There’s not much to say about the Texas Rangers that I didn’t say a week or so ago. Despite getting swept at home by the Bombers, they remain in first place in the AL West (thanks to the Yanks’ just completed 2-1 series win over the second-place A’s), and they’ve made just one roster move, demoting spot-starter Robinson Tejeda in favor of righty reliever Scott Feldman last Monday.

Due to consecutive rainouts in Boston, the Rangers have played just four games since hosting the Yanks, dropping two of three to the visiting Twins before taking the rain-shortened opener in Fenway behind five scoreless innings by Kameron Loe. Adding in a scheduled off day this past Thursday and the Rangers have played just six innings in the last four days.

So, with nothing doing on the other side of the leger, I thought I’d take this opportunity to take a better look at the home town team, as they could use some lookin’ at given the events of the past week.

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No matter how far up you sit in Yankee Stadium, you always have the feeling that you are right on top of the action. On Saturday afternoon, I sat in row W (second to last row) with a great bunch of baseball fans–Mike Carminati, Chris DeRosa, loyal Bronx Banter readers Mike and Murray Markowitz, and their pal Alex. Mike Markowitz took a couple of flicks and in turn, I’d like to share ’em with you.

Check out the top left-hand corner and you can see the Grand Concourse.

Our Field of Dreams

The Gang (from right to left): That’s me, Mike C, Chris DeRosa, Murray and Alex.

The M&M Boys. Talk about taste. And dig the hat Murray’s rocking–it’s fabulously hideous. His wife made him buy it when they were vacationing in Holland.

Yup, these are the kind of Yankee fans I’m proud to have as friends. And yo, I’d rock a Bobby Meachum shirt, or at least a Pasqua or Pags joint any day of the week.

Although it was overcast for most of the weekend–with more rain due throughout the week, we’ve been able to steer clear of the wet weather that cancelled two of the three games in Boston (and shortened another). Saturday turned out to be sunny and breezy, as the Yankees edged the A’s 4-3, on the strength of home runs by Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. Taynon Sturtze appeared and was awful and is now on the disabled list. (Hey, at least he’s been replaced by Scott Erickson!) Kyle Farnsworth wasn’t brilliant, but he was better, and he worked around a critical error by Jeter to save the game by a run.

Randy Johnson’s pitching woes are still here. While he showed signs of improvement on a pink and gray Mother’s Day in the Bronx, Freddie Sez it is clear that Johnson is in the process of working through a career crisis of sorts. A first-ballot Hall of Famer, a dominating force like Johnson just doesn’t transform into Frank Tanana overnight. According to Tyler Kepner in the New York Times:

“A lot of it is probably mechanical,” [pitching coach, Ron] Guidry said, before pointing to his head. “Some of it is probably still up here.”

…”It’s absolutely frustrating to not be pitching the way I’m accustomed to pitching,” said Johnson, who has 268 career victories. “But I’ve been through a lot in my career, and that’s why I appreciate everything I’ve done in my career.

“If everything were easy, it would be easy. Right now is frustrating because I’m not pitching the way I’d like to or even close, and I realize that. Nobody has to tell me that.”

Unfortunately for the Yankees, Oakland’s starter, Danny Haren, was terrific, throwing a complete game. Final score: A’s 6, Yanks 1. The Yanks start the week tied with the Red Sox in first place with the well-rested Rangers team coming into town for a four-game series.

I don’t believe there is such a thing as a must-win game in May, but if ever the Yankees needed to post a W, it was last night. Earlier in the day, Hideki Matsui underwent successful surgery to repair was we now know is a fractured radius (the larger forearm bone on the thumb side of the arm). Matsui had two pins inserted and is expected to miss a minimum of three months, which would mean mid-August at the earliest. The Yankees are operating under the mindset that getting Matsui back this season would be a bonus, rather than a sure thing. With Gary Sheffield still on the DL, the Yankees played Melky Cabrera and Bernie Williams at the corners last night, with Bernie batting fifth and Andy Phillips at first base and batting eighth against the left-handed Barry Zito.

With the A’s similarly, if not more banged up, Zito and Chien-Ming Wang took a scoreless game into the sixth. The only runner to reach third through the first five and a half innings was Phillips, who yanked a one-out single past Bobby Crosby in the fifth, was bunted to second by Cabrera, and pushed to third by walks to Johnny Damon and Derek Jeter. He was stranded when Jason Giambi hit a ball 390 feet to dead center that settled into the glove of Mark Kotsay for the final out of the inning.

Alex Rodriguez broke the tie in the bottom of the sixth with a home run into the Yankee bullpen, his second tie-breaking home run in the last three games. With former Yankee Randy Keisler, who had just replaced Matt Roney on the A’s roster before the game, in for Zito in the eighth, Bernie Williams doubled the Yankee lead with his second homer of the year, both of which have come off lefty pitching.

