The one positive to A.J. Burnett crapping the bed Saturday evening is that we now get one heck of a rubber game to cap off this hotly-anticipated series between the Yankees and Dodgers. Starting for the visiting Yankees is Andy Pettitte, who has been one of the best pitchers in the American League thus far this season and is having his best season as a Yankee at the age of 38. Pettitte has averaged 7 1/3 innings pitched over his last six starts while posting a 2.25 ERA, 0.98 WHIP, 7.6 K/9, and 4.11 K/BB. Every single one of those six outings has been a quality start, and Pettitte hasn’t allowed more than two earned runs in any of them. In fact, Andy has allowed more than two earned runs in just two of his 14 starts this season.

Opposing Pettitte will be 22-year-old lefty Clayton Kershaw, who was the seventh-overall pick in the 2006 draft. Kershaw allowed more than two runs, earned or otherwise, in just two of his first 11 starts, but has fallen off a bit in June, allowing three or more runs in three of four starts. Not that he’s been bad. He’s 2-1 with a 3.90 ERA and 10.1 K/9 in his four June starts, his only real dud being his last start in which he gave up five runs in 6 2/3 innings against the Angels, all of those runs coming in his final two frames. The Yankees should be able to get their walks against Kershaw, but his impressive four-pitch arsenal (which includes a mid-90s fastball, big yakker of a curve, changeup, and slider), has shut-down potential. Over the past two seasons, a stretch of 262 2/3 innings, Kershaw has posted a 2.95 ERA and struck out 9.9 men per nine innings.

For those of you wondering if Joe Girardi would leave Curtis Granderson in the lineup against a tough lefty like Kershaw in a rubber game, the answer is yes (you’d prefer Chad Huffman, a player with just one major league hit to his name, or Kevin Russo, who is hitting .196/.260/.239 in 51 plate appearances?), but he’s dropped him to seventh in the order. Swisher bats second. Posada is back behind the plate and batting sixth. Marcus Thames, meanwhile, joined Triple-A Scranton last Tuesday, but has yet to begin playing rehab games there.

All-City.

[Picture by Bags]

On Friday night, Edwin Jackson became the third pitcher to no-hit the Tampa Bay Rays in the last calendar year. No team has ever been no-hit three times in a 12-month span before. What’s more, the Rays are one of the best teams in baseball and have one of the top offenses in the game.

What gives? I search for an answer to that over at SI.com.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Yankee offense did it’s best to keep ahead of A.J. Burnett’s advancing vortex of suck Saturday evening. Before Dodger starter Hiroki Kuroda could record an out, the Yankees were up 3-0 thanks to walks to birthday boy Derek Jeter and Curtis Granderson and a home run by Mark Teixeira, who extended an eight-game hitting streak during which he has homered as many times as he’s struck out (thrice each). Burnett gave two of those runs back in the bottom of the first, the big hit being an RBI double by Manny Ramirez on a fastball up in the zone, but he worked around a walk in the second and the Yankees got a run back in the third on singles by Jeter and Granderson and a throwing non-error by Blake DeWitt on a would-be double play pivot.

That 4-2 lead lasted all of four batters. Burnett’s bottom of the third started with a five-pitch walk to Matt Kemp, an Andre Ethier single, a wild pitch that moved both runners up, a walk to Ramirez to load the bases, and a game-tying single by James Loney. After a five-pitch walk to Casey Blake to reload the bases, Burnett got Russell Martin to hit into a double play, though the go-ahead run scored in the process. Burnett then walked DeWitt and struck out the pitcher, Kuroda, to end the inning.

Amazingly. Shockingly. Stunningly, after that performance, Joe Girardi let Burnett hit with runners on the corners and one out in the top of the fourth. Burnett sacrificed, but didn’t squeeze, trading an out for putting a second runner into scoring position. Kuroda then struck out Jeter on three pitches to end the threat.

If it wasn’t already clear that Girardi was less than fully committed to trying to win the game at the expense of blowing out his bullpen, after Burnett lasted just two batters in the bottom of the fourth, he brought in Boone Logan, who suddenly seems to be some sort of long man for Girardi despite the fact that righties were hitting .289/.372/.421 against him entering yesterday’s action. Logan swelled the Dodger lead to 7-4, after which Chan Ho Park added on a couple more runs to set the final at 9-4.

Meanwhile, Kuroda quashed a two-out Yankee rally in the fifth, and fireballing lefty Hong-Chih Kuo stranded two runners for Kuroda in the sixth. The Yankees did bounce old frenemy Jeff Weaver before he could complete the eighth, but George Sherrill and Jonathon Broxton shut things down from there.

