend. That’s certainly understandable considering how keyed in Moose has been of late and the fact that he generally does well against the Sox, but it carries the risk of the long rest resulting in a poor performance from Wang tonight that could aversely affect his standing in the rotation, which could lead to future skipped starts, snowballing into his being demoted if/when Jaret Wright ever comes back. Here’s hoping that Wang performs up the standard he’s set for himself tonight (6+IP, 3 or fewer runs), or, failing that, that Torre and Stottlemyre recognize the effect of the long rest give him a mulligan. Lastly, Wang’s strikeout total to beat tonight is four. Tiger vs. the Tigers. As Alex says . . .

Detroit Tigers

2004 Record: 72-90 (.444)
2004 Pythagorean Record: 79-83 (.488)

Manager: Alan Trammell
General Manager: Dave Dombrowski

Ballpark (2004 park factors): Comerica Park (96/97)

Who’s replacing whom?

Magglio Ordoñez replaces Alex Sanchez
Nook Logan fills in when Ordoñez is on the DL
Ramon Martinez replaces Eric Munson and loses some playing time to Brandon Inge
Vance Wilson replaces spare parts
Wilfredo Ledezma inherits Gary Knotts’ starts
Troy Percival replaces Esteban Yan
Kyle Farnsworth replaces Al Levine
Franklyn German inherits Steve Coyler’s innings
Matt Ginter replaces Danny Patterson
Chris Spurling and Doug Creek replace Craig Dingman and other spare parts

Current Roster:

1B – Carlos Peña
2B – Omar Infante
SS – Carlos Guillen
3B – Brandon Inge
C – Ivan Rodriguez
RF – Craig Monroe
CF – Nook Logan
LF – Rondell White
DH – Dmitri Young

Bench:

R – Marcus Thames (OF)
R – Ramon Martinez (IF)
L – Jason Smith (IF)
R – Vance Wilson (C)

Rotation:

R- Jeremy Bonderman
L – Nate Robertson
R – Jason Johnson
L – Wilfredo Ledezma
L – Mike Maroth

Bullpen:

R – Ugueth Urbina
R – Kyle Farnsworth
L – Jamie Walker
R – Franklyn German
R – Matt Ginter
R – Chris Spurling
L – Doug Creek

DL:

R – Magglio Ordoñez (OF)
L – Bobby Higginson (OF)
R – Troy Percival
R – Gary Knotts
R – Fernando Rodney
R – Colby Lewis (60-day)
L – Fernando Viña (IF) (60-day)

Typical Line-up

S – Nook Logan (CF)
R – Brandon Inge (3B)
R – Ivan Rodriguez (C)
S – Carlos Guillen (SS)
R – Rondell White (LF)
S – Dmitri Young (DH)
R – Craig Monroe (RF)
L – Carlos Peña (1B)
R – Omar Infante (2B)

Hovering around .500 (they’re two wins in the red, but 15 runs in the black), the Tigers continue to improve after the remarkable turnaround they made last year in the wake of their historically bad 2003 season. Last year, the team was revived by the infusion of an actual offense, lead by Ivan Rodriguez and the out-of-nowhere MVP-level performance of Carlos Guillen along with a career-saving season from Brandon Inge and a collection of solid, above-average seasons from Dmitri Young, Rondell White, Carlos Peña and Craig Monroe.

This year, the story is the pitching. Second worst in the league last year with a 5.21 ERA, the Tiger staff has posted an outstanding 3.66 ERA thus far in 2005, good for seventh best in the majors and fourth best in the AL (behind the Chisox, Twins and Angels). And before you accuse them of being a product of their pitching-friendly home park, they hold up with a 3.78 ERA on the road, still in the top ten in the bigs and sixth in the AL.

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Previewing the subway series on Friday I wrote “Kris Benson seems to be rounding into shape after being disabled with a strained pectoral muscle early in the year.” No doubt, Benson held the Yankees scoreless through six innings yesterday, allowing just three hits (Matsui, erased by an E-Rod double play, Posada double, E-Rod single) and not a runner past first in his first four innings of work.

However, he did walk two (walking Cano intentionally to pitch to Randy Johnson with two out and Posada on second doesn’t count) and hit Derek Jeter in the elbow. According to the radio broadcast (I only caught parts of this game live, and less than that on television), Jeter was in a great deal of pain, and left the game after being forced out at second. X-rays were negative and both he and Gary Sheffield, who was a late scratch in favor of Bernie Williams due to a sore left hand that he actually in jured two weeks ago on a check swing, are day-to-day. Both could start today’s rubber game against Pedro Martinez.

