Brett Gardner batted with bases loaded and two outs in the fifth. He represented the tying run. The home plate ump rang him up on a pitch that split the border of Weehawken and Hoboken. Gardner unleashed the power of a thousand exploding suns, or at least a bunch of frustrated Yankee fans.  He got ejected and, yeah, it was worth it.

It’s hard to believe, but the Yankees actually had a legitimate shot to win this game before Gardner got tossed. They opened that inning with five straight base runners. But because Carlos Beltran could not score from second on a double over the head of Cespedes (he got a bad read, he’s old, he’s slow, the there were no outs, the ball was somewhat close to being caught, all true, but gotta score on a clear double from second base unless your hamsting rips apart) Martin Prado ran up the back of Brian McCann at second and was tagged out. They still ended up scoring two runs in the inning, but with the gift out on the bases and the bridge and tunnel whiff of Gardner, the Red Sox only needed to get one out on their own. 

That’s not to say the Yankees didn’t get walloped. They lost 9-4 as the youngsters from Boston clobbered homers off an off-model Shane Greene. I know this is heresy, but I like both Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts and am kind of excited to see what they become.

The loss was awful and the Yankees look less and less like a team that will play meaningful baseball in September. That’s OK. When they lost four of six in Detroit and Toronto, that was the official sign to stop thinking about October. Of course there’s no reason to write them off until they’re eliminated, but I no longer feel the need to check the standings or the scores of the more realistic contenders. If they play improbably great baseball for the rest of the month and get back into it, fabulous.

Photo by Rich Schultz/Getty Images

A plump 3-0 lead, Bradon McCarthy pitching well, 2 outs in the 6th inning. Sunday looking like a good day for the Yanks. Then Melky Cabrera hits a bomb, and Jose Bautista hits a shot (he’s homered in his last five games). Edwin Encarnacion joined the party with a solo blast of his own in the 7th, and a base hit off the otherwise stellar Dellin Betances resulted into a close play at the plate and when the smoke cleared the Jays went ahead, where they’d stay to beat the Yanks, 4-3.

Yanks got the tying run on second with one out in the 9th, and then had him 90 feet away with two out for Derek Jeter. But the captain didn’t have a headline in him, just another weak, harmless line out to second.

Couple of painful losses this weekend, Juice. Brutal.

[Picture by Hugo Pratt]

Michael Pineda made one mistake, hung one breaking ball, and Jose Bautista hit it, good for a 2-run homer. The Yankees managed one hit. That’s how it’s been and that’s how it went yesterday as the Blue Jays won, 2-0.

Onward.

[Photo Via: The Minimalisto]

Down 1-0 after 6, man, it looked like another one of those nights. But then the Yanks scored 5 runs, added another one late on a solo home run by Jacoby Ellsbury, as they beat the Jays 6-3.

Nice job by Chris Capuano who told reporters after the game, “I couldn’t be prouder to get a win as a Yankee. It feels really good.”

It ain’t over.

[Picture by Bags]

My glass is always half full, but I had a bad feeling heading into this game. When the news first broke that Jusin Verlander was being pushed in favor of a kid making his major league debut, the prevailing thought was that the Yankees had caught a huge break by avoiding the former Cy Young winner. My first response? “Oh, no.”

I seem to remember seeing some statistics indicating that the Yankees don’t perform as poorly as we think they do against rookies, but my memory tells a different story. Even when the Yankees were regularly running roughshod over the American League, unknown pitchers were their Kryptonite, and so it was on Thursday afternoon at Comerica Park in Detroit.

Hiroki Kuroda, as usual, was good enough to win, even though he didn’t. He pitched seven strong innings, giving up just two runs while allowing only four singles and a walk, an effort the team would clearly have signed up for on Thursday morning.

The problem, of course, is that Detroit’s Kyle Lobstein was just as good — or more accurately, just as effective. He didn’t strike out a single hitter, and Yankee batters were able to hit several balls hard, but it never amounted to anything. He lasted six innings, yielded only four hits, a walk, and two runs (one earned).

As a result, the game zipped into the late innings tied at two, with each team desperate for a win to get closer to a playoff spot, and each team squandering opportunities. Dellin Betances took over for Kuroda in the eighth and eventually found himself facing the best hitter on the planet with two outs and the potential winning run on second base. Demonstrating his growing confidence and maturity, Betances didn’t give in to the temptation to prove his strength by overpowering Miguel Cabrera with a triple-digit fastball. Instead, he froze him with two consecutive 82 MPH curveballs. Cabrera let the first go by without a swing, then waved feebly at the second to strikeout and end the inning.

In the top of the ninth, facing Grizzly Chamberlain, the Yankees mounted a two-out rally. Mark Teixeira walked, Carlos Beltrán singled him to third, and Brian McCann came to the plate needing only a single to put his team in position to win. Joba elevated his second pitch, and McCann absolutely crushed it — but it hooked to the wrong side of the foul pole, leaving the Yankees only inches from what would’ve been a three-run lead. Joba pumped two more pitches past him and the inning was over.

Betances had thrown only 13 pitches in the eighth, so I hoped he’d come back for the ninth, but instead we were treated to Shawn “Horsehead” Kelley. The trouble started immediately. Victor Martínez led off with a double deep into the right field corner, then J.D. Martínez milked a seven-pitch walk and the Tigers had runners on first and second with none out. From there he dug his hole even deeper, working himself into a 3-2 count on Nick Castellanos before recovering with a perfect pitch on the outside corner for a called strike three. Next he toyed with pinch hitter Torii Hunter, overpowering him with 95-97 MPH fastballs and teasing him with marginal sliders before finally finishing him with the heater.