Burnett is now 0-5 with a 11.35 ERA in June. By way of comparison, Javier Vazquez had a 9.78 ERA in his first five starts of the year in which the Yankees went 1-4. That was enough for the Yankees to skip Javy’s next turn. Ivan Nova, meanwhile, has a 1.34 ERA over his last five starts for Triple-A Scranton. Nova threw three scoreless, walkless innings for the Yankees in mid May. I say it’s time to give him another look and let A.J. work things out in the bullpen for a while. Logan can be optioned to make room for Nova.

You couldn’t really have asked for much more than Friday night’s game delivered: a tense pitching duel; Alex Rodriguez coming up big in what for him was a grudge match against his former skipper; a little bit of hit-batsman antagonism with Vicente Padilla, but everything kept safely below the waist; CC Sabathia coming up big and striking out his last man in the eighth; Mariano Rivera coming in to face Manny Ramirez, who had an RBI single and a dropped fly ball earlier in the game, and striking out the side to pick up the save with no margin for error in a 2-1 win. It won’t get better than that, so I hope you all stayed up for it.

In fact, with A.J. Burnett on the mound this evening, things could get a lot worse in a hurry. Burnett has gone from poor to awful in June, providing a counterweigh to Sabathia’s strong month by going 0-4 with a 10.35 ERA in four starts while allowing nine home runs in just 20 innings pitched, inflating his season ERA by a run and a half in the process. Part of Burnett’s inconsistency is that you don’t expect his struggles to last long, either, but it seems as though each of Burnett’s starts this month has been worse than the last (not exactly true, but close), and with Dave Eiland on leave for a personal matter there are some have begun to wonder if Mike Harkey isn’t up to the task of getting Burnett back on track, while others, including the general manager, are wondering if Burnett is tipping his pitches.

To make matters worse, the pitcher opposing Burnett this evening, Hiroki Kuroda, is just the kind of crafty, off-speed groundballer prone to giving the Yankees fits. Even if he wasn’t, his success this season speaks for itself (3.06 ERA, 2.92 K/BB, career-best 7.1 K/9). In stark contrast to Burnett, Kuroda has been aces in his last three starts, the last two of which have come against the best offense in each league, the Reds and Red Sox, in those teams’ hitting-friendly ballparks. In total, Kuroda has posted a 0.95 ERA with 23 Ks in 19 innings against just four walks and no homers in those three starts (the third of which came at home against the Cardinals, who have some dangerous hitters themselves). That line works out to a 10.9 K/9 and 5.75 K/BB to go with that sub-1.00 ERA and 0.89 WHIP.

Gulp.

Jorge Posada, who fouled a pitch off his healing right foot last night but stayed in the game, gets the night off. Francisco Cervelli hits seventh ahead of Brett Gardner and Burnett. Curtis Granderson remains in the two-hole. Nick Swisher bats sixth.

The good news is that, if the Yankees do drop this game, as it seems they’re likely to do, it sets up a hell of a rubber game on ESPN tomorrow night with the Dodgers’ young lefty ace Clayton Kershaw facing off against veteran southpaw Andy Pettitte, who thus far is having his finest season as a Yankee at the age of 38. Well, that and the fact that you won’t have to stay up ’til 1am to watch the carnage tonight.

Very hot, very hot.

It’s as hot outside as Mattingly was last night after the last out.

Keep cool.

[Picture by Bags]

I’m pretty jazzed up for this weekend’s interleague set between the Yankees and Dodgers. Not just because of the familiar faces in the opposing dugout (yes, Joe Torre, but also Don Mattingly, who has also never been part of the Yankees’ opposition before tonight and who never wore another team’s uniform before following Torre to L.A. for the 2008 season, and former undesirables Manny Ramirez and Jeff Weaver, whose presence helps stir the emotional pot), but because it’s Yankees-Dodgers. This matchup was the greatest World Series rivalry in baseball history. From 1947 to 1956, the Yankees and Dodgers met in the World Series six times in ten years, and from 1977 to 1981 they met three more times in a five-year span. Altogether, the Yankees and Dodgers have played 11 World Series against one another, the most of any paring in major league history, with the Yankees holding a 8-3 advantage in those Series.

Given that history, it’s shocking to me that this is just the second interleague meeting between the two teams and that they have yet to play an interleague game in the Bronx (which means the the final dozen years of Yankee Stadium’s existence passed without such a matchup). Since the Dodgers come-from-behind victory in the 1981 World Series, the Yankees and Dodgers have played just one series, a three-game set in Chavez Ravine in mid-June of 2004 that the Dodgers took two games to one. The winning pitchers in that series were Brad Halsey for the Yankees in the middle game and Weaver (who, in his first Dodgers stint immediately following the Kevin Brown trade, beat Javy Vazquez in his first  stint with the Yankees) and the late Jose Lima for the Dodgers.

