As Brett Cecil mastered the Yankees for the fourth time this year, the Yankee game lacked any drama after Phil Hughes served up a two-run gopher ball (already his second of the day) in the third inning. As the Bombers failed to mount a serious challenge in a 7-3 loss, Yankee fans watching the scoreboard were treated to a roller-coaster ride as Tampa and Boston played hot potato with the leads in their games with Baltimore and Chicago.

As the Yankees went quietly, Tampa was putting up a four spot on the Orioles in the sixth to overcome a three-run deficit. Luckily, the recently defiant Orioles answered back with four of their own in the bottom of the same inning. After Tampa scratched another two runs in the seventh, the Orioles held on tightly to the slim remaining margin. They sealed the win in impressive style as newly minted closer Koji Uehara made short work of the top of the Rays order, whiffing MVP candidate Evan Longoria to end it.

And that was nothing compared to what was going on in Boston. The Red Sox led 2-1 until Daniel Bard’s throwing error in the seventh gave Chicago a 3-2 lead. Boston struck back immediately to reclaim a 4-3 lead courtesy of a Victor Martinez two-run blast. After an insurance run in the eighth, Papelbon needed three outs to make up a game on both the Yanks and Rays. He only could get two. Eight white socks crossed the plate and Chicago ended up with a sweet comeback victory.

These happily wild endgames turned the Yankee loss into a minor annoyance, or possibly to the truly enlightened, a mere afterthought. Hughes was bad. Though he only allowed seven hits in six innings, the hits were all loud (six for extra bases) and the Jays hurt him with every kind of pitch. Hill doubled on a terrible curve and homered on a flubbed cutter. Wells homered on misplaced fastball. Buck touched up another bad cutter and Snider doubled on an ineffective change (pitch identification courtesy of mlb.com’s Gameday). When he needed an out, he didn’t know where to turn, and he mostly came up small.

The velocity charts on Fan Graphs don’t show a lot of deterioration on Phil’s offerings over the course of the year, but pitches that blew past bats in April and May are finding wood as the summer drags out. He is less precise with his location, less effective overall.

But the Jays are a clubbing squad. He avoided the walks, got five K’s and mixed in the change up a little bit more. And he lasted six innings. I don’t think Hughes has many big performances left in him this year, but I’m not going to forget the great start to the year either. Hope he contributes what he can down the stretch, and comes back stronger next year.

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The roller coaster season of Javy Vazquez resumed today as he returned to the starting rotation for the second time in 2010.  His most recent rotation sabbatical resulted in two relief appearances (4.1 and 4.2 innings) in which he allowed a total of four hits and two walks.  Interestingly, those two appearances were each as long or longer than any of the last three starts prior to his banishment to the pen.  Perhaps manager Joe Girardi liked this matchup for Vazquez’s return to the hill, as Javy was 1-0 with a 2.38 ERA and only three hits allowed in 11 innings versus the Jays this season.  On the other hand, the wind was blowing out to right at 21 MPH at gametime, and “Homerun Javy” (27 allowed this season) has been a flyball pitcher his entire career.  In fact, his 0.54 GB:FB rate this season is his career worst.  The next worst season?  2004, when he pitched for … yes, the Yanks.

But the Yanks had hope as they faced Blue Jay starter Mark Rzepczynski.  He came into the game with a 6.03 ERA, and had been torched for six runs and eight hits in three innings by the Bombers just two weeks ago.

Vazquez started strong with a seven-pitch top of the first, getting Jose Bautista on a swinging strikeout to end the inning.  With one out in the  second, Lyle Overbay launched a meatball slider into the jetstream to right, and the Jays took a 1-0 lead.  After a walk to John Buck and an Adam Lind popout to short, John McDonald banged another misfired slider high off the left field foul pole, and all of a sudden it was 3-0.

Meanwhile, Rzepczynski sailed through the first two innings, save for a first inning leadoff single to Brett Gardner.  Gardner swiped his 4oth base of the year (though replays showed him to be out), but he was stranded there.

