Don’t worry…’bout a thing.

[Photo Credit: Bags]

It was the fifth inning and the Yankees were in trouble. CC Sabathia had protected a 1-0 lead since the second (in itself a minor miracle) but that lead was history. The Rays now led 2-1, had the bases loaded, and, if the root canal wasn’t painful enough sir, here’s a kick in the shin with a steel-tipped boot: Evan Longoria was at the plate with nobody out.

Sabathia threw a tub of junk at him and up 0-2 in the count, got Longoria to bounce to third. Alex Rodriguez, whose leather was strong and supple in all the right places tonight, charged. He had everything in front of him: the ball, the third base bag, the runner racing home and Longoria breaking for first. He had a fraction of a second to decide what to do and three options, none of them perfect.

He could fire home and prevent the run from scoring. That would keep the score 2-1, and with David Price on the mound for the Rays, every run is precious. But the bases would still be loaded and there’d only be one out. He could step on third and sling the ball across the diamond hoping for a double play. He’d concede a run but he’d give Sabathia the chance to end the inning with an out. Or he could step on third and still try to cut the run off at the plate. The degree of difficulty on that play is absurd. The runner might beat the throw home anyway, and to make a perfect throw, on the run, with no angle… and the catcher still has to block the plate and make the tag.

Alex chose the 5-3 double play and I immediately thought two things: 1) Good for you Alex. You are showing belief in your team that you can score a couple of more runs in this game. 2) The Yankees probably just lost this game.

The Yankees never did take the lead again, but it would be inaccurate to say they lost the game there in the fifth. No, the Yanks had some runs in their tank tonight. Curtis Granderson homered off David Price. Eduardo Nunez ripped a single off the leg of third base umpire Jerry Meals. The bad news is that it was clearly going to be a double. The good news is that it hurt. The bad news outweighed the good news unfortunately, because had the inning played out the same way with Nunez starting at second, he scores the tying run. As it was, he was rounding third when Elliot Johnson dove to snag Arod’s dribbler. It was ticketed for right field, but the ball was in no hurry to get there.

The Rays padded their lead in an especially disheartening fashion. CC Sabathia, if you remember from opening day, is supposed to have some kind of Jedi mind trick in place when pitching to Carlos Pena. Pena drew a crucial walk in the three-run fifth and led off the seventh with an infield single. Neither was as loud as the grand slam from April 6th, but CC’s inabilty to retire Pena was a big part of another loss.

Elliot Johnson tried to bunt Pena to second, only CC jumped on the bunt and erased the lead runner. Yay. Johnson stole second and scored by a whisker on a two out single to center. Fuck. Pena would never have scored on that hit. B.J. Upton hit a tall homer in the eighth. It was 5-2 and all those close decisions that would have made this an agonizing loss didn’t seem to matter so much.

Then Derek jeter pounded a single into the right field corner and Alex Rodriguez hit a vintage 2007-era blast to left and made the score 5-4. Oh it’s an agonizing loss again, that’s better. The Rays turned a bloop, a steal and an ghastly error by Nunez into an unnecessary insurance run and made the final score 6-4.

In the seventh, Ben Zobrist squared up a high fastball right down the middle from Sabathia and stroked a blue dart back through the box. It was a bad pitch, but Zobrist didn’t miss it. He also didn’t try to do too much with the high heat. The Rays scored a vital run with two outs. In the eighth, Curtis Granderson tapped a grounder to second with two outs and the tying run on second and go-ahead run on first. It was a lousy swing, but it was also an excellent pitch, a strike, but low and away where Granderson couldn’t get good wood to it. The Rays got the vital out and protected their slim lead.

It’s not that simple, but it’s not that complicated either.

The Yankees have not won a game that they have trailed in the eighth inning (or later) all year long. This wouldn’t matter so much except that they’re behind in the eighth and ninth almost every night these days. Tonight they trailed 6-1 with two outs in the top of the eighth and looked deader than disco. Alex Rodriguez stroked a double. Eric Chavez and Russell Martin worked gutsy walks around an RBI single from Curtis Granderson. Pinch hitter Chris Dickerson faced the erratic Pedro Strop with the bases loaded and took four straight balls to push the tying run to second. Ichiro Suzuki bounced a game-tying single to right.

The Yankees had just completed their most important comeback of the season and sent out the best of their bullpen in the bottom of the eighth. David Robertson quickly got ahead of Adam Jones 0-2 and went for the kill with his great curveball. But that pitch is gone. When he attempted to throw it to Jones, it slipped out of his hand and he nearly plunked him in the noggin. I thought he needed to go right back to curve because a) no way Jones is looking for a curve when he just gagged one so badly, and b) might as well see if he’s got any feel for it whatsoever for the rest of the outing. Instead Martin called for a fastball up out of the strike zone. Robertson put it on a fucking tee. I threw batting practice for fifty kids today, mostly underhand, and I didn’t throw a pitch that hittable.

After Adam Jones homered, Robertson kept sucking. He let up a single and another homer before he spun dizzily into the showers. In a show of solidarity, Boone Logan let up another homer as soon as he got in there. Robertson’s stats aren’t as good as last year, but I don’t think we had any business expecting that kind of year again. He’s still been pretty good. It’s his timing that has been so shitty. Robertson’s 4-0 record last year has turned into a 1-6 tally this year. That swing in the standings has been crippling for the Yankees.