Thanks in part to some outstanding defense by Robinson Cano and Andy Phillips and a whopping four double plays, Wang had not allowed a runner past first in the first eight innings of the game, holding the A’s scoreless on three hits and a walk and needing just 85 pitches to do it. Still, Joe Torre decided to have Mariano Rivera, who has the flu and had pitched in each of the previous two games and with a four-run lead on Wednesday, close out the game. Three batters into the ninth inning, Rivera had men on first and third with one out, but the Yankees’ fifth double play of the game, a 3-6-3 DP started by Phillips, shut the door, giving the Yanks a much needed 2-0 win.

Today the Yanks send fifth-starter Jaret Wright to the mound to face former Big Red Blog paper . . . er, posterboy Brad Halsey. Wright will be making just his third start of the season, his last coming a week and a half ago in Tampa Bay. Wright has allowed just two runs in his last ten innings pitched and allowed just three hits over six innings to the Devil Rays. That said, there’s nothing to indicate that he has anything other than luck to thank for that run.

Carl Pavano left his rehab start in Trenton last night after throwing just 63 pitches due to tightness in his right bicep, but pitched well, getting through six innings on those 63 tosses, holding the opposition to one run on three hits and no walks while striking out six. Still, Pavano was supposed to throw 90 pitches. He’s scheduled to make his next rehab start on schedule, but one imagines the speed of Pavano’s rehab will be in some way affected by the performance of Wright this afternoon.

As for Halsey, he’ll be making his third start of the year after having spent most of 2005 in the Diamondbacks’ rotation. The Admiral had a 1.42 ERA as the second lefty in the A’s bullpen prior to being forced into the rotation by the injury to his former Yankee teammate Esteban Loaiza. In his two starts since then, he’s looked a lot like he did in pinstripes, lasting into the sixth inning both times, but not cracking the seventh in either, and holding the opposition to three runs on both occasions.

Curiously, the lefty Halsey, who I once thought might have been the answer to the Yankees LOOGY problems and who was murder on lefties in his first two big-league season, has something of a reverse split thus far this year. Still, Torre is sticking with Phillips at first and Bernie (who is hitting .364/.400/.576 against lefties this year) batting fifth. Kelly Stinnett gets the day game after night game start behind the plate, batting eighth behind Phillips and ahead of the left fielder, Melky Cabrera. For the A’s, Eric Chavez and Jason Kendall are back in the line-up, though Chavez will be DHing with Scutaro staying at third.

The A’s are the perfect team for the Yankees to be playing right now. As Ken Arneson wrote earlier today:

Players are dropping like flies, and if you can somehow manage to stand on two feet at all, you’re in the lineup. Kendall is tossed out, Eric Chavez has a bacterial infection, Frank Thomas pulled a quad, Justin Duchscherer has a bad elbow, Joe Kennedy has an muscle strain in his arm, and none of those guys are among the three A’s players currently on the DL.

There are actually four A’s on the DL, though I can understand why Ken might have ignored ex-Yankee Jay Witasick. The other three are Rich Harden–who is quickly earning a reputation as the Mark Prior of the AL, and that ain’t a good thing–the similarly injury-prone Milton Bradley, and former Yankee Esteban Loaiza. And Ken didn’t even mention the fact that closer Huston Street missed a week and a half in late April with a strained right pectoral muscle and currently sports a 6.30 ERA.

As a result, the A’s have Kirk Saarloos and a third ex-Yank, Brad Halsey in their rotation, and–due to Chavez’s illness, Thomas’s injury and Kendall’s suspension–will be limited tonight to a two-man bench of Marco Scutaro and Jeremy Brown and a line-up that looks something like this:

L – Mark Kotsay (CF)
S – Nick Swisher (LF)
R – Bobby Crosby (SS)
L – Dan Johnson (1B)
R – Jay Payton (RF)
S – Bobby Kielty (DH)
S – Adam Melhuse (C)
R – Mark Ellis (2B)
R – Antonio Perez (3B)

Kendall will return to action tomorrow, though whether or not the Yankees will see Chavez or Thomas this weekend is unknown.

Nonetheless, it’s not hard to figure out why A’s are underperforming the expectations that I and many others had for them entering the season, though the fact that they’re at .500 and just a half-game out of first despite all of these interruptions in playing time bodes well for their ability to turn on the jets after returning to health.

Indeed, the Yankees are facing the A’s at exactly the right time. Not only are the A’s a team that’s even more beat up than the Yankees are, but they’re a team that at full strength could very well be the best in the league. Sometimes timing is everything.

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Never mind last night’s loss to the Red Sox. The Yankees have far more pressing issues that a one-game deficit in the standings on May 12. What the Yankees need right now is an outfield as Gary Sheffield and Hideki Matsui are both on the DL with injuries to their left wrists and Johnny Damon is literally banged up, his achy left shoulder and sprained right foot having been aggravated by another collision with the outfield wall last night.