This year, Weaver is in the bullpen and Vazquez won’t pitch until the Yankees return home next week, but the matchup is even more compelling. Beyond that history and the familiar faces, this series pits the defending world champions against the team that lost the last two National League Championship Series. Say what you want about Joe Torre, but he has kept his postseason streak alive since leaving the Bronx.

I figured the Dodgers would make it 15 straight seasons for Torre before this season started, and though they got off to a slow start (13-17 and six games out of first place on May 8), they turned things around in a hurry with a nine-game winning streak, the start of a 23-7 run from May 9 to June 9 that put them a game ahead of the inexplicable Padres. They’ve only won three of their last 12 since then, however, and have fallen back to third place, three games behind San Diego. Included in that swoon has been a 1-5 performance against their local rivals in Anaheim and a three-game sweep at the hands of the surging Red Sox in Boston, where the return of Ramirez and old rival Torre added a similar charge of emotion.

The bad news for Yankee fans is that despite the Dodgers slide, Manny has been red-hot, hitting .421/.463/.711 with three homers in his last ten games (nine starts) and enters this game with a six-game hitting streak. The Dodgers are finally seeing some signs of life from Andre Ethier as well. Ethier was having an out-of-his-mind season before breaking a finger in batting practice in mid-May. He didn’t hit a lick upon returning on May 31, but has gone 5-for-13 with a pair of doubles in his last three games. The same goes for Matt Kemp, who slumped badly for most of June but went 4-for-13 with a double and a homer in those three games. The Dodgers also just got Rafael Furcal back in the lineup after he missed close to a week on bereavement leave.

The most favorable pitching matchup in this weekend’s series for the Yankees is tonight’s as CC Sabathia takes on Vicente Padilla. CC has been sharp in June, going 4-0 with a 2.48 ERA 28 strikeouts in 29 innings, a 3.11 K/BB and just two home runs allowed, both in his first start of the month. Padilla, meanwhile, has made just one start since April 22 due to a nerve irritation in his right forearm that shelved him for nearly two months. Padilla gave up four runs in 5 1/3 innings at Fenway his last time out. In his last start against the Yankees, on June 2 of last year while he was still a Texas Ranger, he gave up seven runs in 3 2/3 innings.

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Tyler Kepner on the one and only, Vin Scully.

[Picture by Bags]

Yanks have the night off, but feel free to fall through and chatter about whatever catches yer fancy.

Stay cool now, y’hear?

[Picture by Bags]

“The site is supposed to be located on an ancient Indian Burial Ground…”

 Is The Shining a scary film? I don’t know. It certainly sticks with you and comes back to you, not always at the best of times. I think it’s because Stanley Kubrick has seared a few incredibly disturbing images onto our collective consciousness – an accomplishment that stands up just as well as if he had made a great film. Or maybe that’s the same thing.

The movie was not well received in 1980. But it would have taken a visionary critic to have foreseen the lasting impact of this film, and there is a lot to criticize even if someone had been such a visionary. Roger Ebert gave it a “Thumbs Down” initially, and then in 2006, he reconsidered and included it in his reviews of Great Movies.

To get the plot out of the way, because that is the least important thing about The Shining, Jack Torrance (a revved up Jack Nicholson) agrees to become caretaker of a haunted hotel and almost instantly loses his marbles and tries to kill his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son (Danny Lloyd). Though he is pretty much off-the-deep-end after the first snowstorm, his madness is fairly directionless until a couple of experienced ghosts counsel him on the finer points of axe-wielding and wife-hacking. The breakneck speed of Jack’s descent and the ultimately useless side story of the telepathic son and chef (Scatman Crothers) are poorly draped around some of the spookiest and most indelible images from the entirety of horror-film history:

The winding mountain road.

Danny’s ever present Big Wheelish Trike.

The blood in the elevator.

The twins.

Jack’s demonic facial contortions.

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Leeches; Orcs; Johan Santana’s recent talks with the Mets’ PR department; Abe Vigoda’s armpit; C.H.U.D.s; this guy; Newark; the 2010 Orioles; Don Mossi.

What do those things have in common? They’re all prettier than tonight’s steaming pile of an excuse for a ballgame. And yet, in the end… I wasn’t totally sorry I watched. That’s thanks to the go-ahead Curtis Granderson homer in the 10th inning, and Marian River’s ultra-dramatic white-knuckle save to preserve the Yanks’ 6-5 win. But, lord, you did not want to watch them making that sausage.