In the fourth inning of this game, when I finally tuned in, David Phelps allowed the first three batters of the inning to hit the ball a combined 1200 feet. It was just dumb luck that two of them ended up as outs. The third was a homer by Robert Andino which made the score 5-1 and officially designated Phelps outing as “dogshit.”

The Yankees have played the Orioles four times recently, with the division title clearly on the line, and the Orioles would have swept all four if Pedro Strop could throw a few strikes. Even with Strop screwing things up for them, the Orioles have kicked the Yankees asses in three of the four games. They crushed three homers tonight on their way to an easy win. Strop made things complicated, so they smacked three more to win comfortably, 10-6.

The Orioles have looked the bully in the eye and found out he’s not so tough. The Orioles are playing great baseball and I can’t think of any reason why they would stop. I’m usually ok with the phrase “may the best team win.” But the best team is usually the Yankees.

Every opening I came up with for tonight’s 5-2 loss to the Rays was depressing and cheap. The Yanks have played poorly, blown a big divisional lead and I was ticked. But I stopped myself and tried again. I remembered this isn’t the finish line.

If this collapse coincided with the end of the season, like it did for the Red Sox and Braves last year, then we could thrash and roll about all night. However, there are 27 games left and it’s now a flat-footed tie with Orioles. If they come up short in this sprint, we’ll have plenty of time to hash out why they weren’t good enough this year. In the meantime, maybe they’ll get mad, play well and win.

We don’t know if it will happen that way, and by the look of things, the chances aren’t that great. But it could and we should keep watching and hoping like the fans of the other, less pre-destined, teams.

I didn’t come to this outlook on my own. I woke up this morning to mouse clicks followed by a small voice repeating “Yes!” I figured my son was at the computer checking baseball scores, just down the hall from my room. The problem with that is I knew that the Pirates lost yesterday afternoon and I knew my son knew this, too. I pulled myself out of bed to see what he was celebrating. He sat there dangling his feet and grinning like he just heard about Cookie Crisp cereal. I pulled up over his shoulder and asked him what he was doing.

“Checking out the olden days,” he said. He had clicked all the way back to June. The Pirates won a lot of games in June, so he was thrilled. It didn’t seem pathetic either, like it is when I hole up with Baseball-Reference.com and swaddle myself in past glory each time the Yankees get bounced from the Postseason. I think he just wanted to see the whole picture of the season rather than dwell on their most recent disappointment.

The 2012 Yankee team has access to something better than this. There are some guys that could play better and some guys that could get healthy. If it all happens that way, I think they’re the best team over the last 27 games and I hope their records indicates that. If it doesn’t, well, my son wouldn’t mind if we joined him rooting for the Pirates.

As for the game I have only one thought. After the Yanks went down 3-2 in the third, they sent 21 batters to the plate for the rest of the game. Three over the minimum over the final six innings. I am sure some will credit the Rays pitcher Alex Cobb with grabbing the lead and not letting it go. And some will blame the Yanks hitters for tightening up and failing to execute when they fell behind. I don’t know which is correct, so I hope the Yanks load up on both lead-holding and come-backing for these last 27 games. Find out where the O’s and Rays are shopping.

The stillness of New York at the end of the summer.

And a passage from E.B. White’s Here is New York:

“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something…Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. ”

Picture by Bags. 

Yankee ace CC Sabathia had two runs in one pocket and a ray of sunshine in the other. He didn’t have the world’s greatest defensive performance behind him, but the runs and the sunshine should have been enough against the lowly Blue Jays. It wasn’t nearly. The Jays beat the Yanks 8-5, took the series, and if you watched all the games without knowing the standings, you’d be shocked to learn that the Yankees were on top and the Jays were on the bottom.

I was at the game with my family and for two innings, we lived the ideal day at the ball park. Unobstructed views for the wee ones, shade, and the Yankees kicking ass. I noted it, but I should have savored it. My kids began melting down approximately five minutes before Sabathia did and it never really got any better. We ended up leaving the stadium in storm of tears, trailing by a run in the seventh.

By the time we got home, my kids had straightened things out, but the Yankees never did get it together. I didn’t properly appreciate the Yankees 2-1 win yesterday. In the face of this series chucking loss, the 2-1 win seems like an oasis of pleasure.

Losses on TV make me want to spill a thousand words. Losses in person just make me shrug my shoulders. It’s so obviously a game of action and execution when you watch it live. It’s not the scripted drama I tend to make it when I watch on TV.

Can’t say much for this series except the Blue Jays clearly outplayed the Yankees and deserved their two wins. The Yankees will be in first place for several more days at least. It could stretch for the rest of season. Despite the evidence on the field lately, I think it will.

Photo by Rich Schultz/AP

The Yankees won a taut, low-scoring affair with a big performance by a starting pitcher, some good defense and a solid bullpen. As long as you don’t have to answer any follow up questions, that’s our story for this game, OK? The Yanks can win close ones. All is well, everything will be OK from this point on, yada, yada. This 2-1
victory over the Blue Jays was the huge sigh of relief that the team needed after Monday’s disappointment. Got it?

Phil Hughes was good for the second straight game – a Yankee-Stadium-Special his only blemish. Never mind that he was up 1-2 on the hitter, and that the hitter was someone named Adeiny Hechavarria, who may or may not have discovered the silent “V”. It was Hechavarria’s first career home run, though I wonder if he’ll be fined in Kangaroo court for smiling – I’m not sure opposing batters are allowed count Hughes and Nova homers for personal milestones.