Damon will continue to play through his pains, but a few days at DH would be advisable as the last thing the Yankees can afford right now is to have either of Damon’s ouchies turn into a chronic injury that might effect his offense or availability. That means a Yankee outfield of Melky Cabrera, Bubba Crosby and Bernie Williams might become a common sight over the next couple of series. Gulp. One thing’s for sure, with Matsui and Sheff on the DL and Kevin Reese having been called up to take Matsui’s spot on the roster, those three along with Damon will see the bulk of the playing time in the outfield and at DH.

I’m tempted to say that the time has come for Torre to make Andy Phillips his primary DH, sitting him only to give Damon an occasional break from the field. Certainly a line-up with Phillips at DH, Damon in center, Melky in one corner and a Bernie/Bubba righty/lefty platoon in the other inspires more confidence than what we’re more likely to see, which is Bernie at DH and an outfield of Bubba, Damon and Melky from left to right. But I think I’ve finally given up hoping that Phillips will get his shot. That said, the Yankees will face lefty starters tonight and tomorrow, so there’s a ray of hope.

Barring Joe seeing the light on Andy, here’s what the Yankee line-up will look like for the next week or two:

L – Johnny Damon (CF/DH)
R – Derek Jeter (SS)
L – Jason Giambi (1B)
R – Alex Rodriguez (3B)
S – Jorge Posada (C)
L – Robinson Cano (2B)
S – Bernie Williams (DH/RF)
L – Bubba Crosby (LF/CF)
S – Melky Cabrera (RF/LF)

You can kiss 1,000 runs goodbye.

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Last night I got together with Cliff, Jay Jaffe, Mark Lamster and SI.com’s Jacob Luft for a bite to eat. We caught the game–or at least portions of it–and obviously, it was a devastating night for the home team. Both Cliff and I got home way too late to be able to write a thorough recap of the nights events, which is too bad because it was an absorbing game. The Yanks lost 5-3, with Bernie Williams and Derek Jeter contributing key defensive errors, but the critical moment of the game came early when Hideki Matsui fractured his left hand trying to make a shoestring catch.

Anyone who saw the replay knows how bad the injury instantly looked. It might not have been Joe Theisman/Jason Kendall horrific, but it was painful to watch (oddly enough, it was a night for highlight reel injuries–we must have seen the replay of Philadelphia’s Aaron Rowand crashing into the centerfield fence 58 times). Matsui’s consecutive game streak–which dates back to his days playing Japan–is over (1,768 straight). Godzilla is scheduled to have surgery today and after the game Yankee GM Brian Cashman commented that it is possible that Matsui could be lost for the year. According to Tyler Kepner in the New York Times:

“It’s going to be a long time,” General Manager Brian Cashman said. “Whether we get him back before the season’s over, we won’t know for a while.”

With Gary Sheffield still out, the $64,000 question for the Yankes is who will replace Matsui? The lines are open. What do you think?

Bubba Crosby and Johnny Damon both made outstanding catches at the wall, and it looked as if the Sox were not going to be able to get a break (they stranded 15 on base for the game). Their luck would change however as they took advantage of New York’s fielding mistakes and good pitching from Tim Wakefield, Mike Timlin and Jonathan Papelbon for the win. The Yankees’ fortunes continued to go south. Both Jeter and Williams reached second base in the late innings, making up for their errors, and both were stranded when their teammates could not drive them home. Mariano Rivera allowed a run in the ninth. He was livid with himself when he left a fastball over the plate which Kevin Youkilis drove into center for an RBI single. To make matters worse, Damon hurt his shoulder and right foot when he robbed Doug Mirabelli of extra bases.

In the end, it was a painful night in the Bronx. And losing to the Sox was the least of it.

Well sorta. Tonight’s rubber game will determine the winner of the current-three game series between the Yanks and Red Sox, and will give the winner a one-game lead in the AL East, but if the Yankees win the two teams will be tied overall this season and will even up their head-to-head record since 2002 at 92-92.

The last two nights were opposites in just about every way. Tuesday night was characterized by sloppy play and awful pitching, at least by the home team. Last night was a crisply played and well-pitched game, eight of the ten runs coming on homers, one bad pitch at a time rather than the persistent inability to get hitters out.

Tonight could go either way, though a repeat of last night seems more likely. After a rough start, a pair of ugly relief appearances, and despite a skipped start due to a rainout last week, Shawn Chacon appears to have found his way back to his late 2005 form. In his last three starts he’s done this:

19 2/3 IP, 13 H, 3 R, 0 HR, 9 BB, 12 K, .216 BABIP, 1.12 WHIP, 1.37 ERA, 3-0

The only ugly number there is his walk total and there’s been some recent discussion that Chacon’s walks, which have always been high, are actually part of his pitching strategy. He pitches around dangerous hitters and gets the next man out. That he’s walked more than four men per nine innings but managed to keep his WHIP down supports that theory, which of course requires Shawn to work more of his BABIP magic.