I began the evening feeling sorry for Dontrelle Willis – a fun, charismatic player who I loved watching in his prime, which feels like it was a long, long time ago now (…but then, the third inning feels like it was a long, long time ago now). An hour or two later I mostly felt bad for myself and anybody else still watching the slow-motion tragicomedy of errors well after 1 AM on the east coast. The fact that the Yankees eventually came back from their self-dug grave and pulled a win out of their caps made it more bearable, of course, but still, all traces of this game should probably be scrubbed from the archives immediately to protect the public.

You will, I hope, forgive me for not giving you a complete blow-by-blow of this game, but it’s late, I’m tired, I had to delete most of the writeup I had ready in the ninth, and this is a family website. Willis went just 2.1 innings, gave up two hits, and walked seven. It was excruciating to watch, and he left, head hanging, after walking Alex Rodriguez to force in a run. The fact that the Diamondbacks got out of that inning with the score tied at 2 is a testament to how sloppy the Yankees were playing all night – numerous outs made on the bases, often dumb ones; swinging at all kinds of things they shouldn’t be swinging at. By the end of the game the Bombers had amassed 10 hits and 13 walks (!) with six runs to show for it; early in the game that ratio looked even worse. Damaso Marte added some nice flourishes in the sixth inning with a balk and a wild pitch. Going into the ninth, the Yankees were down 5-4 and I was not exactly brimming with confidence, despite the reassuring presence of old friend Aaron Heilman on the mound.

“They play 162, and they can’t all be Rembrandts,” someone wrote to me on Twitter while I was bemoaning this festering eyesore. Which is true. But surely there’s plenty of middle ground between a Rembrandt and this, which is really more of a monkey-painting-the-cage-wall-with-its-own-feces sort of a game.

Or at least that’s what I was thinking before the ninth and tenth innings. It wasn’t a Rembrandt but maybe it was, I dunno, a lesser Basquiat or something. In the end, I was glad I’d stayed up for it – it certainly wasn’t dull. That said, as I wrote last night: just because you made it home okay, doesn’t mean it was all right to drive drunk and high on meth, you know?

—

Runner-up titles for this post:

This Game’s so ugly, it couldn’t get laid in a prison with a handful of pardons.

This Game’s so ugly, I took it to a haunted house and it came out with a job application.

This Game’s so ugly, even the tide won’t take it out.

War Pigs

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

–from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751)

Depending on where you want to draw the line, Paths of Glory was either Stanley Kubrick’s fourth feature film or his second. Taking an inclusive view, his first two features were  Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer’s Kiss (1955). However, Kubrick later disowned the former, and both were independent, self-financed films that ran 72 and 67 minutes, respectively, and employed minimal crews comprised largely of family and friends.

Taking the exclusive view, Kubrick’s proper film-making career began with 1956’s The Killing (which Matt will visit later this week). The first of three films (along with Paths of Glory and Lolita) made under the auspices of a production company formed by Kubrick and fellow New Yorker James B. Harris, The Killing was Kubrick’s first experience with a proper crew, an actual budget (though still minimal, it was provided by distributor United Artists), and a real-life movie star, Sterling Hayden (who would later reunite with Kubrick as Brigadier General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove), and it propelled him into the big time.

Still considered an essential film noir, The Killing caught the eye of Kirk Douglas, who lept at the chance to star in Kubrick’s next project, an adaptation of Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel Paths of Glory. (Three years later, Douglas would tap Kubrick to replace Anthony Mann as the director of his Roman epic Spartacus.) The novel (and film) center on an abuse of power by French officers during World War I supposedly inspired by the Souain corporals affair in which four French soldiers serving under General Géraud Réveilhac were unfairly executed for mutiny.

The film was Kubrick’s first to be set and shot outside of the United States (set in France, it was filmed in Germany, likely due to it’s portrayal of the French officers; the film was banned in France until 1975), and it was by far his most elaborate and high-profile production to that point. Watching it now, the 87-minute film shot in black-and-white in the old, boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio with a mono soundtrack, seems modest and quaint by the director’s later standards, which is part of it’s appeal. Paths of Glory is by far the most direct film in Kubrick’s discography. Lolita was nearly twice as long, and Dr. Strangelove, while similar in many ways in terms of format and theme, was far busier and complex. Even The Killing had a fractured chronology, which would later be a key inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s early films.

Paths of Glory, by comparison, is an exceedingly straight-forward film in terms of plot, theme, and structure. The first two thirds play like a typical court-martial film, one obvious comparison being The Cain Mutiny, starring Humphrey Bogart, which came out three years earlier. Paths is neatly bifurcated. The first half of the film sets up and executes the key events and the second half of the film unfolds the fallout from those events, but it is not a trial movie. The court martial itself turns out to be little more than a show trial that takes up just ten minutes of screen time, and the verdict is revealed with a third of the film’s running time remaining.