Then the bottom of the third came, and Rzepczynski remembered who and what he was and whom he was facing.  Eduardo Nunez grounded out to short, but Francisco Cervelli pulled a pitch to left, and hustled his way to a double thanks to a weak-armed Travis Snider.  Gardner walked, and then Derek Jeter also pulled one into left for a double, scoring Cervelli.  Mark Teixeira followed with a walk, and Robinson Cano, who had been in a 0-12 slide, bounced one up the middle, scoring Gardner and Jeter and tying the game at 3.

Meanwhile, Vazquez was continuing to find no command of his slider, instead relying on an 87-89 MPH fastball and a 72-75 MPH change.  He managed to avert further damage in the third and fourth, despite two more walks and a single.

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The Great One

Ivan Nova gave up a long home run to the second batter of the game but the Yanks jumped on Brandon Morrow for two runs in the first, two in the second and one in the third giving Nova something he’s been unaccustomed to so far in his brief Major League career–a lead.

Then in the third inning Lyle Overbay lead off with a double that fell in the right-center field gap between Curtis Granderson and Austin Kearns. Aaron Hill hit the next pitch even deeper into the same gap for an RBI double. Pitch after that was a ball outside, so Jorge Posada went out to the mound and stood on the outfield side of his young pitcher, uphill so they could see eye-to-eye, and handed him the ball. Posada didn’t take off the face mask. His back was to the TV camera. Before he was finished speaking, Posada placed his right hand flat on Nova’s chest, and left it there for a good five count.

It was a simple, calming gesture, a throwaway really. But it’s that small stuff, those kinds of details, that I find so compelling these days when we’ve got so much access to the games and the players but such limited access to really knowing them as personalities, at least in the way that we knew recent generations of jocks and celebrities, through the print media.

Of course, watching Mariano smile in the ninth inning, enjoying a laugh and handshakes all around once again is one of the distinct pleasures I’ll ever know. It never gets old and I appreciate it each and every time, knowing it will not last forever, knowing the bulk of his great career is behind us now.

Nova wasn’t terrific in his fourth start, didn’t pitch long enough to get the win, one out away. The bullpen didn’t give up a run, Curtis Granderson had two more hits and three RBI, and Fat Elvis had a couple of hits too, as did lil’ Nunez and Pena. Robbie Cano doesn’t look himself, and John Flaherty was on to something when he suggested that this might be a decent time for him to get a couple of days off. Otherwise, it was another happy day in Yankeeland, an ideal way to kick off the holiday weekend.

Final Score: Yanks 7, Jays 3

Hoo-Ha.

Feels so good…ya heard?

1-04 Dry Bones

[Photo Credit: AP Photo/Bill Kostroun, Bags]

Ivan Nova tries to stay souped-up against that formidable talent, Brandon Morrow this afternoon in the Bronx.

The weatherman says a big storm might blow into town. Jays in town for three day games.

Never mind the picnic, Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

The Topps Company produced 11 different cards of Lou Piniella as a Yankee, ranging from a capless 1974 traded card to his final 1984 card, but the one shown here is my favorite. Part of the wondrous 1980 set, the card shows Piniella near the completion of one of his typically sweet swings. Looking at the position of his bat, it appears that Piniella has just used his patented opposite field swing to drop a line drive (or a bloop) into right field. Action cards are always the most desirable to have, but especially when they give you a snapshot of a player doing something for which he is best known. And I’ll always remember Piniella best for that flat, line-drive swing that often seemed pointed directly toward right field.

I feel a little bit sad now that Piniella has retired from the game, a game that he has served for 50 years, in a decision that was expedited last month. We had all expected that “Sweet Lou” would finish out the season with the Cubs before stepping aside, but his elderly mother’s illness mandated that he retire immediately. Family comes first, a decision made easier when the Cubs are hopelessly lost in the National League Central. It’s not as if Piniella was abandoning a team in the midst of a pennant race; if anything, he may have given the franchise a lift by allowing the Cubs to evaluate their interim manager, the unusually pronounced Mike Quade, as a potential fulltime replacement for 2011.

