I’ve never been to Fenway, but I have driven past it a couple of times.  It does seem awfully close to the road, and I can’t really imagine parking my car too close to it, considering the propensity for balls flying out of it is probably higher than the Green Monster itself.  Ask Shane Greene. Mike Napoli hit the crap out of one of his offerings and nearly caught a windshield in the third inning, giving the Sox a 2-0 lead in the second inning, and a third run came in by the end of the inning. I’m guessing this was another one that seemed to have “oh well, let me mow the lawn” written all over it, except that Boston’s pitcher Allen Webster wasn’t really all that good as he promptly gave up the lead the next inning, starting  with three straight walks.  After a visit to the mound to exchange recipes, Jeter dinked a double to right field, pushing in two. Ellsbury followed with a run-soring ground out, and you’d think it was pretty much over after Teix grounded out, but it only got better for the Yanks as Beltran (getting his second wind, no doubt) singled and scored Jeter from third. Two walks later and Mr. Webster took his dictionary to the showers. Such is life in the big leagues.

Oh, and remember that long home run Napoli hit in the second? In the fifth, Teix said, “that’s nothing” and smacked one over the wall just a few feet less, but just as impressive as it flew over Lansdowne Street and bounded past parked cars and rolled to a stop, pondering the realities of life in the big leagues; maybe took stock in what just happened and thought about its next step in its career. That and in the seventh switch-teamer Stephen Drew doubled in Beltran to add another insurance run, which was good because the Sox tried hard to mount a comeback after that, but only managed to get one of the runs back on an Ortiz sac fly off of Betances in the bottom of the inning that was charged to Adam Warren.  But other than that, it was a bullpen win as Shawn Kelley ended up with the win and Betances and David Robertson nailed down the last two innings respectively.

So in essence, the Yanks smacked back at the Sox with this one 6-4, and look to claim the series before heading home to deal with the Tigers and their new addition to the rotation (but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?)

AB: I know I should be above it, I know not to expect too much from this team, but when they lose to the Red Sox, I’m 8 years old again, more upset than I really should be. (censored, LOL)

CW: It just seemed inevitable. Between the combination of mediocre and under-performing talent with Girardi’s bemusing insistence on managing by the numbers, I feel almost drained following them this season.

Which is really worse when you put it into the context of professional sports? A bad team in a weak division that commits seppuku at the trade deadline with an eye towards resurrecting itself in the near future or a mediocre team in the same division that makes small moves to keep itself going and hope it can overtake the other weak teams? I can’t help but get philosophical as Alex and I bantered about the effects this rivalry has on fans who have been following two teams that have been slow since last winter (even though one had just won the Whirled Serious a couple of months before).

It was journeyman thirty-something  Chris Capuano for the visiting Yanks facing twenty-something rookie Anthony Renaudo for the home team. That’s right; no Lester, no Lackey, not even a Dubront or anyone we would have heard of this season for Boston (except for Clay Buchholz; who like our own Hiroki Kuroda is the last man standing in the rotation, although for entirely different reasons), and considering how the Yanks have lost four-fifths of it’s starting rotation to injury and replaced it with spit, gristle and a little bit of luck, we’re really in no position to talk. Capuano himself had been purchased from the Colorado Rockies’ farm system; having signed with the organization three days after being dumped from the team he was about to face.  His younger counterpart, born and raised in Freehold, NJ (home of The Boss, Bruce Springsteen) was making his major league debut. You know what that means…

AB: I only get drained when I expect more than is reasonable…like any time they play the Red Sox. But I suppose I really want them to make the second wild card so that Jeter’s final game isn’t at Fenway Park. Then again, would that be worse than flying to Anaheim and getting trounced in a one game playoff game? At least the Sox fans will appreciate DJ properly.

CW:Exactly; it’s more discouraging to me when they make the playoffs and get wiped out because it prevents them from getting a better pick (crucial when you consider how close they were to getting Mike Trout) and gives them the false impression that they are better than they are constructed.