The Yankee offense jumped out to an early lead, that’s good right? Should it matter that the pitcher the Blue Jays sent against them is so lost this year he’s walked 5.1 batters per nine innings? He walked eight Tigers in his last start. He shut the Yanks down for seven innings.

But that’s not the whole story, because for Ricky Romero to have a shut-down game this year, something else must be at work. And yeah, there it is, the Yankees had recent re-acquisition Steve Pearce batting cleanup. Russell Martin batted fifth. Russell Martin, who may not be the fifth best hitting catcher in the Yankee system, was the fifth best hitter the Yanks could send out there tonight.

The game threatened to tilt in a tricky sixth inning, but the quick reactions of Robinson Cano saved the day. De-Fense, that’s important, right? Hughes walked the first two hitters and Adam Lind tried to order another Special, but the kitchen was all out of meatballs. He skied it to the wall in the right field corner. The tying run moved to third with one out. Yunel Escobar stung one Willie-McCovey style right to second. Cano snared and fired to third to catch Rasmus dancing by himself. The double play balm soothed those nagging doubts that began to appear.

If someone does start asking follow-up questions, like “why was that game against that pathetic team so damn close?” Or  “can you imagine a team like the Yankees fielded tonight winning many future games?” you just say, “how about that Red Sox trade?” And cross your fingers.

Photo by Jeff Zelevansky/Getty

It’s dead in town this week. August dead in New York City is a beautiful thing. Only a few days left.  Summer is almost over.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

[Pictures by Bags]

Love and Happiness Loop (Monty Alexander)

[Photo Credit: Bags]

Bartolo Colon, you’re up. Who will be next?

[Picture by Bags]

What’s the last book you bought on the street? I can’t remember myself, but I know I picked something up this spring. My cousin found a copy of Pauline Kael’s State of the Art on a brownstone stoop near his home in Brooklyn earlier this year and sent it to me. Twenty minutes after he found it a thunder storm hit. Book would have been ruined. I’m glad it’s got a good home here in the Bronx.

[Picture by Bags]

Derek Jeter jumped the first pitch of the game like a spring-loaded mouse trap. It was a fastball, of the let’s-get-ahead-in-the-count variety from Francisco Liriano, and by the time Jeter’s bat sprung through the strike zone, all that was left was a bloody stump. The ball sliced through the twilight and cleared the fence with ease. I worried that the game had just yielded it’s marquee moment, making the prospect of the ensuing nine innings rather daunting.

Derek Jeter’s resurgence has been well noted around these parts and much of our focus as been on the future. How many more hits can he get? How many more contracts? It’s been the best part of the season. Well here’s something encouraging: In Derek Jeter’s career from 1998-2009, he slugged under .400 in two consecutive months just three times (September 2003-April 2004, May-June 2006, April-May 2008). From May 2010 to June 2011, Derek Jeter has slugged under .400 for eight consecutive months. In the last eight months of play, he’s been over .400 six times.

I don’t mean to say we should expect vintage Jeter for any extended period of time, but at least we can guess that the Ceti-eel that crawled into his aural canal, wrapped itself around his cerebellum and sapped his strength for 2010 and half of 2011 has died and been expelled. Probably through the nasal cavity with a mess of blood and pus. If Jeter stops hitting for power in 2013, we’ll know it laid eggs.

About the other nine innings… I don’t want to alarm you, but Ivan Nova let up a few extra base hits. A double and a triple. A solo homer. A grand slam. That’s another thing that’s so encouraging about Jeter’s re-found power, he’s slugging over .400 without the benefit of facing Ivan Nova. Nova has allowed the most extra base hits in the league and watching him pitch several times this year, I’m not going to bother fact-checking that statement. It just reeks of truthiness.

Francisco Liriano matched up with an umpire that wouldn’t give him a millimeter, let alone an inch. I figured the Yankees would recognize this and walk around the bases. But apart from Mark Teixeira and Andruw Jones, nobody was interested in that approach. Liriano made it through six innings. Almost any other Yankee team in the last fifteen years would have knocked him out in the fourth.

The Yankees lost 7-3 and were reduced to staring at the scoreboard and hoping the Royals would eke out a run against the Rays. The Royals came through and won 1-0 in ten innings. A sigh of relief for the Yanks, I guess. Four games seems a lot bigger than three, but it’s not really.

Photo via AP/Charles Rex Arbogast

As crazy as it might sound, I don’t get as much pleasure out of watching the Yankees beat up on Josh Beckett anymore. He’s still the bad guy, but it simply isn’t as much fun when you expect him to get rocked, you know? Heck, even Red Sox fans are tired of him, so it’s hard for me to summon the energy to despise him. The cocky, young kid who silenced the Yankee bats to clinch a World Series almost a decade ago has somehow become just another pitcher, kind of like the neighborhood dog that chased you mercilessly when you were a kid, but years later couldn’t rise from his front porch.

And so it was on Sunday night.

Derek Jeter jumped on Beckett’s second pitch of the night and sent it deep over the head of Jacoby Ellsbury in center field for a double, and eventually came home on a two-out double from Curtis Granderson, and the Yanks were off and running. Beckett was stewing.