Neither of those injuries are as troubling as the inconsistent performances of Randy Johnson thus far this season. Johnson did strike out some men this time, five in 6 2/3 innings, but he also gave up hits. Lots of them. Three singles in the first (no runs thanks to a fielder’s choice and a caught stealing). Three in the second (one run). Three in the third (including an RBI double by David Wright). That’s nine hits in this first three innings. Johnson settled some after that allowing just one more hit (erased by a double play) in his next three innings. But then lost his grip in the seventh.

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Wait a second, Kevin Brown and Victor Zambrano faced off in a game that included five errors and thirteen walks and it was just 3-2 going into the ninth inning?

Yup. Both starters belied their shoddy reputations, despite exhibiting the same tendencies that typically get them in much bigger trouble. Zambrano walked six, but allowed just three runs, two earned. Kevin Brown, meanwhile, escaped a bases-loaded jam in the first (single and two walks) by striking out Doug Mientkiewicz on three nasty pitches low in the zone. He then survived a lead-off single in the second and a lead-off walk in the third and a one-out walk in the fifth. The only run he allowed all evening came in the fourth and it was unearned.

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I have to disagree with Alex. While I’m not exactly “geeked” for this weekend’s series against the Mets, I do think this is one of the most compelling subway series match-ups in the now nine year history of interleague play.

One reason is the similarity in the two team’s records. With the Yankees’ loss on Wednesday and the Mets’ simultaneous sweep of the Reds, the Mets are a mere 1.5 games better than the Yanks. That not only reveals the two teams to be very evenly matched, but also marks only the second time in what will now be the fifteen series played between the two teams that the Mets have entered an interleague series with the Yankees with a better record than the Bombers. The previous occasion was in July of 2000, when the Mets were 47-35 to the Yankees’ 42-37 entering the second intracity series of the year. That turned out to be a memorable one, both for the unusual home/away double header that saw the two teams play in both stadiums on a single day, and for Roger Clemens’ now infamous beaning of Mike Piazza. The Yankees won 3 of 4 games in that series and, despite finishing the season with a worse record than the Mets for what remains the only time since 1991, would eventually defeat them in five games in that year’s World Series.

To me, this year is even more compelling than that 2000 match-up, because for the first time the Yankees are not the obvious favorites.

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The road trip that is. The Yanks go for their second sweep of the Mariners in a ten day span tonight, with Mike Mussina–who started this whole winning streak thingy by shutting out the A’s a week and a half ago–coming off the three best starts of his season. His mound opponent will be Jamie Moyer, who hasn’t made it out of the fourth inning of any of his last three starts, the last coming against the Yankees when he was run with one out in the third. Moyer has a 19.80 ERA in his two May starts combined.

Bernie Williams, who has always owned Moyer and went 2 for 2 against him last week with a double and an RBI single, is expected to start, which might mean Womack will sit and the outfield will be an adventure.

Speaking of line-up changes, I had this fantasy that Joe Torre decided that, with the series in his pocket, he could sit E-Rod tonight in favor of Andy Phillips or Russ Johnson, or perhaps a two-at-bats-each in-game platoon of the two. You see, E-Rod has played third for all but one inning this season while Johnson has just one at-bat in the majors this year and Phillips hasn’t played since he took an 0-fer in Moose’s streak-starting shutout back on May 7. With the Yanks headed to Shea to take on the Mets this weekend, it would help to have those two bats a bit warmer than they are now (which is ice cold) for pinch-hit opportunities. And it wouldn’t hurt to rest E-Rod with the series in the bag and a 5-0 record on the current road trip.

Just a thought. I know it won’t happen.

Or as Alex would likely title it “. . . and ya don’t stop.”

The Yanks won their tenth straight last night behind a dominating complete game shutout by Meat Pavano against the very same Mariner team that beat him bloody last week in New York. Here’s his final line:

9 IP, 5 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 7 K, 68 percent strikes

Pavano allowed just six baserunners all game, a full third of them in the ninth inning. Meat hit Bret Boone with a pitch in the second, gave up consecutive singles to Richie Sexson and Raul Ibanez in the fourth and a single to Boone in the seventh. Pavano did not allow an extra base hit, did not walk a batter, and did not allow a runner past second base. His seven strikeouts tied his season high and 15 of the 20 outs recorded by his defense came on ground balls. Seattle never had a shot.