Warning: Spoilers below

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Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Do you remember what it was like to be ten years old, to grip a bat in your hand and mimic your favorite player’s batting stance as you stared out at the pitcher?  Everything stopped for that moment as you used the bat to gently stir the air behind your head and the pitcher stared in at the target, contemplating his next pitch.  The beautiful thing about baseball is that most of us can relate to that moment.

More importantly, you can relate to the dream.  You can imagine how it would feel to pull on a major league jersey for the first time, to step up to the plate against a major league pitcher and simply do what you’ve done hundreds of thousands of times — put the bat on the ball and run to first base.  When the ball finds the grass you take a professional turn around first and then do your best to look calm and nonchalant as you head back to the bag and casually bump fists with the first base coach, all the while watching out of the corner of your eye to be sure that the ball finds its way into your dugout.  And then if you’re lucky, you look up into the stands and you see your mother and father in the crowd.  They’re easy to spot, because they’re the ones who are jumping and cheering with tears in their eyes, no doubt thinking of all the skinned knees, all the games of catch, all the Little League games, and all the trips to the batting cages that led to this one base hit.  In that moment, it doesn’t matter if any of it happens again, only that it happened once.

There are a lot of reasons why I love baseball, but moments like these are high on the list.  Basketball players don’t care much about their first basket, and I’m guessing that even quarterbacks forget their first touchdowns, but there seems to be something magical about a player’s first hit.  Every once in a while, like Tuesday night in Arizona, we get to share in that moment.

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Detail of a New York City Splat Shot by Bags

2001: Thus Yawned Zarathustra

Before you freak out, let me assure you that I’m not saying 2001: A Space Odyssey is a bad movie. I’m not saying it’s not well-made, beautifully crafted, and culturally significant. I’m not saying it doesn’t have interesting, thoughtful things to say about human consciousness and technology and the nature of intelligent life.

I’m just saying I don’t like it.

I tried, I really did. I watched it in high school, and was ashamed to find myself bored. I watched it on the big screen in college, as a film major, and fell asleep. I watched it later in college – this time with the help of substances my friend was sure would help me “get it” – and fell asleep much faster. After loving Dr. Strangelove and Lolita I watched it one more time, just to make sure, because I felt my failure to embrace or even tolerate 2001 was one of my greatest failings as a film major.

I still don’t like it.

Partly this is just personal preference – the movies I love most tend to have involving, well-drawn characters and great dialogue, and even Stanley Kubrick’s most ardent admirers surely can’t claim that for this movie. I’m not especially visual, so while I can love and appreciate great cinematography or camerawork when I see it, movies like this (or for example, Solaris) which are almost entirely about their images just don’t tend to grab me, through no fault of their own.

But my issues with 2001 run deeper: I can think of very, very few films that take themselves this seriously. And there’s nothing wrong with being serious about art, but in my view 2001 crosses the line into pompous pretension early on and never makes it back. Any movie that begins with the chyron “THE DAWN OF MAN,” and is not a Mel Brooks comedy, is unlikely to hit the mark for me.

Can I remind you that this movie leads off with fifteen minutes of people in monkey suits hopping around and screeching. Fifteen minutes. God forgive me, but rewatching it today on YouTube in preparation for this post, all I could think of was the Star Wars Holiday Special and its opening 20 minutes, which are nearly entirely in Wookie, sans subtitles.

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Nathan Denette/Associated Press

So if you’re just waking up and wondering how things went with the Yankees while you were sleeping, I don’t have a lot of good news to report.  It all started out okay, as A.J. Burnett retired the first two Arizona hitters relatively quickly, prompting Michael Kay to wonder aloud if Burnett would be able to have a 1-2-3 first inning, which would be his first in nine starts.  Justin Upton ended the suspense almost immediately by rocketing a 430-foot home run to straight-away center field.  But that was only the beginning.  Following Upton’s blast, five more hitters paraded to the plate with these results: single, single, home run, home run, double.  Thankfully the game was being played under National League rules, so Burnett was able to stop the damage by striking out pitcher Rodrigo López, but it was already 5-0.

Burnett started the second inning the same as he had the first, by retiring Kelly Johnson and Stephen Drew, but with two outs and the bases empty, the Diamondbacks had him right where they wanted him.  Upton singled and promptly came home on a long double by Miguel Montero, bumping the lead to six.

The third inning was uneventful, but Burnett returned to his pattern in the fourth, retiring Johnson and Drew just as he had in the first and second innings.  Upton drew a walk, stole second, then came home on a Montero single to put Arizona up by a touchdown.  Burnett would retire the next hitter to escape without further damage, but it would still be the end of his night.  Four innings pitched, nine hits, seven runs, three home runs — and all of that came after two were out in the inning.