That one run almost looked like it would be enough. Hiroki Kuroda was on the mound for the Yankees, fresh off his two-hit shutout of the Texas Rangers, and he picked up right where he left off. He set down the first eight hitters without incident before Nick Punto singled, then cruised through the next three innings allowing just another harmless single. Suddenly it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine him starting Game 1 in October.

To give Kuroda a bit of a cushion, the Yankee hitters chipped in a run here and a run there. With one out in the third, Jeter replayed his first inning at bat and crushed another double over Ellsbury’s head, this one bouncing over the wall. Nick Swisher followed that with a walk, and then Jeter and Swisher pulled off a double steal without a throw. Beckett’s next pitch skipped away from Jarod Saltalamacchia, allowing Jeter to score, and it was 2-0.

In the fourth inning, Ichiro came up to the plate with two outs. I always liked watching Ichiro hit, so it hasn’t been hard for me to start rooting for him as a Yankee. You would always here people talk about how he would effortlessly put balls into the seats during batting practice and claim that he could hit twenty or thirty homers a season if he wanted to, and he gave proof in this at bat. Beckett left a pitch up in the zone, and Ichiro jumped all over it, rifling it into the seats in right for a 3-0 Yankee lead. Two innings later he shot another ball into the bleachers, just because he could. I know the Moneyball folks led an OPS-driven backlash against Ichiro early in his career, but as he stepped to the top of the dugout steps, lifting his helmet to reveal his greying hair as he acknowledged the cheering crowd, I could only think that this was one of the best hitters ever to play the game.

Kuroda was still on the mound in the top of the seventh when the revitalized Adrian González homered to right. Since González plays first base for my fantasy team (Mike Pagliarulo Fan Club), I couldn’t get too broken up over it, and neither did Kuroda, though perhaps for different reasons. He finished the seventh, then ended his night by setting down the Sox in order in the eighth. Rafael Soriano untucked the ninth, and the game was over. Yankees 4, Red Sox 1.

[Photo Credit: Jason Szenes/Getty Images]

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where the teams come from and what their lousy records are, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

I’ll tell you what bores the hell out of me, when a team has all of these good players on the roster, but then trots out a lineup made up of all the bad ones. Every team’s got bad players on it, I’m not saying they don’t. It’s just that when a team is really stacked, I mean when they’ve got hot-shots at just about every position, it’s really boring when those players just take a seat on the bench all afternoon. And the bad ones that play, you’d think they’d seize the opportunity and really show what they’ve got, but more often than not they just go out there and remind you of why they are on the bench in the first place.

Take Andruw Jones, the hot-shot in left field. He couldn’t catch the ball at all today, though I heard he used catch it like a madman. There used to be nobody better at catching the old pop-fly. I admit it. But not anymore. Now he’s the type of outfielder that looks up in the sky on a bright afternoon, gets confused and falls down. Goddamn house-money lineup. It always ends up making you blue as hell.

And that lineup’s not too gorgeous for this pitcher the Yankees have, a pitcher named Ivan Nova. He’s good and all, I’m not saying he’s bad. I’m really not.  But the thing about Nova is that he’s not good all the time. In fact, when you get right down to it, he’s only been very good a few times, but for some reason everybody thinks that’s the norm. If you ask me, I’d say he’s much more the mediocre type, not necessarily bad, but not as good as the phonies tend to give him credit for. All I know is he was lousy today, so mediocre would have been a substantial improvement. It really would.

Old Nova started things off with a bang. He really did. The Rangers had two runs on the board and the ice cubes in my drink hadn’t even started to melt yet. And I hate it when ice cubes melt too quickly. It’s quite a problem during day games. You’ve got this perfectly good drink in front of you, and then you look away for a second, just a quick look at the scoreboard, and sure enough the ice cubes are sweating. It doesn’t totally ruin the drink, I’m not saying that. But it certainly doesn’t do it any good.

Derek Holland, the pitcher for the Texas Rangers, must have been thrilled to see all those Yankee hot-shots sitting on the bench. Old Holland is the type of pitcher that’s actually quite talented but you’d never know it because he sucks so much. He really does. He’s the kind of guy that wears a phony mustache to make you think he’s a sophisticated Ivy League gentleman but what it winds up doing, you see, is making him look like a goddamn pervert. But if you actually watch him pitch, if you sit down and take the time to really watch him sling the old ball at the dish, you’d see he throws it in there quite hard. I have to admit.

I see a guy like Old Holland with all the talent in the world and a five-something ERA and it depresses the hell out of me. I get so down in the dumps I bust out crying right there at the goddamn computer.  It makes me think of these boys I know from the Yankees named Philip Hughes and Joba Chamberlain. You never saw pitchers come up for the Yankees with talent like that, talent so obvious it was practically coming out of their socks. And it’s not like the Yankees never brought up any other pitchers. They did, all the time. But those pitchers, each one was the type of pitcher that’s always allowing first inning homers and then leaving you sitting in the can. What’s all that Yankee dough good for if you’re always bringing up pitchers that give up first-inning homers? Nothing, that’s what.