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The Mariners are pulling Julio Mateo out of the bullpen to make his first major league start tonight. This may look like a great opportunity for the Yankees to extend their winning streak, but this sort of set-up always seems to go awry for the pinstripers.

Mateo, for example, may not have started since A-ball in 2000, and he may be averaging just two innings per outing this year, but that 2IP/G is up from his career average, and his last two outings have been the longest of his season at 3 1/3 innings each. What’s more, he has a 0.41 ERA, the opposition is hitting .154/.205/.179 (.137 GPA) against him (ten singles, two doubles, two walks against ten Ks in 22 innings), and in his second-most-recent outing he held the Yankee’s scoreless over 3 1/3. He’s pitching so well that Jason over at U.S.S. Mariner actually suggested the M’s move Mateo into the rotation in a post this past Saturday, with no expectation that the Mariners would actually do it, let alone so soon (to be fair, this is a spot start while Joel Pineiro works on his mechanics in the minors).

More encouraging for the Yankees and their fans, Dave added a very informative post yesterday that reveals that Mateo pitches to contact in the Quantrill/Lieber style except that instead of throwing ground balls, Mateo is an extreme fly-ball pitcher. Thus far this season Mateo has an absurdly low .176 opponents’ average on balls in play (against a league average of .293) and has yet to allow a home run. In other words, he’s pitching way over his head. Dave fears the odds will catch up with Mateo tonight over an extended outing against the Yankees’ major league leading offense. Here’s hoping he’s right.

Meanwhile, the Yankees have to hope that whatever ailed Carl Pavano in his last start (in addition to Alex Rodriguez’s defense, that is) has subsided in the days since. Especially since Joe Torre has inexplicably decided to bump Chien-Ming Wang out of his scheduled start at Shea on Sunday and use Thursday’s day off to let Pavano move up a day in his place. Wang should start one of the first two games of next week’s homestand against the Tigers instead.

In other news, don’t look now, but Mike Stanton is the only active Yankee reliever with an ERA over 4.00. Meanwhile, Ruben Sierra is playing extended spring training games in Tampa (batting left exclusively for the moment) and should start a Florida State League rehab stint mid-week. Take your time, Ru.

. . . and rolling, and rolling . . .

The Yanks made it nine straight in Seattle last night thanks to another strong performance by Chien-Ming Wang and a seventh-inning grand slam by Bernie Williams in his first start of the road trip.

Wang coughed up a pair of runs to the Mariners in the first on an Ichiro Suzuki single and stolen base, an Adrian Beltre single and a Raul Ibanez double. He then retired eighteen straight batters before getting knocked out of the game in the seventh by a Bret Boone double (misplayed just a half inning after his grand slam by Bernie, who started in center for the first time since the big shakeup) and a more legitimate double by Jeremy Reed that drove Boone home. TanGorMo kept the M’s scoreless the rest of the way. And yes, Wang did post a season-high four strikeouts, while not walking a batter for the first time in his four major league starts.

As for the Yanks, they got runners on in each of the first five innings against Aaron Sele, but only got one of them home, a Robinson Cano lead-off double in the third that was cashed in on a pair of groundouts by Hideki Matsui and Alex Rodriguez. Batting second for the first time (Womack sat), Cano went 2 for 5 and is now 13 for 22 with six doubles in his last five starts.

Sele struck out the side in the sixth, but the last strike was his 115th pitch, so, leading 2-1, Mike Hargrove went to his pen in the seventh. Shigetoshi Hasegawa loaded the bases with one out. Lefty George Sherrill (who replaced Joel Pineiro on the roster) got Tino (who didn’t homer, but drew an intentional walk earlier in the game with a man on second and two outs) to ground into a fielder’s choice, forcing Sheffield out at home and keeping the bases loaded with one out.

That brought up Bernie Williams, who had a walk, a groundout and a flyout on the night. Hargrove went to his top righty set-up man, J.J. Putz. Putz fired a fastball to Bernie and Bernie smacked it to dead center. Centerfielder Jeremy Reed went back, jumped and reached over the wall, the ball hit his mitt and the simultaneous impact of the ball and the wall knocked Reed’s glove off his hand. Grand slam. 5-2 Yankees.

The M’s pulled a run closer against Wang, as mentioned, but the Yanks came right back against Jeff Nelson on singles by Cano, Sheffield and E-Rod to put the final score at 6-3.