Rodrígo López, meanwhile, was making like Greg Maddux.  He kept the Yankee hitters off balance all night long by changing speeds (sound familiar?) and throwing strikes.  He was so efficient, in fact, that 12 of the first 15 Yankee hitters started out with strike one, and ten of those twelve were called strikes.  Brett Gardner managed four base hits (a slap to left, a drag bunt, and two other infield singles), but everyone else seemed to be just missing all night long.  Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira, and Alex Rodríguez seemed to end each at bat by tossing their bats away in frustration.

Even so, they were able to scratch out three runs to cut the lead to 7-3 while Chad Gaudin held down the fort with two scoreless innings of relief.  Chan Ho Park follwed up with a scoreless seventh, and there were two moments when a big hit could’ve cut the lead down to something more manageable, but it never quite happened.  CHP ran into some trouble in the eighth, putting two men on with two outs.  (Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before.)  Facing Upton, Park jumped out to an 0-2 advantage, but then quickly worked himself into a full count.  Apparently worried about walking Upton, Park instead called timeout and ran into the dugout.  He returned with a batter’s tee, set it down on home plate, placed the ball on the tee, and got out of the way.  Upton deposited the ball 408 feet away in the left field stands, and the game was over.  Diamondbacks 10, Yankees 4.

In other news, the Yankees decided that Phil Hughes will be skipped when his turn comes up this Friday. It’s probably a good thing, since the off-days allow them to move everyone else up without having to pitch on short rest, and it will help keep Hughes’s innings down.  But coming when it did, while the team’s worst starter continued to spiral downward, it was troubling to learn that its best starter wouldn’t be back on the mound for more than a week.

In 2007, the Diamondbacks won the National League central with a 90-72 record despite a negative run differential that translated to a 79-83 Pythagorean record. That team, which swept the Cubs in the Division Series only to be swept by the Rockies in the NLCS, was flush with young talent including shortstop Stephen Drew, second baseman Alberto Callaspo (then a backup to Orlando Hudson), and right-fielder Carlos Quentin (all 24), third baseman Mark Reynolds, center fielder Chris Young, and back-up catcher Miguel Montero (all 23), 19-year-old right-fielder Justin Upton, 25-year-old first baseman Conor Jackson, 26-year-old catcher Chris Snyder.

That winter, Arizona flipped Quentin to the White Sox for first-base prospect Chris Carter (not the one on the Mets, the now-23-year-old slugger who lurks in Sacramento as one of the top prospects in the American League) then made a big-splash by trading Carter to the A’s with outfielder Carlos Gonzalez and left-hander Brett Anderson, among others, for starter Dan Haren. Haren, then 27, partnered with the then-29-year-old Brandon Webb to give the Diamondbacks a tremendous 1-2 punch in their rotation, and with a lineup filled with developing young talent, the team looked ready for a big break out after experiencing a bit of correction with an 82-80 second-place finish in 2008.

I was one of four SI.com “experts” to pick the Diamondbacks to win the NL West in 2009, but all of us were surely banking on the impact of Webb and Haren atop the rotation. Instead, Webb got smacked around for four innings on Opening Day and hasn’t pitched since due to shoulder issues, surgery, and subsequent set-backs. Mind you, this was a pitcher who from 2006 to 2008 went 56-25 (.691) with a 3.13 ERA and finished in the top two in the Cy Young voting each year, winning in ’06.

That was a devastating loss, but it was made no easier by the fact that the young talent in the Arizona lineup has failed to coalesce into a productive offense. Callaspo was, like Quentin, traded after the 2007 season, ultimately yielding Dontrelle Willis (via Billy Buckner) earlier this month. As for the rest, Jackson never developed power, came down with Valley Fever last year, and didn’t seem fully recovered this spring before being flipped to the A’s last week for closer prospect Sam Demel. Stephen Drew, J.D.’s little brother, slugged .502 with 21 homers in 2008 and looked primed for a breakout, but has hit just .266/.328/.430 since. Young was two stolen bases shy of a 30/30 season in 2007, but saw his production decline each of the last two years, though he seems to have finally righted his ship this season. Upton showed steady progress the last two years, but is striking out at an alarming rate this year (92 Ks in 67 games) and has seen his production regress in turn (.247/.326/.429). Montero claimed the catching job from Snyder with a break out season last year, but has played just 12 games thus far this year due to knee surgery.