In some ways, Piniella was one of the last of a breed: the colorful and fiery manager. He spoke bluntly with the press–often too bluntly–and argued fervently with umpires–sometimes too much so. But with those qualities, he brought some old-fashioned personality to the table, a mix of John McGraw and Billy Martin, with a little Fred Hutchinson tossed in for good measure. (Hutchinson was simultaneously loved and feared by his players. After giving up a game-ending home run, one of Hutchinson’s pitchers refused to walk back to the dugout to face his manager. He instead walked toward the center field exit.) So many of today’s new managers are cut out of the same mold; they engage in politically correct managerspeak, afraid to ever criticize their players for poor play, and they stand motionless, even emotionless, in the dugout, while passively observing the game in front of them. I have trouble telling many of the new breed managers apart from one another: Manny Acta, Bob Geren, Ken Macha, Brad Mills. I know that they’re all intelligent baseball men, but they’re also so bland, so indistinct, so seemingly interchangeable.

I guess maybe they have to be that way, especially if they don’t have strong major league playing resumes to fall back on, like Piniella. Managers have never had it more difficult than they have it today. The salaries of the players dwarf their pay so many times over that they have been rendered virtually powerless. They can’t publicly scold their players, whose egos simply will not permit it. And they’re afraid to say anything minutely controversial in their interviews with the press, out of the fear that their words could be misconstrued or twisted into the latest installment of a never-ending soap opera.

Piniella was different; he just didn’t care about repercussions. As a longtime player, he had a body of work to fall back on, 18 seasons as a big league outfielder, in case his players sassed him. Unlike previous targets like John Boles and Fredi Gonzalez, he had played the game at the highest level, with a couple of world championship rings as proof. Piniella didn’t worry about becoming embroiled in controversies; if anything, he seemed to embrace the excitement brought about by the conflict.

Now sometimes Piniella went too far. He picked fights with reporters when they posed legitimate questions. He kicked dirt on umpires, something that no arbiter, no matter how incompetent, should have to endure. He could come across as a spoiled, petulant child, like he did two years ago when he carried on about the “suffering” the Cubs had to endure having to play in the Hall of Fame Game in mid-June while in the midst of a pennant race. So yes, Piniella could take his act of fire and brimstone too far, sometimes making himself smaller in the process.

Yet, on the whole, Lou Piniella as a manager was good for baseball. He taught hitters like few others I’ve ever seen, with his prized students including Don Mattingly and Edgar Martinez. Though he often lacked patience with his pitchers, he motivated most of his players, through his energy and his constant call for professionalism. He won a ton of games along the way, culminating in an unlikely world championship for the 1990 Reds. He had a degree of success everywhere, with the one exception being Tampa Bay, where only Joe Maddon has found the way. And let’s not forget that he brought some much-desired verve and allure to the dugout, where the manager is still the boss, even if some want the players to be.

Good-bye, Lou. Enjoy that retirement. But don’t lose that personality.

Bruce Markusen writes “Cooperstown Confidential” for The Hardball Times.

You know the best thing about CC Sabathia?  Not the strikeouts, not the innings, not even the dominance.  It’s the fact that he’s a Sure Thing.  A suuuure thing.  The Yankees have been blessed with a lot of great starting pitchers over the past sixteen years, including guys like Jimmy Key, Andy Pettitte, David Cone, Roger Clemens, El Duque, Mike Mussina, and probably someone else who’s slipping my mind, but there’s never been anyone like Mr. Sabathia.  All those other guys were great and played the role of ace at one point or another, but Sabathia lives the part.  When he takes the mound, he takes the game by its throat and doesn’t let go until either Girardi pries the ball from his meaty left hand or Posada squeezes the final out.

All of that is always a good thing, but it’s never been more valuable than this season.  As the other four starters have struggled with injury and inconsistency, Sabathia has been a rock, showing his brilliance not only with dominant outings like Thursday afternoon but with a measured consistency that makes him the solid front-runner for this year’s Cy Young Award winner in the American League.  When you look at his game log, all of this becomes clear.

His last three months have been ridiculous.  From June 3 to September 2 his numbers look like this:

18 GS  15-1  131.1 IP  113 H  42 BB  111 K  2.39 ERA  1.18 WHIP

Which isn’t bad.  But even during these past three months, Sabathia’s strength is that he’s been consistently… really, really good.  On Thursday afternoon he was dominant.  After the game Jorge Posada said that Sabathia had had no-hit stuff, and it almost translated to an actual no-no.  Mark Ellis punched a ground ball to right field to lead off the second, and that would be the only base hit surrendered by Sabathia over his eight innings.  (Our old friend Jonathan Albaladejo would pitch a scoreless ninth to finish the shutout.)