The Yankees are now one game over .500 and just a half game behind Toronto for third place in the AL East. Also, the A’s snapped their eight-game losing streak against the Red Sox, allowing the Yankees to pull within 2.5 games of the World Champs. The Yankees’ current nine-game winning streak is their longest since they won nine in late June and early July of 2001. Lastly, when the Yankees were struggling in April and the first week of May, Joe Torre repeatedly said that he was just waiting for the team to pull off nine out of ten and get going. Well, guess what?

The Yankees’ current eight-game winning streak matches their best such streak from last season. Interestingly, last year’s streak also included a 5-1 run against the A’s and got the Yanks out of an early hole and back over .500. The Yankees aren’t back over .500 yet, but they would be with a win tonight as they roll into Seattle to face a Mariner team they swept in the Bronx one week ago.

Not much has changed with the M’s since then, though they did have fun this weekend, taking 2 of 3 from the Red Sox (by comparison the A’s were swept by the Sox in between series with the Yanks). There have been a couple of roster changes in Seattle. Wiki Gonzalez, who was called up to replace Dan Wilson and promptly given the starting catching job over a severely slumping Miguel Olivo, has been placed on the disabled list with a hamstring injury. Olivo has been given the starting job back and 21-year-old rookie Rene Rivera has been called up to serve as the back-up.

Meanwhile, Joel Pineiro, who was to become the staff ace after the trade of Freddy Garcia last year only to spend the majority of that time on the DL thus far, has been sent to the minors to work on his mechanics following a rough Friday the 13th start. Reliever Julio Mateo, who has started just 12 games in his professional career, the last coming with Class-A Wisconsin in 2000, will take Pineiro’s start against the Yankees on Tuesday. He will be framed by Aaron Sele (tonight) and Jamie Moyer (Wednesday) against whom the Yankees scored twelve runs on eighteen hits in five innings last week.

Chein-Ming Wang takes the ball for the Yanks tonight. Removing his one rough outing in Tampa, he’s turned in this line in his other two starts: 14 IP, 10 H, 5 R, 0 HR, 5 BB, 3 K. Curiously, the only part of that that isn’t encouraging is the K/BB ratio, which was one of his strong suits in the minors. Expect that to correct itself. He’s already seen his strikeouts increase in all three starts, even if it has only been from 0 to 3.

Thursday’s off-day cleary didn’t faze the win-happy Yanks. Nor did last Saturday’s 131 pitches faze the suddenly vintage Mike Mussina. After featuring a fastball that finally reached the low 90s to shutout the A’s last weekend, Mussina switched to a reliance on a sharp knuckle curve last night to hold those same A’s to two runs on six hits and a walk over seven innings while striking out an encouraging nine men. Suddenly my claims of Moose’s demise seem alarmingly premature. Check out his last three starts combined:

23 IP, 15 H, 4 R, 1 HR, 5 BB, 14 K

In the process he’s dropped his season ERA from 4.97 to 3.46. Of course, I’ll feel better about Mussina once he turns in a solid performance against a team other than the punchless A’s or the last-place Devil Rays, but he certainly is a pleasure to watch right now.

While Moose was cruising the Yanks got out to a 2-0 lead on a first inning home run by Gary Sheffield, who has four homers through the first half of May after hitting just two in April. A 2-RBI triple by Tony Womack (who has a hit in 9 of the Yankees 11 games this month), and two sac flies by Hideki Matsui added four more runs.

In the ninth, Jason Giambi followed lead-off walks by Tino Martinez (who’s homer streak was stopped at five) and Jorge Posada with his first hit since April 28, a single to right which Bobby Kielty misplayed for two extra bases, allowing both baserunners to score. Robinson Cano followed with a double that plated Giambi to put the Yanks up 9-2. Cano was 3 for 4 on the night with a pair of doubles and is now 5 for 7 in his last two games with three doubles. After hitting seemingly ever pitch on the ground to second during his first six or seven games in the majors, Cano is suddenly driving the ball into the gaps with regularity.

Joe Torre went back to the well with Tom Gordon in the eighth despite holding a four-run lead against the worst offense in baseball, but given three more runs to work with in the ninth, finally took Mike Stanton out of mothballs. Understandably, Stanton was rusty, surrendering two runs before he was able to get the third out. Paul Quantrill finished the job. 9-4 Yanks.

Kevin Brown vs. Joe Blanton tonight at 9:05 EST as the Yanks try to make it seven in a row.