Those three starts have brought Chacon’s season ERA down to 3.94 and pushed his record to 4-1. Indeed, add Chacon to Mussina, the bullpen, and the quest for 1000 runs on the list of reasons why the Yankees are in first place right now despite the complete disintegration of Randy Johnson’s delivery.

Tim Wakefield, meanwhile, has had some hard luck thus far this season, posting a Chacon-like 3.97 ERA and making quality starts in five of his seven turns, but getting just 3.71 runs worth of support per start, resulting in a 2-4 record. Take out his last two starts and that run support drops to just 2.00 runs per game. In his penultimate start, Wake beat the Yanks by holding them to three runs on four hits and three walks over seven innings while Joe Torre’s Jeff Weaver Syndrome handed the Sox the win.

Two of those three hits and two of the three Yankee RBIs in that game came off the bat of Robinson Cano, who is now 5 for 15 in his brief career off the knuckleballer with two doubles, a homer and four RBIs. The only other Yankee hitter with a career OPS above .800 in more than ten at-bats against Wakefield is Gary Sheffield, who is on the 15-day DL. Yes, those 15 at-bats are a ridiculously small sample size, but after years of watching Robbie’s veteran teammates wave at Wake’s knuckler like they’re swinging at houseflies with a rolled up magazine, it’s striking how confident and locked in Cano seems against Timmy’s tumbler.

Bronx Banter Interview: Joel Sherman

This is a tidy year for baseball anniversaries here in New York: Thirty years ago, the Yanks returned to the playoffs for the first time since 1964; twenty years ago, the Mets enjoyed the best season in their organization’s history and won the World Serious, and ten years ago, of course, Joe Torre managed the Yankees to their first Serious victory since 1978. So it is entirely fitting that Joel Sherman’s first book, “The Birth of a Dynasty”–an insider’s account of the 1996 Yankee team–has just been released. Sherman has been a columnist for the New York Post since ’96 and his book is a must-read for both casual and die-hard Yankee fans. I consumed the book in a few days and was excited about how much I learned (I never heard of a six-tool player before, but Ruben Rivera apparently fit the profile).

Sherman took some time out this week to discuss “The Birth of a Dynasty.” Hope you enjoy our chat.

Bronx Banter: You are a veteran baseball writer–first as a beat reporter, then as a columnist. Both of those jobs require different skills, but in both positions you are still working on a deadline and have only a limited amount of space to get your point across. This is your first book. What challenges did you encounter with the new medium? What was the most difficult transition for you, and what did you learn about yourself as a writer?

Joel Sherman: This is an excellent question. My whole temperament is built to be a newspaperman. I am almost a New York stereotype. I like to work quickly and move on to the next thing. The column feeds that. At the New York Post, you work on three deadlines a day. So you are constantly working all day on the days you write and then, boom, you are done. It is in the paper for various editions and you are on to the next day. When you write a book, there is no instant gratification or negative reaction, at all. It is a long-term process and my Brooklyn mindset had a tough time with that. As for what I learned during the process was more something that was re-established in my own mind, which is how much I love to report. The 1996 Yankees were an extremely well covered team and interviewing folks to try to find new information and new avenues to tell these stories really energized me.

BB: Did you enjoy the process?

JS: Mostly no. It was a difficult time for me to take on this process. My wife and I had our first children, our twins Jake and Nick, and trying to research/write as an extra job during first a pregnancy and then the early months of the lives of my children was straining. Also, a relationship with a publishing house is like a brief, shot-gun marriage. You are forced to deal with people for a very short, intense period that you probably would not associate with at other times.

BB: How long did it take to write?

JS: The research and writing took about 18 months, but there was no continuity to it because of the pregnancy. I went long stretches of doing nothing.

BB: It sounds like it was a humbling experience for you, going from the immediate gratification of newspaper writing, to the grind of a longer project. The scope is so much larger as you mentioned. Also, book writing is often a collaborative situation, which means you don’t have as much control as you have been used to. How important were the contributions of your editor–or colleagues who looked at different versions of the manuscript–in terms of helping you compose a dramatic arc for a book as compared with a column?

JS: The publishing house provided very little guidance. But I am blessed with great, talented friends. Mike Vaccaro, a columnist at the Post, was terrific at encouragement. When he was interested or intrigued by a topic, I knew it was a topic to pursue. I wanted to have moments all over the book where even people who follow the team religiously would go, “wow, I didn’t know that.” Mike was fantastic at helping me with that. Lou Rabito, an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I went to school at NYU. Among Lou’s many skills is that he is the best line editor I have ever worked with and he is brutally honest. So he not only cleaned up the copy, but he told me frankly when items did or didn’t work. His touch is on nearly every page of the book. Also, Ken Rosenthal, now of Fox Sports, worked at the Baltimore Sun in 1996 as a columnist. He was in fact, a great columnist. The Orioles were the Yankees’ foil in 1996 and I had Ken read passages about the Orioles just to make sure I was getting them right. He was invaluable, as well. I think the key thing all three did was give me confidence. With no instant gratification, I needed people along the way to tell me, you are going right or you are going wrong. They did that.