There he was, Old Holland, wearing that phony mustache in the middle of goddamn Yankee Stadium of all places and trying to sneak a fastball by Mark Teixeira in the sixth inning. And Mark Teixeira, mind you, he just wears Old Holland out like the back seat of a New York City taxi cab. He really does. Old Holland couldn’t get Teixeira out in a big spot if his life depended on him getting that out. But this time in the sixth inning, when Teixeira represented the tying run, what he did was he threw this slider in the dirt to a spot where Teixeira couldn’t get it – it damn near killed me when he threw it in that spot. It was actually quite tricky.

Old Holland must have been feeling pretty good about that slider in the dirt, maybe too good. Because you see what he did on the next pitch to that Andruw Jones, the hot-shot that fell down earlier, he laid one right down the middle. I mean right down goddamn Broadway. And Old Jones, you know he wasn’t feeling too good about falling down, so he must have been so relieved to just see this pitch coming right down the middle. He didn’t look confused on that pitch as he tied up the game at four. He really didn’t.

The goddamn game would have ended right there if it had any sense. But, of course it didn’t. It went on for three more innings. It went on long enough for all the bad feelings the Yankees erased in the sixth to become bad feelings again in the seventh. The worst part, the very worst part of the whole collapse is that pitcher I was telling you about before, Joba Chamberlain, came out with the game on the line and they needed him to be his old self, his old hot-shot self. The thing of it is, that guy is gone. This other guy that looks like the same guy but isn’t as good, he’s here to stay. And about the only way you can tell the difference is by looking at that scoreboard. That goddamn scoreboard just about kills me. It’s just depressing as hell.

See that’s what I don’t like about baseball. It’s depressing as hell. You’ve got a guy falling down in the outfield feeling down in the dumps about it. You’ve got the same guy tying the game with a homerun and feeling all warm and fuzzy. And then you’ve got the same guy coming up with a chance to re-take the lead and striking out and going down in the dumps again. Who wants to play a game that can rip you up like that? Nobody with any sense, that’s who.

A lot of people here, especially this one accountant, are asking me if the Yankees are going to win tomorrow when they start their series with the goddamn Red Sox. It’s such a stupid question. How are you supposed to know if they’re going to win a game before they play it? The answer is, you don’t.

On those nights when I get home late, I have to look for clues about what’s going on the in the Yankee game. My phone’s itching to tell me the score from the confines of my bag, but taking it out on the walk home isn’t a great idea.

Tonight I started my journey around 8:30 and it was already weird because I hadn’t had any score updates yet. I figured it must be busted – no way both of these teams were going scoreless for 90 minutes. The next clue came as I got off the subway at 207th st. it was about 9:20. I spotted guy in a Giambi shirt and fitted Yankee cap exiting as well. That looks like a gamer, I thought. I was sure they had come from the game when his girlfriend trailed him up the stairs wearing her Jeter shirt.

At 9:20? No possible way a Yankee-Ranger game was over by in two hours and change. I figured it was a blowout one way or the other. Neither Giambi nor Jeter was giving anything away however. Couple a Tom Landrys. I hoofed it up Broadway and passed the first bar that would have the game on. Commercial on one screen, slo-mo, extreme-closeup replay of a guy in a gray jersey taking a big cut on the other. Shit, that’s gotta be a Ranger roadie, I thought.

The next spot was the cigar shop and I had to slow my stride to take in the full scene. They had their screen split four ways, taking in action all across the league. The Yanks game was such a dud it didn’t even make one of the quarters. OK, now I was convinced. 16-0 Rangers.

I came home and did those things you have to do even though all you want to do is to go right to the scoreboard. But my wife wasn’t feeling well and I took care of her for a little while. She had real news to convey about one of the kids messing up his forearm in a scooter fall. We might need X-Rays. Well shit, that blowout doesn’t seem so important now. I took my shower, I poured my wife some water and helped her off to bed. I ate a slice of cheese in the kitchen. OK, no more stalling, time to face the music.

Holy Shit! I said it loud enough to startle my wife. Hiroki Kuroda just went out and dropped a complete game shut out on one of the best offenses in baseball. He did it with style too, taking a no-hitter into the seventh before Elvis Andrus lucked into an infield single with one of the most lifeless hacks you’ll ever see.

From the numerous highlights of Kuroda’s offerings, you can see how almost every batter is wrong-footed. He’s hiding the ball so well, and releasing each pitch from the same spot that the hitters can’t gauge the speed until it’s too late. From the clips, his location looks good, not superb. It’s that he has the entire lineup deceived. Kuroda’s final, glorious numbers, 9 innings, 2 hits, 2 walks, 5 Ks.

The only problem tonight was that the Yanks couldn’t score any runs. Kuroda gets the least run-support by far among all Yankee starters – a full run behind the rest of the rotation and over two runs behind CC, and tonight it actually went down.

In the seventh, they finally gave Kuroda something to work with. Jeter collected his second hit of the night (and passed Nap Lajoie on the all-time hit list) and knocked effective starter Matt Harrison out of the game. Ron Washington called on Alexi Ogando, a hard thrower to be sure. Nick Swisher worked him over but good and when Ogando tried to beat him with a high hard one on a full count, Swisher jumped the 98 MPH gas and launched it into the bullpen. Just for shits and giggles, Mark Teixeira ripped a 99 MPH pitch into the seats as well.

The final was 3-0 and it took 2 hours 35 minutes to complete. I guess Giambi and Jeter bolted after the no-no was busted up and the Yanks hit their homers. Can’t blame them, the game was over.