Though a valiant second wind from the likes of Brett Gardner, having a career year with heretofore unrealized and hopefully unplugged power, not to mention a surprise appearance of contribution from Carlos Beltran and a big pop from The Captain, the Yanks were simply not capable of overcoming their Achilles Heel: The Unheralded Rookie Pitcher.  Couple that with some mishaps from Ichiro in right that turned a single into a double and let runners get into scoring position, cashed in by the actual hitters in the Sox lineup, and you had the makings of a frustrating night.  It did get somewhat interesting when Junichi Tazawa gave up a booming shot to Jeter over the Monster to bring the game close, but Ellsbury’s shot to deep center was grabbed by the fleet-footed Mookie Betts, a converted second baseman playing center who made an awkward leaping catch that will inevitably be played over and over again in yearly highlights. It was an important grab because Tazawa was hit hard that inning, and had Ellsbury been on base he would have scored and tied the game. Such is the luck of the Yanks this season. Sox closer Koji Uehara relieved the otherwise ineffective Tazawa and shut down the Yanks.

AB: Right. Whom do you prefer, the A’s or Tigers? No who do you think will win but who’d you root for? Or would you pull for the O’s to upset them?

 CW: I think the Tigers would win, but I’d be rooting for the A’s. I can’t root for the Peter AngelO’s.  Plus Buck has gotten to be more of an ass as he ages. If you don’t mind, I’m going to incorporate this conversation into the recap 🙂

 AB:  Sure thing. Just don’t mention that (redacted, blah blah blah, none of your business)

CW: Copy that.

Yanks lose 4-3…

The Red Sox are done for the year but they play the Yanks 9 more times and could be a pain in the ass. Yeah, their starting pitching is thin this weekend but then you look and see the Yanks counter with Capuano, Greene, and Phelps and nothing feels certain.

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Carlos Beltran DH
Brian McCann C
Chase Headley 3B
Stephen Drew 2B
Ichiro Suzuki RF

Ah, never mind the pessimism:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Jo Ann Callis via Magnificent Ruin]

At 2:00 p.m. yesterday, David Price was at Tropicana Field throwing. I saw footage of it last night and wondered if he was out there out of routine or to say farewell to the only professional team he’s ever played for. According to Marc Topkin:

Price has been pitching for weeks knowing a trade was possible. But he had hoped, even Thursday, when he went to play golf and swung by the Trop for a workout, that it wasn’t going to happen.

“It’s tough to put into words,” he told the Tampa Bay Times. “There’s absolute sadness. This is where I’ve been the last seven years. I love the guys, I love being here. It’s different.”

I also saw a clip of Austin Jackson being called off the field in the middle of an inning, hugging teammates in the dugout. Four-and-a-half years with the Tigers and goodbye. Then I saw this article linked over at Hardball Talk.

Yeah, I know this is just business–it’s Chinatown, Jake–but I couldn’t help but feel for the sense of loss these men–and their former teammates, not to mention fans–were experiencing.

Must feel unreal.

[Photo Credit: Yash Dravid via It’s a Long Season]

Lester and Gomes to the A’s for Cespedes. Billy Beane going all in. Sounds like a good deal for the Sox, too.

Wow.

Brett “The Constant” Gardner hit a long home run to lead off the game last night and a few innings later Jacoby Ellsbury hit a solo home run. That brought the  Yanks to within a run of the Rangers, who scored 3 times in the first inning against our man Hiroki. But the Yankees didn’t get a man on base after the 3rd inning and even with Kuroda pitching 7 durable innings, that’s just no way to win a ball game, now is it?

Final Score: Rangers 3, Yanks 2.

Former President George W. Bush was on hand before the game as part of the Rangers’ farewell ceremony for Derek Jeter. Watching the former President standing next to Jeter was amusing. Jeter looked completely at ease. Not presidential, exactly, but a Duke in his domain for sure.

The Yanks received mercy from the Rangers and the Gods yesterday. Let’s hope they leave Texas tonight with a nice, professional series win. And who is more of a pro than our man Hiroki?

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Carlos Beltran DH
Chase Headley 3B
Francisco Cervelli C
Zoilo Almonte RF
Brendan Ryan 2B

Never mind the deadline:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Bags]

Trade, anyone?

Latest has Lester going to the O’s. Dag!