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After belting a two-run homer into the upper deck in his first at bat, David Ortiz tapped a single through the right side of the infield with two outs in the top of the third. Had the infield been positioned normally, it would have been an easy out, but Ortiz, who has been slumping of late, generally finds a way when playing at the Stadium (he went 4-4 on the night, yet he only hit the ball hard twice…”just” two times, oy). When Ortiz reached first he shared a smile with Yankee first baseman Jason Giambi, who also sees an extreme shift employed when he bats (Giambi would crank a two-run homer of his own in the bottom of the inning). The scene was notable only because it demonstrates that, with a few exceptions, the players on the Yankees and Red Sox are not engaged in the same kind of rivalry that you see and hear in the stands. Yes, I’m sure the players feed off the intensity of the fans, and the hype in the papers, but this isn’t 1977 and for the most part, you don’t get the feeling that the participants hate one another too tough.

The rivalry has become more about the fans than anything else, and often it brings out the worst in us. The electricity in the crowd–at either Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park–is palpable and that brings an acute tension to almost every pitch, every at bat. I think this is great as you just don’t see the same kind of excitement elsewhere around the majors for a regular season in game. But the downside is that the crowd entertains itself with lewd chants that have nothing to do with the action on the field. The so-called class acts in the Bronx last night spent a good portion of the game riffing how much the Red Sox suck. C’mon now. I just find it pathetic.

But nobody heard boos last night like Alex Rodriguez did after his second at bat. Rodriguez struck out looking (on three pitches) in the first inning, and then popped out weakly to first base the next time up. The boos showered down on the reigning AL MVP. As Mike Lupica notes in a refreshingly sharp column today, “Sometimes the place isn’t nearly as cool as we make it out to be, or want it to be.”

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There’s not much that needs to be said about tonight’s game that can’t be summed up by this chart:

Schilling and Mussina have just one non-quality start between them this year in 14 tries, that being Schilling’s fifth start of the year in which the Indians touched him up for five runs on nine hits and two walks in 6 2/3 innings despite striking out eight times in that span. The Indians, incidentally, currently lead the majors in runs per game, edging the Yankees by less than six one-thousandths of a run.

Baseball Prospectus’s Jim Baker provides a brief history of the three prior head-to-head matchups between these two borderline Hall of Famers, both of whom are improving their chances of enshrinement weekly. He also reminds us that both were both minor leaguers with the Orioles in 1990, Mussina cracking triple-A for the first time that year and Schilling splitting time between starting in triple-A (prior to Mussina’s mid-season promotion) and relieving in the majors in his second of three stops before finding a home with the Phillies.

I wonder if Glenn Davis will be watching tonight.

Steve Lombardi has an revealing post on Alex Rodriguez vs. the Red Sox, and David Pinto has an equally good one on Randy Johnson. Check ’em out.

Here’s what I wrote in anticipation of last night’s game:

Given their performances over the past few weeks, tonight’s match-up of fireballers Randy Johnson and Josh Beckett could be the wildest game of them all. In his last three starts, Beckett has posted this combined line:

16 IP, 16 H, 18 R, 17 ER, 6 HR, 10 BB, 11 K, 9.56 ERA

Meanwhile, in three of his last four starts, Johnson has done this:

15 IP, 22 H, 18 R, 18 ER, 2 HR, 8 BB, 8 K, 10.80 ERA

That’s ugly enough in and of itself, but consider that, despite all of those crooked numbers, the two have combined to go 2-2 in those six games thanks to their offenses, which have scored 15 runs for Beckett and a whopping 32 for Johnson in those three games. That would seem to place the over-under on total runs scored tonight somewhere around 15.

The Yanks and Red Sox combined for 17 runs last night. What I didn’t expect was that the Red Sox scored 14 of them, posting a pair of touchdowns to the Yankees lone field goal.

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Last week’s two-game series in Fenway Park was disappointing as scheduled and became even more so after the second game was rained out. The three-game series that kicks off tonight in the Bronx, however, should make up for it and then some, thanks in large part to some fantastic pitching match-ups. Both teams are skipping a starter due to yesterday’s off day (Wright for the Yankees, Clement for the Red Sox), and the Red Sox fifth starter/place holder Lenny DiNardo started on Sunday, leaving us with the three best starters on each team for this week’s series, the highlight of which, at least on paper, should be tomorrow’s pairing of rejuvenated aces Curt Schilling (5-1, 3.02 ERA, 0.99 WHIP, 45 K, 7 BB, 6 quality starts in 7 games) and Mike Mussina (5-1, 2.35 ERA, 0.98 WHIP, 42 K, 8 BB, quality starts in all 7 games).