Kuroda’s game reminds me a lot of those ALDS games against the Rangers in 1998 and 1999. The Rangers could hit all day, but in those games the Yanks shut them down. Whether it was El Duque, Pettitte, Wells… didn’t matter. Now, these Rangers are a much better vintage than those late nineties teams. They’ve got a few starters that are still healthy and a fierce bullpen. The teams are a lot closer now than they were back then. That’s what makes this game so damned good – it might have even impressed McKayla Maroney.

Photos by Seth Wenig/AP

What a lovely night to return to recapping. Summer hit my apartment like a solid right hook this June, sent us sprawling around the East Coast for months. Vacations in Pittsburgh, DC, Gloucester and Maine. Work travel to more cities than I can list.

In the meantime Yanks went up, up, down, splat and are now back to somewhere around sea level. I was happy my first game back at the Banter would be a CC start – best chance for blowout win. So much for that. David Phelps got the call instead. Lucky for me, he can pitch.

As David Cone and Paul O’Neill covered in an especially jovial night in the YES booth, Phelps has the requisite arsenal to pitch in the big leagues and enough confidence in his various offerings to throw any pitch at any time. His numbers tonight aren’t going to knock you out, but this wasn’t the Blue Jays farm team, this was the defending American League Champion at something close to full strength.

With an 80-pitch limit, Phelps completed five innings and allowed six hits, walked one and hit another. He struck out three, but more impressively, other than David Murphy, nobody could square him up. Murphy, a bench bat on a “Yankee-killer” team, blasted a homer and double, but the rest of the contact was weak. When guys got on, Phelps deftly picked them off. He was very good.

There is a possibility that this was just an off-night for Texas since a Wight (that’s a reanimated corpse for those of you who have not been to Westeros) resembling Derek Lowe came out and dazzled them for the final four innings. But given that Phelps has been effective most of the year, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Ryan Dempster took the ball for Texas. The Yankees and Rangers have both been crushed by pitching injuries and ineffectiveness this year. The Yanks have survived on internal options. The Rangers went out and got Oswalt. Then they got Dempster. I don’t necessarily remember anyone advocating for either of those guys for the Yanks, but certainly Dempster seemed a better option than Freddy Garcia or Hughes and Nova at their worst. Maybe not.

Dempster’s been pretty bad for Texas and the Yanks got to him in the third. I went into the kids’ room for bedtime down 2-0 and as I came out I thought to myself “5-2 Yanks.” Granderson was up with bases loaded and missed a grand slam by about ten feet. The sac fly to center  made the score 5-2. Sorry Curtis, I should have been greedier. I rewound to watch Swisher’s grand slam. Chavez added another homer in the sixth. Both were mature-content homers – Swisher’s never bothered to start descending.

The Yankees took the first game of this four-game series 8-2. Perhaps fans place too much importance on certain regular season match-ups, but it occurs to me that this would be an excellent week to kick some ass. Let’s get to Sunday and look back at Monday as the nail-biter.

Photo via AP/Seth Wenig

I really don’t know what to say about these Yankees anymore. Deep into the game I was sure this recap was going to be full of doom and gloom. I just knew they’d lose yet another, what would be their third loss in four games in Detroit, and somehow I’d have to put a positive spin on things and convince the Banter faithful that their faith would eventually be rewarded. It turned out none of that would be necessary, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Doug Fister was on the mound for the Tigers. I’m not sure what the numbers are, but it seems like the Yankees tend to struggle against him. In the second inning, though, things were looking good. Eric Chávez sat on first base with two outs when Raúl Ibañez launched a towering fly ball over Quintin Berry’s head in deep left center field, far enough that even the slow-footed Chávez was able to score the game’s first run and the equally challenged Ibañez was able to cruise into third with a triple. Ichiro was up next, and he wasted no time in collecting his daily hit, flicking the second pitch he saw down the left field line for a stand-up double; the Yankees led 2-0.

I must admit that I didn’t have high hopes when Hiroki Kuroda joined the team during the off-season, but he’s quietly become the Yankees’ most dependable pitcher shorter than 6’6″ and weighing less than 290 pounds. Kuroda cruised through the first four innings, nursing that 2-0 lead but looking perfectly comfortable while doing so. Then came the fifth.

Jhonny Peralta hit a booming double to left to open the inning, and a few pitches later Alex Avila laced a home run down the line in right to tie the game at two. These things happen, I suppose, but what happened next usually doesn’t.

Ramón Santiago singled, and with two outs Andy Dirks floated a high fair/foul pop halfway down the line in left. Ibañez was on the case, though, and he hustled in from deep left hoping to make the final out. He came up short, but for a moment it didn’t seem to matter.

Just before the ball dropped, third base umpire Tim Welke threw his arms up, signifying a foul ball. The problem with that is that a split second later the fall ball fell on the chalk, forcing Welke to reverse his call and point correctly into fair territory. Ibañez chased the ball around long enough to allow Barry to score.

Manager Joe Girardi immediately popped out of the dugout and began debating with Welke. His point was that Welke’s initial call — even though it was incorrect — had caused Ibañez to give up on the play, if only for a moment. (For the record, replays did not seem to support this.)