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

From our pals at the ever-great site, Cinephilia and Beyond, comes Michael Chapman talking about the use of slow motion in Raging Bull:

We were pretty precise about what we wanted and we had all sorts of rules, you know, the actual boxing would all be at 24 frames, but other times it could be other… when it wasn’t just the boxing, or there’s some famous shots where it’s in 24 frames, and then you go to 48 frames while Jake walks away in the neutral corner and he’s breathing, and he comes back to 24 frames when he’s going to fight again, but it’s all in one shot, and we did… that was okay, because he wasn’t actually boxing when he went to 48 frames, and we did it with a… really just by hand, and now you can coordinate that and punch it in, but in those days you did it by listening to the sound of the camera changes — speed changing and then opening and closing the diaphragm in… in relation to the change of the speed. But guys just did it by hand; we did it two or three times and it worked out. If you don’t do it right, of course, it… you know, it gets all buggered up. We did it I think every time and it worked out all right, and then occasionally when he’s in the corner, and they’re pouring water over him, we would go to a really 96 or 120 frames and… and really be outrageous, but when they were boxing we made sure they were always 24, except I think like all rules we broke them a little bit in the end, but, anyway, we had very elaborate rules and very elaborate methodology that we worked on all the way through the movie.

Damn those Yankees for spoiling what I thought to be a perfectly good headline: The Constant Gardner. Ol’ Brett is fire right now so I wanted to pay tribute to that. But then the game got in the way, an old-fashioned, tedious, and seemingly endless American League slugfest, that came down to the final pitch. Well, Gardner figured into that, too, when he caught Adrian Beltre’s fly ball to end the game.

I don’t know about you, but from where I was sitting, I thought the ball was going over the fence for a game-winning home run.

The Yanks had a big fat lead but the Rangers scored 7 runs in the last 3 innings and made us more than somewhat uncomfortable. J.P. Arencibia, a reincarnation of Pete Incaviglia, turned around a 97 mph fastball–above the waist!–from Dellin Betances for a grand slam in the 7th. Thank goodness for Mark Teixeira’s 2-run home run in the 8th because the Rangers made things sweaty in their final turn at bat. They scored twice and had the bases loaded again, David Robertson on the ropes. Course the count went full against Beltre before he flew out to Gardner to end the game.

For those of us who watched the whole thing, we earned that one, eh?

Hey, the win is the thing.

Final Score: Yanks 12, Rangers 11. 

[Photo Via: Toilet Wolf]

Go git ’em, fellers.

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Carlos Beltran DH
Brian McCann C
Chase Headley 3B
Zoilo Almonte RF
Brendan Ryan 2B

Never mind last night:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: William Eggleston]

The Yankees swept through Texas on the way to World Championships in 1998 and 1999. When they faced off in the Division Series, each squad featured a team OPS of over .819. They were two of the better hitting teams in a juiced-up era.

In last night’s game, each lineup featured exactly one player who can top the team OPS of 15 years ago – Beltre for the Rangers and, here we have to cheat a little bit, Cervelli in a limited roll for the Yanks. If we don’t get to cheat, then the Yanks top starter was Brett Gardner, though his .789 OPS is well short of what the 1999 Yanks could do.

No player is better-suited to thrive in today’s game than Brett Gardner. A glove-first speedster who could get on base a little but couldn’t hit it out of the infield, he’d never have made it on the field in the late 90s. The Yanks weren’t sure how to account for stellar defense and weren’t too sure how much it was worth to them anyway. In recent years, even powerless, Gardner became one of the Yankees’ better players. In 2014, reaching a dozen homers while the calendar still says July, he’s added enough power to his game to be a star and the Yankees MVP. And a rarity – a very good contract.

The Yankees were very fortunate to have him last night, as he got them on the scoreboard and gave them a real chance to win with two solo homers. He now has four career homers off Yu Darvish which strikes me as near-impossible. But David Phelps couldn’t retire J.P. Arencibia when it mattered most and lost the game 4-2. J.P. Arencibia is hitting .153 and getting on base at a .198 clip. He’s indistinguishable from a statue except the statue would probably take more walks. Phelps allowed all four runs on two-out hits in the fifth.

The Yankees threatened a couple of times and really handled Darvish as well as you can possibly expect them to, but they could never get the meaningful hit with men on base. When Darvish attacked McCann with a 91 MPH heat-seeker aimed at his back leg in the seventh, it was like watching Mariano’s cutter gone feral. McCann struck out of course, but the pitch just kept boring in past the point of recognition and carved out a unique-looking trajectory.