Coming into the season one would have thought that Thursday’s matchup of soft-tossers Shawn Chacon and Tim Wakefield would be the most likely of these three games to be a high-scoring shootout, but given their performances over the past few weeks, tonight’s match-up of fireballers Randy Johnson and Josh Beckett could be the wildest game of them all. In his last three starts, Beckett has posted this combined line:

16 IP, 16 H, 18 R, 17 ER, 6 HR, 10 BB, 11 K, 9.56 ERA

Meanwhile, in three of his last four starts, Johnson has done this:

15 IP, 22 H, 18 R, 18 ER, 2 HR, 8 BB, 8 K, 10.80 ERA

That’s ugly enough in and of itself, but consider that, despite all of those crooked numbers, the two have combined to go 2-2 in those six games thanks to their offenses, which have scored 15 runs for Beckett and a whopping 32 for Johnson in those three games. That would seem to place the over-under on total runs scored tonight somewhere around 15.

Incidentally, the Yanks and Sox are still tied for first in the AL East, with the Yanks still ahead by percentage points and a game in the loss column due to having played two fewer games. Both teams have won five of their last six. The Sox have won their last four, the Yanks their last five and seven of their last eight.

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Anything interesting going on this week for the Yanks? Ah, yes, baseball’s version of the WWF returns to the Bronx. In-Your-Face Action! No, it’s not Madden 2006, it’s the most over-hyped rivalry in professional sports. But even with the customary hoopla, there are three fun pitching match-ups to be had in Boston’s first trip to the Stadium this year, starting tonight with Randy Johnson vs. Josh Beckett. Cliff will be round a bit later with a thorough series preview. On a softer note, erstwhile Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez is featured on the front page of the New York Times this morning as a gardner of all things. When he was with Boston, I feared and loathed Martinez. He was an easy villian. But I have to say, in spite of his faults, I can’t continue to hate the guy–I’m a sucker for his charm, his sense of humor and his sense of theater. This article accentuates the sensitive side of Pedro.

While Cliff and I were busy with our lives this weekend, the Yanks took two more from Texas (6-1 on Saturday, 8-5 on Sunday) to extend their winning streak to five games. Hideki Matsui and Alex Rodriguez had strong weekends, while it appears as if Gary Sheffield is headed for the DL. Yesterday’s win was the 1000th of Torre’s Yankee career. But it didn’t come without some tense moments from the usual suspects. Tyler Kepner reports in the Times:

The Yankees’ bullpen has not blown a lead for a starter this season, but Tanyon Sturtze did not help Sunday. He is struggling at a crucial time, because the Yankees may need to find room in their bullpen if Octavio Dotel returns in a few weeks.

It is clear now that Scott Proctor is going nowhere, despite having minor league options. Proctor bailed Sturtze out of a seventh-inning jam after Sturtze walked the leadoff man, threw away a grounder with an off-balance heave to second and walked the No. 9 batter.

“I wanted to wring his neck,” Torre said of Sturtze, referring to the error. “You’ve got to keep in mind the score. He looked like he was trying to get rid of the ball so we can get a double play, but we just needed one out there. He dug himself a hole. Fortunately, Proctor dug him out of it.”

Sturtze, Torre: wringing necks. Does any of this sound familiar to any of our readers?

The Yankees hope to clinch the first of their two series in Texas this year with a far less eventful game tonight than last night’s. The pitching matchup will see Shawn Chacon take on the lone holdover in the Rangers’ rotation, Kameron Loe (though Loe pitched primarily in relief last year, he did do it in a Texas uniform). Chacon’s last start got washed out by rain in Boston. As a result he’ll take the mound tonight on eight day’s rest. Here’s what I wrote in anticipation of Tuesday night’s game in Boston:

After a couple of rough outings and an ugly stint in the bullpen, Chacon has come around in his last two starts working his low BABIP magic to hold the Orioles and Devil Rays to a combined .190 BABIP over 13 1/3 innings that saw just two runs cross the plate. That sort of thing won’t continue, of course, and the Red Sox, even with their diminished offense, are exactly the sort of team in exactly the sort of park in which such a stat is likely to correct itself.

The same could be said of the Rangers and their ballpark, though the Texas hitters are in general a less patient sort, which gives Chacon a little more leeway.

Loe, meanwhile, has alternated good and bad starts over his first five turns. His last start saw him hold the A’s to three runs over six innings. If the pattern holds, the Yanks will do some damange tonight.