Sabathia allowed only six balls to be hit in the air, three lazy flies to the outfield and three pop-ups to Mark Teixeira at first.  He found himself in trouble only twice, but quelled the uprising both times without breaking a sweat.  Shortstop Cliff Pennington laid down a bunt to lead off the third inning and ended up on second after Posada air-mailed the throw down the right field line.  Pennington arrived at third with just one out after a tapper to the mound, but CC wriggled free by popping up Rajai Davis and striking out Kurt Suzuki.

CC faced the minimum twelve batters over the next four innings, but made things momentarily interesting when he followed a hit batsman (Jeff Larish) with a walk to Landon Powell.  He held a 4-0 lead, but with two men on and no 0ne out, suspense entered the equation for the first time all afternoon.  But don’t worry.  A quick strikeout, a floater out to right, and a ground ball to second, and the mini-crisis was averted.

For their parts, the hitters gave Sabathia what he needed for his nineteenth victory.  Posada homered in the second for the first run, Curtis Granderson (fresh off the bench for Nick Swisher, whose sore foot kicked him out of the game after the first inning) homered for the second run in the sixth and added a two-run jack in the seventh to make it 4-0.  A string of hits in the eighth inning started by Lance Berkman (whose helicoptering bat almost decapitated Posada in the on-deck circle) and finished by Austin Kearns closed out the scoring at 5-0.

The story, though, was Sabathia.  The Sure Thing.  With Sabathia going once every five days in September and pitching two or three times in each playoff series, I like the Yankees’ chances.

Still summertime, still scorching in the Rotten Apple.

CC Sabathia v. Dallas Braden today as the Yanks look to sweep the A’s.

We’ll be rootin’.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

[Picture by Bags]

“I can’t stand AJ Burnett. I don’t like him. I don’t like his face, I don’t like the way he looks, I don’t like his tattoos, I don’t like him at all.”

It’s not some demented baseball version of “Green Eggs and Ham,” it’s my mother’s visceral reaction to Allan James Burnett’s mere appearance on a pitcher’s mound. Mom lives nearly 600 miles away, and I’m sure she was repeating those words when she asked my father, “Who’s pitching tonight” and he likely said, “Burnett. Your favorite.”

My mom’s disdain toward Burnett is shared among many Yankee fans. Turning from the superficial to the baseball-related stuff, Burnett’s 2010 performance provided all cause for whatever disdain, distrust, or dislike is felt. Burnett had allowed at least six earned runs in nine of his 26 starts prior to Wednesday’s outing. As news of Andy Pettitte’s pain-free, 55-pitch bullpen session and Javier Vazquez’s return to the starting rotation filtered through the wires, talk shifted to AJ Burnett potentially pitching his way out of the rotation. ESPN New York’s Andrew Marchand, my fellow Ithaca alum, went so far as to say he was staring at “that Ed Whitson-Hideki Irabu-Kei Igawa abyss,” and gave this start make-or-break status.

(I’d put the “abyss” more on the Kevin Brown level rather than Whitson, Irabu or Igawa — especially when you consider the parallel of Burnett cutting his hand while breaking a plastic casing on the clubhouse door to Brown punching a stanchion in the clubhouse back in 2004 and breaking his left hand, but OK, point taken.)

Burnett has had three discernible trends this season: 1) all-out implosion; 2) early blow-up, then cruises, as he did in Kansas City; 3) cruise early, then have a one- or two-inning hiccup and hang on for dear life. Wednesday, Burnett chose Option 3. Staked to a 4-0 lead after two innings, Burnett had everything working the first pass through the A’s order. He was throwing hard but looked like he had a lot in reserve. Once the fourth inning came around, the inevitable “uh-oh” moment happened. Burnett caught too much of the plate with two fastballs: the first resulted in a line-drive double off the bat of Kurt Suzuki, and the second ended up in the right-field seats, courtesy of Kevin Kouzmanoff. 4-2 Yankees.

The fifth inning wasn’t much better. Rajai Davis led off by scalding a belt-high fastball to left-center that one-hopped the fence for a ground-rule double. He later stole third base and scored on a groundout. As quickly as the Yankees built the four-run cushion for Burnett, the lead was down to one. Burnett then lost a nine-pitch battle with Daric Barton, issuing a two-out walk. He bore down and got Suzuki to fly out to end the inning, and retired the A’s in the sixth, the only blip in that inning being the two-out single by Mark Ellis.