Then there’s Reynolds, who had perhaps one of the most unique offensive seasons in baseball history last year when he hit 44 home runs, stole 24 bases, and shattered his own single-season strikeout record by wiffing 223 times. Reynolds’ positives (314 total bases plus 76 walks and those steals at a 73 percent success rate) out-weighed all those Ks last year, but he’s testing that balance this year having already struck out 99 times while hitting just .215/.327/.472 and stealing just three bases.

To that frustrating core, the Diamondbacks have added reheated ex-Braves Adam LaRoche and Kelly Johnson at first and second base, respectively. Johnson started the season with a wholly unexpected barrage of home runs (9 in April), but has hit just four more since while hitting .244/.355/.399. LaRoche, perhaps the game’s most notorious second-half hitter, typically hits the turbo boost around this time of year and has hit .300/.363/.546 after the All-Star break in his career.

That all adds up to one of the NL’s better offenses thus far this season, but it also makes for one of the league’s worst defenses, and the pitching staff, without Webb and with Haren’s ERA inflated by bad luck on both balls in play and fly balls leaving the yard, is suffering for it. Curiously, old pal Ian Kennedy has actually had very good luck on balls in play, and thus leads the Snakes’ staff in ERA despite a similar home run problem (which has not been a product of his new home park). Edwin Jackson, who accompanied Kennedy to Arizona in the three-way Curtis Granderson deal, however, is having similar problems to Haren, his BABIP having lept up from .278 last year to .326 this year.

The D’backs’ bullpen, meanwhile, has just been flat awful, posting a 7.14 ERA, blowing 12 saves and picking up 16 losses. Closer Chad Qualls has lost his job to ex-Met Aaron Heilman, the only Arizona reliever with an ERA below 4.00. The less said about the rest of the pen the better other than to point out that the pen has contributed to the Diamondbacks allowing the most runs in baseball thus far, having allowed 38 percent of the 405 the Snakes have give up.

Perhaps all you need to know about the Diamondbacks pitching is that tonight A.J. Burnett faces Rodrigo Lopez. Lopez resurrected his career (briefly) as a fill-in for the Phillies last year, going 3-1 with a 5.70 ERA in five starts and a pair of relief appearances. He’s been a rotation regular for the D’backs this year and pitching pretty much in line with his career rates, which means he’s not a far cry from the pitcher you might remember from his five years with the Orioles from 2002 to 2006. Lopez’s main trick this year has been pitching efficiently enough to go deep into games regardless of his ability to keep runs off the board (a product of that lousy bullpen). In his last two starts, Lopez pitched 14 innings, but allowed 11 runs. Burnett, meanwhile, is in the middle of a full-on skid, having gone 0-3 with a 9.00 ERA across just 16 innings over his last three starts. More bad numbers from those last three: nine walks against ten Ks, three hit batsmen, and six home runs allowed.

Meanwhile, outfielder Colin Curtis has been called up from Triple-A, replacing Chad Moeller on the 25- and 40-man rosters. A fourth-round pick out of Arizona State (which has also produced Ike Davis and Mike Leake in recent years) in the Yankees boffo 2006 draft, Curtis disappointed up on hitting Double-A in mid 2007, hitting .250/.311/.359 in 1,343 plate appearances above High-A from 2007 to 2009. Curtis reportedly fixed his swing before appearing in the Arizona Fall League last fall and raked there (in a hitting-friendly environment), in spring training, and for Triple-A Scranton in April (.339/.435/.441), but an ankle sprain interrupted his season and he’s been back to being awful since returning to action, hitting .226/.284/.306 in June. Even with his strong start, he’s homerless on the season. Curtis, now 25, bats lefty with a reverse split (at least this season) and can play all three outfield positions. I don’t see the point, but then I didn’t see the point in Moeller, either.

Joe Girardi runs out his primary lineup tonight. Remember, there’s no designated hitter, so A.J. Burnett hits ninth behind Brett Gardner.

(more…)

Hey, y’all. Sorry for the delay in posting yesterday’s recap. It’ll be up jiffy. Then, we’re back to our regular schedule. Hold tight…

[Picture by Bags]

Man, it’s a hot one out there. Damned Mets are hot, while the Yanks are decidedly not.

Still, the Bombers remain tied for first place with the Rays. The Can’t-You-Hear-Me-Knockin’ Sox are just a game back.

Hope everyone is staying cool.

[Picture by Bags]

It’s official, the Yankees are in a team hitting slump. Since opening up a can of Whoop-Ass on Roy Halladay on Tuesday, the Yankees have scored a total of four runs in three games started by 47-year-old Jamie Moyer, Phillies’ sixth-starter Kyle Kendrick, and Mets fill-in Hisanori Takahashi, and two of those runs came on solo homers off Moyer.