Perhaps the hardest part of any manager’s job is managing his bullpen. Some relievers need to pitch regularly to stay sharp. Others need proper rest to avoid fatigue and injury. And there’s often a very fine line between one and the other. But in a pen such as the Yankees’ that has a clear hierarchy of talent, there is one overriding principle. There are high-leverage relievers (Rivera, Farnsworth, Myers against lefties) and low-leverage relievers (Sturtze, Proctor, Villone, Small). The high-leverage guys need to pitch in high-leverage situations (leads of three runs or less, tie games at home or on the road, and, depending on the relative strengths of your offense and the opposing pitching staff, trailing by one or two). The low-leverage guys, meanwhile, are there to eat low-leverage innings, allowing the manager to save the high-leverage guys for when they’re most needed.

Of course, it’s impossible to stick to this formula exactly. Going deep into extra innings will require the use of a low-leverage pitcher in a high-leverage situation, as might playing many tight games in a row. Conversely, participating in a number of blowouts in a row might force a manager to use one of his high-leverage guys in a low-leverage situation just to keep him fresh. Last night was not one of those situations.

Mike Mussina entered the eighth inning with an 8-1 lead having held the Rangers to a run on three hits over seven innings, striking out five, walking none, and needing just 85 pitches, 72 percent of which were strikes, to do it. After Kevin Mench lined Moose’s first pitch of the eight into center for a lead-off single, Joe Torre popped out of the dugout and signaled for Aaron Small.

Fair enough. Sure, Mussina was cruising and a first-pitch single with a seven-run lead hardly amounted to a sign of struggle, but Small had pitched just once since coming off the disabled list on Monday and here was an extreme low-leverage situation in which to get him a couple of innings of work, both for his own good, and so Torre and his staff could have a better idea what Small has to offer now that his surprising 10-0 run is a thing of the past.

Brad Wilkerson hit a sharp grounder through the second base hole into center on Small’s second pitch to put runners on the corners. Rod Barajas then a punched a 1-1 pitch past Derek Jeter to score Mench and push Wilkerson to third. Mark DeRosa followed by grounding into a fielder’s choice to score Wilkerson, and Gary Matthews followed that by singling under the dive of a drawn-in Alex Rodriguez to put runners on first and second for the Rangers who still trailed by five runs.

That brought Torre back out to the mound, but he didn’t call for Sturtze, Villone or Proctor. No, he went straight to Kyle Farnsworth. The very same Kyle Farnsworth who sat and watched as the Yankees lost a tie game on the road in Oakland in the season’s second game. The same Kyle Farnsworth who didn’t get into the next night’s game until after Jaret Wright had allowed the A’s to break another tie in the eighth inning. The very same Kyle Farnsworth who got the night off in Boston on Monday while Small and Tanyon Sturtze allowed the arch rival Red Sox to break another eighth-inning tie. True, Farnsworth was rested, having not pitched on Thursday, but he was not in need of work, having gone an inning and a third in a high-leverage win on Wednesday.

What happened next was not Joe Torre’s fault, but it exacerbated the damage done by going to his high-leverage pitchers in a low-leverage situation.

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“If the guys behind me would have come in and it would have been smooth, nobody would have thought anything of it,” [Mike] Mussina said. “You’ve got to believe those guys can come in and pitch, and they can. Today was the day when it was tough to get through that one inning.” (New York Times)

Yeah, and if Woody had gone straight to the police, none of this would have ever happened…

The Yanks and Rangers played two games on Friday night in Arlington. The first saw Mike Mussina continue his stellar early-season pitching, while the offense patiently beat the bejesus out of the Rangers’ pitching. Alex Rodriguez, dropped to fifth in the order, had two hits, a walk and three RBI–nothing like being back in Texas. The first game ended when Moose allowed a single to open the bottom of the eighth and was relieved by Aaron Small. Certainly Mussina could have continued to pitch, but with a huge lead, it didn’t seem odd that he was pulled.

Then the second game began. The one where the Rangers rallied for six runs against the Bombers’ bullpen in the same eighth inning. Aaron Small, then Kyle Farnsworth and Mariano Rivera were slapped around as the home team pulled to within 8-7. With a runner on first and one out in the ninth, Michael Young hit a hard ground ball to the hole between shortstop and third base. Derek Jeter moved to his right and made a nifty, mid-play adjustment, stabbing at the ball which had taken a late, high hop. There would be no chance to get Young at first; Jeter’s only play was to second. As his body carried him out to left, Jeter spun and fired to second to nab Gary Matthews, Jr by a half a step. It was a fine play and most likely helped save the game for Rivera, who then retired the Rangers’ slumping Mark Teixeira on a well-struck line drive to right to end it. (Rivera’s location was off all night and he was hit relatively hard.)

In a Sports Illustrated poll released earlier this week, Jeter was voted by his fellow-players as the most overrated player in the game. I haven’t mentioned it earlier because this doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know. Jeter makes a lot of money, and has had the good fortune to be the star player on a string of championship teams in New York. He is as over-exposed as a player can get. You could say he’s overrated, but I think if you asked players who the most respected player in the game is, Jeter would find his way to the top of the list too, so you’ve got to take these things with a grain of salt.