Joe Girardi has fiercely defended Burnett, citing how well he’s pitched in big games — specifically Game 2 of the World Series and the way he dueled Josh Beckett at Yankee Stadium last August — and it’s not too late for him to turn things around and have a good month heading into the playoffs. But he did not take any chances Wednesday night. Girardi pulled Burnett after the sixth with the Yankees holding the slim 4-3 lead, preserving at worst a no-decision. Joba Chamberlain, Boone Logan and Kerry Wood made things interesting in the seventh and eighth innings, putting the tying run in scoring position in both frames. However, they were able to escape those jams.

Even Mariano Rivera wasn’t a sure bet. He, too, allowed the tying run to advance to scoring position. After retiring the first two batters quickly, Daric Barton reached on an infield single and later stole second base. But Rivera ended the suspense by striking out Suzuki on a 93 mile-per-hour sinker.

Mark Teixeira continued to wield a hot bat, going 3-for-4 and driving in three more runs.

But the story was Burnett. He bent but didn’t break, tying a season-high with eight strikeouts and walking just two to earn his first winning decision since July 28. More importantly, 65 percent of the pitches he threw were strikes (59 of 91). As there are three trends to Burnett’s starts, there are now three AJs: The Extreme AJ that’s either great or awful, and the AJ that’s in between. Not bad, not stellar, just good enough to win. The Yankees will take that last one every time.

For one more turn through the rotation, at least, Burnett is still a piece to the Yankees’ pitching puzzle.

October is thataway, son.

The Yanks look to continuing pushing their weight around tonight against the A’s.

AJ Burnett has been, well, AJ Burnett. Looking for him to turn it around. Why not start now?

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

[Picture by Bags]

Robbie Cano hittum for high average…ESPN New York has the skinny.

Meanwhile, Diane Firstman digs up some depressing numbers for Derek Jeter.

Tuesday night’s 9-3 rout of the Oakland A’s was the Yankees’ 82nd victory, thus ensuring their 18th consecutive winning season. That’s a remarkable feat. What’s even more remarkable is that the streak isn’t even halfway to the team’s record of 39 straight winning seasons, done from 1926-64.

Phil Hughes started the game and watching his first few innings over again — isn’t DVR great? — it didn’t look like his stuff was that bad or that he was too far off with location. He wasn’t sharp, to be sure, but he didn’t appear wild enough to have issued five walks. There were some pitches that looked like they painted the outside corner or were within that two- to three-inch window to be called strikes, or were over the plate on the lower border of the strike zone. In short, they were pitches that were close enough that many umpires would have given the benefit of the doubt. The fastball had life, the curveball was good enough to get outs, and the changeups and cutters he mixed in enabled him to pitch out of jams.

More of a concern was the fact that three of the four hits Hughes allowed came when he was ahead in the count. The worst offenses came in the fourth inning, when he grooved an 0-1 fastball to Kevin Kouzmanoff that resulted in a hard single up the middle, and next, after two straight curveballs that kept the bat on Mark Ellis’s shoulder, Hughes threw a belt-high fastball on the outside corner, allowing Ellis to extend his arms and line it to right for a single. This is the same issue, not coincidentally, that has been plagued both of Javier Vazquez’s Yankee tours. A strikeout pitcher has to be able to put away hitters when he’s ahead in the count. Vazquez hasn’t demonstrated that with any consistency this year, and Hughes didn’t on Tuesday.

Michael Kay summed up Hughes’s start in the YES postgame: “When you look at his numbers, 16 wins, how can you complain? But when you watched this game, that’s not the way Phil Hughes wants to pitch.”