Through the first five innings against Takahashi Friday night, the Yankees managed just a walk and two singles. One of those singles, an infield hit to second base by Derek Jeter, should have been ruled an error as Mets first baseman Ike Davis dropped the throw on a bang-bang play on which the ball hit Davis’s glove an instant before Jeter’s foot hit the bag. That, by the way, stands as Jeter’s only hit in the last four games. He is “2”-for-21 with two walks and a caught stealing in his last five.

Nonetheless the game was a compelling one, because Javier Vazquez nearly matched Takahashi pitch-for-pitch. In fact, through the first seven innings, the difference in the game was a matter of mere inches on a play at home with two outs in the top of the first.

Vazquez got the first two outs of the game on six pitches, but the red-hot David Wright spoiled things with a two-out double into the left-field corner. Ike Davis followed with a single into right. As Wright rounded third, Nick Swisher uncorked a strong throw to the plate. However, while the ball was in the air, Francisco Cervelli inched just slightly up the first base line for the catch. Wright saw that and slid to the far side of the plate. Cervelli caught the ball and lunged, but just missed Wright’s left arm, which Wright then stuck out to catch the tip of the plate with his fingertips.

Watching it live, I thought Wright had failed to touch home, but on replay I noticed a telltale streak of dirt across the point of the plate, which was otherwise sparkling clean given that the game was just 11 pitches old. Cervelli was convinced he had tagged Wright, but replays proved he didn’t.

That was it for seven innings. Vazquez pitched around a two-out single in the second, then didn’t allow another baserunner until the sixth, when he walked two men only to have the first of them, Angel Pagan, caught stealing by Cervelli from his knees. Vazquez then struck out Davis to end that non-threat and pitched around a two-out walk in the seventh as well. His final line was a sparkling 7 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 3 BB, 4 K, with all three of those walks coming in his final two innings.

The only downside to Vazquez’s outing was that one run, which slipped in by the smallest of margins, and the Yankees’ complete inability to do anything to support him.

The Yankees didn’t get a man past first base until the sixth, when, with one out, Nick Swisher and Mark Teixeira delivered consecutive hard singles up the middle to put men on first and second. Takahashi got Alex Rodriguez to ground out for the second out, and while that moved the runners up, it also allowed Takahashi to pitch around Robinson Cano, who walked on eight pitches. That brought up Jorge Posada, who was essentially the entire Yankee offense through the first five innings, owning both the walk and the only legitimate single. However, Posada chopped Takahashi’s 0-1 pitch to the third base side of the mound where David Wright charged it and made a great, bare-handed play that proved a bit excessive as he threw Posada bout by about 15 feet.

With Elmer Dessens on in relief of Takahashi, who passed 100 pitches during the Yankees’ sixth-inning rally, Cervelli, likely still burning from that play in the top of the first, led off the seventh with a double. With the lefty starter out of the game, Joe Girardi then called on Curtis Granderson to pitch-hit, but Jerry Manuel countered with ace LOOGY sidearmer Pedro Feliciano, who struck out Granderson. Brett Gardner did what Granderson couldn’t grounding to the right side to get Cervelli to third, but it was of little use after Granderson’s out, particularly as the slumping Jeter tapped out to Feliciano on the first pitch to strand Cervelli at third.

Then things fell apart. Girardi went to Chan Ho Park to start the eighth, and Park coughed up two runs to the first three hitters he faced before recording a single out. Boone Logan cleaned up that mess, but then yielded a run of his own in the ninth to make it 4-0 Mets.

For their part, the offense got a man to second in the eight when Nick Swisher led off with a single then ill-advisedly took second on a fly out to left, benefiting from another dropped ball on what was ruled an assist and an error, but stranded him there when Feliciano struck out Rodriguez and got Cano to fly out.

With lefty Raul Valdes on in the ninth, the Yankees built another rally on one-out singles by Cervelli and Granderson, forcing Manuel to call on his closer, Francisco Rodriguez. Gardner greated Rodriguez with a 12-pitch battle that saw him foul off seven pitches including five 3-2 offerings before finally getting ball four to load the bases, but Rodriguez struck out Jeter on three pitches, the last an unsuccessfully checked swing, and Swisher fouled out to Wright to end the threat and the game.

The Yankees are now 12-12 in games against left-handed starting pitchers and are on a three-game losing streak having gone 2-5 in their last seven games against teams with winning records. They also now face having to beat the Mets’ two-best starters, Mike Pelfrey and Johan Santana, each of whom shut the Bombers down in Queens four weeks ago, in order to win this series.

On the bright side, the Yankees  continue to share first place in the AL East with the Rays, who lost for the sixth time in their last eight games last night. Oh, but the Red Sox won and are now just a game out of first place.

Gulp.