***

The last batter of the game was Derek Jeter and he stung a one-hopper to short but Andrus handled it easily. That put an end to one of Jeter’s best games of the year. Three hits and a walk. One of them a double!

The third hit, a perfectly executed hit-and-run before the McCann whiff in the seventh, was his 3420th and sent Jeter past Carl Yastrzemski into seventh place by his lonesome on the all-time hit list (according to Elias and MLB.com). Honus Wagner is up next, 10 hits away, and that’s as far as Jeter can get this year. He’d need another 94 hits in the Yankees remaining 57 games to catch Tris Speaker for the fifth spot.

I watched each of Jeter’s at bats with an enthusiasm I have not been able to muster since Masahiro Tanaka got hurt. I wish there were a few more doubles sprinkled into Jeter’s season, but otherwise, he’s had a very enjoyable year and I look forward to the last two months. I would not be surprised at all if his batting average keeps creeping up towards .300, like in 2008 when the Yanks season was crap and the stadium was closing and he rallied the fans around his pursuit of the previously obscure Stadium hit record.

Image from simpsonswiki.com

In order to avoid a 3-game losing streak, the Yanks will have to beat the Rangers on a night when Yu Darvish starts. They escaped trouble with Darvish last week thanks to a rainstorm. They’ll need old fashioned things–like hits and runs to best him tonight.

Brett Gardner CF
Derek Jeter SS
Brian McCann 1B
Carlos Beltran DH
Chase Headley 3B
Francisco Cervelli C
Brian Roberts 2B
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Zoilo Almonte LF

Never mind the two-step:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: r2-d2]

In the winter of 1997 I was in L.A. on a job. I invited a woman to see a Buster Keaton movie at a place called Old Town Music Hall. She stood me up, but I went anyway and had one of the greatest nights of my life. I recently visited L.A. and went back to see another Buster movie at the Music Hall. Good to know such a place exists, you know?

So I was thrilled to see this movie posted over at This Must Be The Place (via Kottke).

[Photo Credit: Ambitus Orchestra]

Head on over to the Stacks and check out my tribute to Roger Angell.

[Photo Credit: John Weiss]

The Yanks lost a close one yesterday, 5-4, which makes two close ones in a row to the Jays. Still, they were 8-3 on the home stand and something else happened to–the Yanks showed some character. I like this team. They aren’t the greatest, they’ve got flaws (boy, they could use a second baseman), they can be sloppy at times, but they have some toughness, too.

So the Jays finally beat the Yanks at the Stadium. Fine, now that we’ve got that out of the way:

Gardner LF

Jeter SS

Ellsbury CF

Beltran DH

McCann 1B

Headley 3B

Cervelli C

Wheeler RF

Ryan 2B

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Bags]

Warm n muggy in the Bronx.

Ball should flying around today. Chris Capuano makes his Yankee debut:

Gardner LF

Jeter SS

Ellsbury CF

Beltran DH

McCann 1B

Headley 3B

Suzuki RF

Roberts 2B

Cervelli C

Never mind the humidity:

Let’s Go Yank-ees

[Picture by Bags]

I went to the game last night with The Wife and some friends. Boy, it was a good time. Yanks are on a little roll here and why not enjoy it while it lasts, right?

One thing came to mind…In the first inning Jose Bautista hit a 3-run home run on a 3-0 pitch. Now, it was the first inning so I know, contextually, there are other home runs that would be more important–late in the game, a game-winner, in a playoff game. Still, I wonder if anything feels so good as not only getting a hit on a 3-0 pitch but hitting the Bejesus out of the ball.

‘Nother weird thing was Francisco Cervelli hit a ball, just foul down the third base line and on the next pitch hit one just fair down the third base line. When does that happen?

Our pal Ichi hit his first homer of the year, Hiroki kept them in the game and the bullpen does what it do.

Final Score: Yanks 6, Jays 4.

[Photo Credit: Bill Kostroun, AP]

Appealing match-up of starting pitchers tonight: Buehrle vs our man Hiroki.

Gardner LF

Jeter SS

Ellsbury CF

Beltran DH

McCann 1B

Headley 3B

Suzuki RF

Roberts 2B

Cervelli C

Never mind the traffic:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Bags]