Indeed. Despite earning that 16th win, a total which is second-most in the American League, Hughes didn’t do much to instill confidence in Yankee fans that there’s a lock-down guy in the rotation behind CC Sabathia. Hughes seems to be the epitome of why wins can be a misleading stat when rating pitchers. With Andy Pettitte’s injury situation still in flux — he’s throwing another bullpen session before tomorrow’s game — A.J. Burnett as schizophrenic as ever, and any combination of Vazquez, Dustin Moseley, Sergio Meat Tray or even Chad Gaudin behind that, many have been waiting for Hughes to step up and be the No. 2 guy, and he hasn’t. Since the All-Star Break, he is 5-4 with a 4.65 ERA. His performance over the past two starts, particularly the number of pitches thrown — 200 in 8 2/3 innings — is helping to enforce the innings limit. He has thrown 149 1/3 innings now, and figuring he has at least five more starts, if the limit is 175 innings, Hughes is essentially a five-inning starter down the stretch.

Those are the negatives. The positives in this victory were all on the offensive side. The nine runs were scored in the first four innings. Nick Swisher (25th), Curtis Granderson (15th), and Mark Teixeira (30th) all homered for the Yankees, who scored six of those runs with two outs.

Teixeira’s home run marked the seventh straight year he’s hit 30 home runs, and he’s five RBIs away from his seventh straight 100-RBI season. He also scored his Major-League leading 100th run. What a turnaround for Tex. Three months ago, in this space, I wrote a column trying to prove that while Tex’s batting average was hovering near .200 and he was getting a free pass from the mainstream media, we in the blogosphere were not being as dismissive. Now, his average is up to .264 and with a month left, .280 or even .290 isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

Tex’s batting average is now just two points behind that of Derek Jeter, who after another oh-fer has just one hit in his last 25 at-bats and is getting summarily hammered at all angles. Is this the beginning of the end? Is the contract on his mind? How can he command $20 million a year if this is the level at which he’ll be finishing his career? I heard one talkie late last week even compare Jeter’s recent slide to Willie Mays with the Mets in 1973. Are we there yet? I don’t think so. The Yankees have been able to cover for him in the same way they did Teixeira earlier this year, but we’ll see what happens in October.

The other positive of the evening: Toronto blasted Tampa, so the eight-day deadlock atop the AL East is broken. The Yankees hand their longest winning streak since the All-Star break to A.J. Burnett. Maybe a new month and a weak-hitting team is what he needs to get on the path to being right.

Nine huge hits from the three big guns in the middle of the Yankee offense blew the doors off Trevor Cahill and the A’s. Left spinning in the dust on the back of the mound was the license plate and the once-sterling (still fantastic) ERA of a fringe Cy Young candidate. Yankees 11, A’s 5.

Mark Teixeira, after missing almost two full games with a bruised thumb, Robinson Cano and Nick Swisher combined for four doubles, two home runs, and seven RBI. And since a proper one has four chambers, Marcus Thames with six homers in his last five starts, ably fills out the current heart of the order.

(About a month ago, having given up hope of rebounds from Jeter and Arod, I asked Alex if Cano and Teixeira could carry the Yanks to the division title. He said big Teix would come through and it looks like Cano and Swisher will be in the trenches with him. Thames has been amazing, but I’m not counting on it to continue, though for no other reason than he’s never been this good for this long before.)

Dustin Moseley was the beneficiary of the outpouring, not because he picked up the win (that honor went to Javy Vazquez for his four-plus innings of very effective relief) but because it spared him the loss of what probably should be his last meaningful start of the 2010 season.

Vazquez deployed a slow, loopy curve ball which sat in the high sixties. He has been throwing his curve ball both more often and harder this year than in his incredible 2009 campaign. Whether or not that factors into his poor results thus far, there’s no denying that the A’s were flummoxed by the new curve. Let’s see how it looks against the hard homerin’ Blue Jays before we get too excited.

I won’t mind if I never have to watch another Daric Barton at-bat. At least when he’s facing the Yankee pitching staff.

(more…)

The Yanks are back in the Bronx. They kick off their longest home stand of the year tonight against the Oakland A’s. Here’s Ted Berg with a preview:

And of course, our man CC does his thing.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

We know the old cliche–heck, when it comes to sports and sports writing, sometimes everything feels like a cliche–“He pitched just well enough to win,” or “He pitched good enough to lose.” Last night, Johan Santana, vexed by bad luck on a bad team, pitched just good enough to lose. Again. Meanwhile, CC Sabathia, a good pitcher on a good team, pitched poorly, but well enough to keep his team in the game.