I don’t need to argue Jeter’s case–his numbers speak for themselves: the man is a sure-fire Hall of Famer. One thing that I think is interesting is that in the same issue of SI, there is a piece on the Rangers’ Michael Young, talking about what a stand-up guy he is, what an overachiever he’s been. One of his teammates said that if Young played in New York he’d be bigger than Jeter. Now, I don’t know about that, but Young is very much like Jeter–a hard-working gamer.

There is a little blurb in the Young article about the three great shortstops in the American League right now–Miguel Tejada, Michael Young and Derek Jeter. Ten years ago, Jeter was the weakest link in the Rodriguez-Nomar-Trio of great young shortstops. Nomar fell off that list due to injuries a few seasons back, and Rodriguez has shifted positions. But Jeter still remains. I’m not saying he’s better than Tejada or Young, but he’s right up there with them, and if either of those two players are still amongst the best in six, seven years, that’ll be something too, wouldn’t it?

If the Yankees caught the Devil Rays at exactly the right time over the past week and a half, getting off to a 3-1 start in the season series against their nemesis of a year ago while Aubrey Huff, Julio Lugo, and Jorge Cantu languished on the DL, the opposite is true about the six games they’ll play against the Texas Rangers over the next two weeks. As of this afternoon, the Rangers had a half-game lead on the Yankees for the second-best record in the American League, they’re sixth in the AL in runs scored, but just five runs behind the second place Yankees (the Indians lead by a bunch), and fifth in the AL in ERA with a 4.21.

It’s that team ERA that is the big news here. The Rangers pitching has been awful for years, and the primary reason their crop of young hitters has been unable to take the team into the playoffs. In 2001 and 2003 the Rangers were dead last in the AL in team ERA and they were in the bottom three in 2002. In 2004 they lept into the top half of the league on the strength of a fluke season by their bullpen, which posted the third best pen ERA in the majors, but their starters still struggled, posting a 5.16 mark, leaving few leads to be protected. Last year, their pen crashed back to earth and the Rangers once again finished among the worst three teams in the majors in team ERA.

This year, the Rangers rotation features just one pitcher who was with the team last year, and he, 24-year-old Kameron Loe, pitched primarily in relief in 2005. Loe’s 4.15 ERA stands as the worst of the five men currently in the Texas rotation. While big trade acquisition Adam Eaton languishes on the 60-day DL following surgery on the middle finger in his pitching hand (he’s due back in August), Loe, late-March acquisition John Koronka (25) and veteran free agents and former Phillies Vincente Padilla and Kevin Millwood have combined to record 14 quality starts in 24 tries. Meanwhile, Robinson Tejeda, who is younger than Loe (having just turned 24), and a more recent Phillie than Padilla, and more recent acquisition than Koronka, held the Devil Rays to three hits over five innings in his first start of the year on Tuesday. Other spot starters and new acquisitions Rick Bauer and John Rheinecker have also turned in solid, if abbreviated starts, with only famiar face R.A. Dickey, since dropped from the 40-man roster, stinking up the joint.

Things have been only slightly less encouraging in the bullpen, where Francisco Cordero has lost the closer job he’s held for the past several seasons, but Akinori Otsuka, who came over in the Eaton trade, has picked up the slack, posting a 1.98 ERA and a 0.95 WHIP in 13 2/3 innings. No one else has been quite that dominant, but only another member of last year’s staff, lefty C.J. Wilson, has been truly bad.

Back on the other side of the ball, the few Rangers hitters who didn’t get off to hot starts have heated up in past weeks including Brad Wilkerson, the key player in the Alfonso Soriano deal, and Kevin Mench, who–as the Yankee broadcasters are sure to tell you far too many times over the next three days–discovered his shoes were a size to small and has been hitting the cover off the ball ever since he fixed his footwear. Most notably, Mench fell one game shy of Don Mattingly’s shared record for most consecutive games with a homer (the record is eight, shared with Griffey Jr. and Dale Long, Mench hit homers in seven straight).

The good news is that the Yankees have Mike Mussina on the mound tonight and Gary Sheffield back in the lineup to get things off on the right, properly outfitted foot. Moose’s opponent will be Vincente Padilla, a borderline All-Star for the Phillies in 2002 who posted similar numbers in 2003 before a pair of disappointing and injury-shortened seasons in 2004 and 2006. Still just 28, Padilla looks to be reestablishing himself as a solid mid-rotation starter, having failed to record an out in the sixth inning just once in six starts, and lasting through five in that exception. Padilla had one dominant outing against the Mariners two turns ago (7 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 HR, 3 BB, 7 K), which was immediatley preceeded by that stinker in Oakland (5 IP, 8 H, 5 R, 4 HR). His other four starts have fallen in between those two extremes, though curiously he hasn’t given up any other home runs in those four other starts.

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