Girardi could be seen to repeat his single claim over and over: “You called the ball foul!” Interestingly enough, Welke admitted as much early in their conversation, saying “I was too quick.” Sometimes an admission like that is enough for a manager, but it only seemed to throw kerosene on Girardi’s fire. He eventually convinced Welke to convene the other three umpires for a conference, but by that point I don’t think there was much that could’ve been done. Had Welke taken away Detroit’s run and pulled Barry back to third, Jim Leyland would probably still be arguing.

When the umpires inevitably held firm, Girardi lost control completely. Fans in the left field bleachers were probably reading his lips easily as he stabbed an index finger into his open palm to illustrate his point: “I’m protesting this game right now!” Welke made note of it and tried to walk away (perhaps because he knew it wasn’t a protestable situation), but Girardi had clearly made up his mind to get himself tossed.

It’s a funny thing. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my emotions run at a fairly even keel, and I almost never get angry. But when I’m coaching a basketball game and an official makes what I perceive to be a bad call and refuses to listen to my argument, everything changes in a Bruce Banner kind of way. If I were to list the ten angriest moments of my life, every single one of them would be the result of an official’s whistle. There’s a feeling that something has been unfairly taken from you in an irrevocable manner, and the feeling of injustice starts in your heart, courses through your veins, and eventually reaches your brain where it drives you insane.

I’ve been in that moment, and that’s where Girardi was on Thursday night. Welke eventually ejected him, but that hardly ended his tirade. He reiterated his protest, fired his hat in disgust, and appeared to make contact with crew chief Bob Davidson (suspension coming?). On his way to the dugout he pantomimed Welke’s error, throwing his hands up in the air, then pointing towards foul territory before pointing back fair. The whole episode lasted just a few seconds short of five minutes, and when Girardi finally turned towards the clubhouse, he paused on the steps long enough to hold his nose while looking in Welke’s direction. He didn’t get what he wanted, but at least he got his money’s worth.

Welke gave his take afterwards: “I started to put my hands up in the air — I was a little quick — then I saw the ball hit the chalk line, and I pointed fair about three times,” Welke said. “I don’t think it had any impact. I’ve watched the replay, and I don’t think there was any impact on the outfielder. I don’t think Ibanez ever even saw me. We got the call right.”

It looked for a while like that was going to be the story of this game. Another creatively painful way for the Yankees to lose.

But in the eighth Mark Teixeira jumped on a 2-0 pitch from reliever Joaquin Benoit and ripped a line drive home run into the stands in right, tying the score at three. Before Benoit could think much about that, Chávez took the very next pitch and lofted a home run of his own over the left field wall, and suddenly the Yankees had the lead again.

Rafael Soriano got the last out of the eighth for the Yanks, then almost threw everything away in the ninth, and it took only three pitches. He gave up a double to Avila to lead things off, then yielded a short single to Omar Infante to put runners on the corners with no one out.

The Yankees surely were hoping to preserve a tie and would’ve been happy just to get to the tenth inning, but somehow Soriano did better than that. He got Santiago to float a soft liner to Canó at second for the first out, induced a pop-up from Berry, then nailed down the third out when Dirks hit a weak fly ball to center. Yankees 4, Tigers 3.

There are questions in Yankeeland, but for one afternoon at least, the answers were adequate.

[Photo Credit: Duane Burleson/AP Photo]

Unpretty.

From In The Loop:

Simon: It’ll be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
Toby: No, it won’t. It’ll be difficult-difficult-lemon-difficult. That is what it will be.

Nothing’s coming easy to the Yankees just now, even when they score 12 runs. So this wasn’t one of your cleaner games, and it didn’t restore massive amounts of confidence — but the bottom line is, they didn’t blow a 7-0 lead. They came as close as you possibly can without actually doing so, but the Tigers never did quite catch up, and New York won 12-8. Of course, just because it could have been much worse, doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been better.

CC Sabathia didn’t have the stuff he had Friday night, when I was at the Stadium and watched him pitch a strong, controlled complete game against the Mariners. The Tigers are also not the Mariners, though. That’s a serious lineup that can do a lot of damage if given half a chance, and they got plenty of chances in this one. On top of Detroit’s bloops, dings, and other weird sound effects, the Yankees threw in some errors (Robinson Cano, Casey McGehee) and sloppy play for good measure.

Sabathia made it into the seventh before things started to seriously unravel. He had given up three runs going into the inning, and when he was pulled his line was 6.2 IP, eight hits, five runs — though even here he maintained a sterling ratio of one walk to seven strikeouts. When he left, things became even less raveled under unlucky reliever David Robertson.

But Rafael Soriano continues to be way more reliable than I would have dreamed back when Rivera went down, and the lineup never rested on its laurels. Every Yankee batter had at least one hit; Curtis Granderson knocked in four runs, and Mark Teixeira and Eric Chavez (again!) claimed two each. Anibal Sanchez was cooked after three innings, and the Detroit pen lost the war of attrition.

The Yankees are 64-46, so there’s no need to panic, and never was. They do need to sharpen their game back up, though, or that record — like Tony Janiro post-Jake LaMotta— won’t be pretty no more.

There’s one thing you should know about the Banter–we spare no expense in the pursuit of a story, and we are never truly on vacation.

So even as my family and I have been enjoying the tropical breezes, idyllic pace, and pristine beaches of Hawaii this week, I’ve kept my nose to the ground the entire time, searching for a story. I found one on Day One.