As Tyler Kepner writes in a good column today about Felix Hernandez:

Mike Mussina used to say that the best pitchers win half their starts. Mussina did that almost precisely over 18 seasons, winning 270 of his 536 career starts. Mussina understood the finicky role luck plays in wins and losses. But he also knew that, over time, a pitcher’s luck tends to even out. He deserved 270 victories, and that is what he got.

When the smoke cleared–presumably from all the fireworks that explode after a White Sox hits a home run–the Yanks survived a wild night of offense, 12-9. A good thing, as the Rays edged-out the Red Sox. Once again, the Yanks and Rays are tied for first place.

For the best and brightest of recaps, check out our friends at: River Ave Blues, Yankeeist, the Daily News, New York Post and New York Times.

Mark Teixeira left the game early and is listed as day-to-day with a bone bruise.

[Picture by Bags]

Ace’s high tonight in Chi-Town. Every game for CC feels like a must-win. Lots of pressure, but he’s usually game.

Fresh from the Lo-Hud Oven, here’s the line-up:

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Marcus Thames DH
Jorge Posada C
Austin Kearns LF
Brett Gardner CF
Eduardo Nunez 3B

I say Nunez has a good night….

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

[Picture by Bags]

It’s still summer in the city after a grey and wet week in the Big Apple.

Yanks and White Sox play tonight. We’ll see you then.

[Pictures by Bags]

Of the three players the Yankees acquired just before the July 31st trading deadline, Austin Kearns was the least heralded. He hasn’t had the career of Lance “Big Puma” Berkman, nor the fame of Kerry Wood. He has never been an All-Star, and probably never will. So it is with some degree of astonishment that Kearns has paid just as much in dividends as the rejuvenated Wood and has had substantially more impact than the injured Berkman.

In 16 games with the Yankees, Kearns has reached base 38 per cent of the time, slugged close to .500, and played flawlessly in the outfield corners. He has become a Pat Tabler force with the bases loaded, showing a knack for coming up with timely hits in the late innings. In other words, he has been exactly the kind of player the Yankees needed in attempting to bolster their outfield depth.

In some ways, Kearns reminds me of Lou Piniella, just retired as manager of the Cubs. More specifically, it’s the way that Joe Girardi has used Kearns that is reminiscent of the role that Piniella once filled in the late 1970s. Like “Sweet Lou,” Kearns plays left field one day, right field the next, and DH’s against the odd left-hander.

That’s not to say that Kearns and Piniella are the same type of players; they’re not. Kearns is a much better defensive outfielder with a stronger arm and more power; Piniella was a better contact hitter who batted for a higher average. But they are similar in that they are the kinds of outfielders who could play every day for a bad team, but should play no more than four to five times a week for a playoff contender.

Not too much, not too little. Girardi has been using Kearns just right.

(more…)

Well, that’s one way to limit Phil Hughes’ innings.

Like lions attacking a herd of wildebeests (or whatever it is that lions attack herds of), the Blue Jays have spent this series picking off the Yankees’ young – first Ivan Nova, who was good but not quite good enough to escape two nights ago, and now Phil Hughes, who was less good. The Yankees were behind the entire game and lost 6-3 but, thanks to the Angels’ 12-3 thrashing of the Rays, remain in a tie atop the AL East.

There’s been much discussion of Hughes’ unspecified innings limit recently, and so it would, in a sense, be nice that he pitched less than four innings tonight – except that he threw 106 pitches in those three and two thirds innings, his shortest outing of the year. They were fairly high stress, and definitely frustrating, as over and over again he got a batter to two strikes before eventually allowing a hit. According to Girardi after the game,  3.2 innings is still just 3.2 innings, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Neither does bringing in Javy Vazquez in relief – it would, except I thought the whole issue was he had a dead arm and needed rest, and I don’t see how pitching 4.1 innings on short notice is going to enliven said arm. I assume the Yankee trainers know more about this than I do, so probably it’s fine… but then again with an off-day tomorrow, why push your luck? The Yankees don’t necessarily need Hughes and Vazquez at their best to have some postseason success this year, but it’s hard to see them getting far without at least one of them. Anyway, the good news is Vazquez pitched well (maybe his arm is only mostly dead?), allowing just one run, on an Aaron Hill homer, and finishing out the game.

Meanwhile, Jays starter Brett Cecil is not this good – at least, not against any other team. As the guys at River Ave Blues point out, he’s now got a 1.64 ERA against the Yanks, and a 4.21 ERA against non-Yankees. Whether that’s because he’s doing something particularly effective against the Bombers, or an accident of small sample size, I can’t really say, but in any case he was effective again tonight, allowing seven hits and two walks, but limiting the damage to two runs over eight innings. The Yankees got two runs in the fourth, when Robinson Cano doubled and Marcus Thames, batting right behind him, homered; they tacked on one more in the ninth, when Eduardo Nunez singled home Austin Kearns. It was a short-lived rally, and the Yankees head into their needed off-day still perched on top of the standings, but a bit battered- Nick Swisher’s knee is hurting now, hence his absence from tonight’s lineup.

The Yankees still have two series to play against the Blue Jays, one home and one, the last of the season, back in Toronto. So you haven’t seen the last of these guys. Presumably the Yankees and their coaches will be watching a lot of Brett Cecil video between now and then.

We’ve been away for much of the past two weeks — Seattle, Portland, and Palm Springs, in case you’re interested — and whenever I get away from the day-to-day and hour-to-hour kvetching about the Yankees, I find that the new perspective does me a world of good.  In Seattle I stayed with a college friend and met his seven-year-old son who loves — get this! — the Mariners.  A quick glance at the paper told me that the Mariners had lost almost 70 games, and there at the top of the American League’s Eastern Division, with the best record in baseball, sat the New York Yankees.  Suddenly I was less worried about Javy Vazquez’s dead arm, Joe Girardi’s managerial quirks, and Alex Rodríguez’s power outage.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t be worried, nor am I saying that I won’t be worried about all those things tomorrow, I’m just saying.

Tuesday night’s game against the Toronto Blue Jays, a bottom-dwelling team that’s given the Yanks fits all year long, was the first game I’d watched end to end in quite a while, and it was a great way to get back in the swing of things.  The Score Truck started rolling early, modestly at first with a run in the first (courtesy of Mark Teixeira’s 90th RBI) and another in the second when Eduardo Nuñez beat out a would-be 4-6-3, allowing Jorge Posada to score, but then things started really heating up.  Toronto lefty Marc Rzepczynski (somewhere, Diane Firstman is smiling) was walking a fine edge in the first two innings; he’d fall off in the third.  (And by the way, you know that old probability bit that says if you put a hundred monkeys into a room with a hundred typewriters, you’d eventually get “Romeo and Juliet” if given enough time?  I think if you give one typewriter to one monkey and put him in a closet for thirty seconds, you’d probably get “Rzepczynski”.)

With one out in the third, Teixeira launched a shot to left that warranted no more than a courtesy glance from left fielder Travis Snider.  Robinson Canó walked, and then Marcus Thames launched a shot to left that warranted no more than a courtesy glance from left fielder Travis Snider.  Next up, Jorge Posada launched a shot to left that warranted… you get the idea.

It was 6-0 at that point, but the Score Truckers weren’t finished — Curtis Granderson added a three-run blast in the fifth, and two batters later Derek Jeter homered, his tenth of the year, but his first hit over the fence since way back on June 12th.  Another run would score in the sixth, bringing the total to eleven, and that was enough.

The beneficiary of all this was my friend Dustin Moseley.  He skipped through the first three innings, and when he finally saw some trouble in the fourth, allowing a run by giving up a walk and two singles to open the frame, he minimized the damage by setting down the next three hitters.  He gave up another run in the sixth on a bases-loaded single by John Buck, but this time it was Granderson who minimized the damage as he threw out Adam Lind at the plate to end the inning.  Later in the game, as Ken Singleton and John Flaherty were making small talk in the closing innings of a blowout, Flash said something I never thought I’d hear someone say: “This was a good game for the Yankees, as they got Dustin Moseley straightened out.”  Really?  Dustin Moseley is that important?  I think I’m starting to worry again.

Chad Gaudin coughed up a few runs in the eighth, Kerry Wood closed out the ninth, and everyone went home happy.  Yankees 11, Blue Jays 5.

Git it in gear, fellas. That sombitch Bautista hit a game-winning dinger and spit in yer grill last night. You gunna just take that?

We’ll be root-root-rootin’ you on…

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

[Picture by Bags]