Directly outside our hotel on the Hilo side of the Big Island, stood an enormous banyan tree marked with a simple sign, “Geo. Herman “Babe” Ruth, Oct. 29, 1933″. After some serious reporting (a five-second conversation with the concierge), I procured a pamphlet which described the evolution of Banyan Drive. Back in 1933 someone decided it might be a fun idea to have celebrities and local luminaries plant banyan trees along a stretch of road that curved around an inlet of the Pacific Ocean. The Babe was on a barnstorming tour, so he was a natural pick, as was Cecil B. DeMille, who was in town filming a movie.

Banyan trees appear as if they’ve been imported directly the planet Dagobah. They begin as a tree with a single trunk, but as they mature, the branches drop long tendrils which twist downward until they find the ground and take root, eventually thickening to the point where it becomes difficult to identify the original trunk. Mature trees have hundreds of separate trunks encompassing hundreds of square feet.

I took my daughter Alison down to the tree on the morning we left to take a few pictures. Before we left I asked her to put her hand next to mine on the outermost root. It was rough and full of history.

“Can you feel it?” I asked. “Babe Ruth planted this tree. Babe Ruth.”

One streak died on Friday night in Oakland, another survived, but more important to the overall picture, a losing streak was born.

When last the Yankees visited Oakland, they thumped the A’s in three straight games, and I spent a lot of time making fun of them in the one recap I wrote, comparing them to a minor league team as I shamelessly listed Oakland batting averages from one to nine, laughing all the way.

Things are different now. (For one thing, Yoenis Cespedes was on the disabled list during that series back in May. He’s been healthy and punishing Yankee pitching during this series, but more on him later.)

Early in the game a preposterous graphic popped up beneath Yankee starter Iván Nova. According to said graphic, not only did Nova lead the league in extra base hits allowed, he apparently led by a wide margin — 61 extras compared to the second place hurler who had only surrendered 49.

I was so baffled by this, that I spoke aloud to the television. “That can’t possibly be true.”

And here’s where things got a bit strange. Nova paused during his warm-ups, waited for the camera to zoom tight, then, as if he were Woody Allen or Ferris Bueller, he turned and looked directly into the camera… and answered me. Surely you noticed it, too.

“You don’t think I can give up extra base hits?” he asked. “Just watch me.”

With two outs in the first, he gave up a double to Josh Reddick, but recovered to escape the inning without allowing a run. In the third, there was a leadoff triple yielded to Coco Crisp, who scored the game’s first run on a Jemile Weeks sacrifice fly. The fourth inning opened with a Brandon Moss double, followed by a Brandon Inge double (Double Brandon doubles?) to double the lead to two.

Guess what happened in the fifth? Another leadoff double, this time to Reddick, but Nova survived that inning without allowing a run. He wouldn’t, however, survive the seventh, leaving after two outs with a deceptive line: only two runs allowed, but nine hits — five for extra bases.

Even so, Nova’s night would’ve been good enough for a win in any of the previous forty-three games, but on Friday night the fearsome Tommy “May Day” Milone was on the hill for the A’s, and the Yanks never got a sniff against him. He cruised through the first three innings, allowing just a harmless single to Curtis Granderson in the first.

Only twice in Milone’s seven innings were the Yankees able to put two runners on in an inning. The first instance was in the fourth, but it lasted only about ten seconds. Mark Teixeira singled with one out, and when Alex Rodríguez followed immediately with a soft single to right, third base coach Robby Thompson inexplicably started windmilling Teixeira around second and into third. To everyone in the stadium, aside from Thompson, I suppose, the outcome was never in doubt. The ball arrived two strides before Teixeira did, and the rally was dead.

Milone struck out the side in the fifth, then found a bit of trouble in the sixth. Derek Jeter reached on an infield single with one out, and one out later Teixeira moved him to second on a single of his own. A-Rod came up with an opportunity to change this recap, but instead he bounced into a fielder’s choice to third.

Millone did yield a somewhat questionable single to Robinson Canó leading off the seventh, but he set down the next three hitters — the last two on strikes — to finish off his night.

How good was Milone? He had been pitching well over his previous five starts, but nothing like this. Seven innings, six hits, ten strikeouts, and nothing else. I’m sure you remember the last time an Athletics pitcher struck out ten or more Yankees without allowing a run. It was ninety-nine years ago when Eddie Plank turned the trick.

And so it all came down to the ninth inning with the Yankees trailing 2-1. (Russell Martin had homered in the eighth.) When Canó validated his twenty-three-game hitting streak by leading off with a line drive that barely cleared the wall in left field to tie the score at two, everything seemed possible. There was life in the dugout, and suddenly it looked like the Yankees might steal a win in Oakland… I’ll give you a second to recover after reading that last phrase… and in doing so they’d extend that other quirky streak.

As the game rolled over to the bottom of the ninth, I convinced myself that it would happen. I should’ve known better, and the YES producers quickly reminded me by sliding one cold-water graphic after another up on the screen. First there was this: The Yankees are 0-30 and the only major league team without a win after trailing in the ninth inning or later. Next: The Oakland A’s have 9 walk-off wins, most in the major leagues.

Josh Reddick struck out swinging, but the rest of the night went like this: single, single, single, dog pile. (Cespedes, Jonny Gomes, and Brandon Moss, if you must know.) A’s 3, Yankees 2.

A new streak starts tomorrow.

[Photo Credit: Ben Margot/AP Photo]