There was hope. As I saw the rest of the game in my mind’s eye, I imagined Kelley overpowering Alex Avila — perhaps striking him out on three pitches — and charging off the mound and into an energized Yankee dugout. His teammates would undoubtedly parlay that momentum into a tenth-inning rally, David Robertson would come in for the save, and the Yankees would escape from Detroit that much closer to the playoffs.

In the time that it took that daydream to wind its way through the corners of my optimistic brain, Avila strolled to the plate, took a hack at Kelley’s first pitch (an inviting slider rather than a crackling fastball), and rocketed it towards the wall in right center. Ichiro raced out towards the gap, but he wasn’t able to make the play (replays showed that perhaps he should’ve made the play), and the game was over.

Kelley was beaten with his second-best pitch, and he seemed to know it. He slammed his mitt to the turf in frustration, and when asked afterwards about how he felt, his answer was direct. “About as bad as I’ve felt walking off a mound in my career. Not good.”

Is this loss worse than any of the other bad losses we’ve suffered through this season? Probably not, but it stings a bit more simply because it reminds of who this team actually is. They simply aren’t going to win six of every seven games they play, but there’s still hope. Masahiro Tanaka is pitching simulated games, Michael Piñeda continues to dominate, Shane Greene has been great, Brandon McCarthy has been much better than anyone could’ve expected, and Hiroki Kuroda has now had three solid starts in a row.

Games like this are frustrating, but it’s not the end of the world. I promise.

All losses at this point are tough ones. Even the games that don’t hurt, hurt. But let’s be positive. Maybe the Yankees have stumbled on the recipe for October baseball. Let’s see if they can follow: Win five, lose one. Repeat until the end of the year.

In this game, like real estate, location was everything. As in, the Tigers had men located on the bases for timely hits late in the game and the Yankees scattered nine hits in such a way that two Ellsbury bombs accounted for two measly runs. As in, Brandon McCarthy, who had only walked seven in eight starts for the Yanks, walked in the first run of the game on a 58-foot worm-killer.

I have fond feelings for McCarthy. Fond enough to stick with him as he let the game slip away in the sixth? Maybe. I definitely didn’t want to see him in the seventh, though. The final score was 5-2, but maybe there was a closer game in there somewhere.  

The Yankees squeezed three games out of four against the Tigers after the trade deadline. The series was a ray of hope quickly obscured by the shittiness of mid-August and forgotten just about the time they dropped their fourth game of five tries against the Astros. Now they face Price and Verlander (though that means something vastly different this year) and need to start a new streak.

Oh, the rollercoaster of the mediocre. But it was this way when they were good too. Then it was the best record in baseball  or an annoying Red Sox team that hadn’t had it’s will broken yet that was causing the turbulence late in the season. Maybe it’s only the really bad teams, like this year’s Red Sox, sorry defending World Champion Red Sox, whose will came broken in the box, that flatten out in the dead of August.

Thank these Yankees for playing just well enough to still matter as we creep towards September. They will need an excellent stretch, with very few games like this one, to extend this any further than that. And it needs to begin now. 

Drawing by J. Calafiore, Sinister Six #17, 2010, DC Comics

That was fun. Strange and fun. But mostly fun last night and then more strange this morning when I looked up the following information:

1) At 8-1, the seven run margin of victory was the third largest of the year.

2) That eight run total was only the tenth time this year they’ve scored eight or more runs.

3) At 68-61, their current seven game bulge over .500 is the high water mark of the year.

Back to the fun bits. Michael Pineda, who defines for me the scouting term “big frame”, was excellent. Apart from the Red Sox incident (and you know, barely taking the mound in almost three full seasons) he’s been great every time out there. I was guilty of only seeing him pitch once or twice in Seattle and attributing much of his pre-trade success to Safeco. But his stuff will play in every park, if you know, he actually pitches in that park. And while I’m impressed with how few people he’s walked thus far, I think it we’d have to invent the three-pitch walk to give a free a pass to a Royal. They play only hack-a-thons.

The Yankees tagged James Shields, who has been good-not-great this year. I think Shields is a fine pitcher and I’m not too concerned about this most recent ass-kicking, but I can envision a Yankee press conference introducing him this winter and I fear that would be… sub-optimal. The imagined justification: we like Lester way better, but we only had to commit four or five years to Shields. The sooner the Yankees stop this penny-pinching crap and get back to trying to win every year, including the year we’re actually living in, the better. And if they’re going to pinch pennies in the rotation, just pinch the shit out them and re-sign McCarthy.

Speaking of Brandon McCarthy, he’s battling Martin Prado for my favorite acquisition of the trade deadline. McCarthy has the stellar performance and the fun internet presence. Prado has had big hits and weirdly, looks like he’s always worn a Yankee uniform. His power outage in Arizona made him a buy-low and, if it returns, he’s a borderline All-Star.

In closing, the Royals are in a position to end years of futility by making the Postseason. They might even win the division, thus skipping the Wild Card peril and ensuring themselves a home game in front of delirious fans. Among those fans will no doubt be some of the vile lot that abused Robinson Cano in the All-Star Game in 2012. There was a time when I would have liked the Yankees (or even the Mariners, new home of the abused) and the Tigers to give them a big shit-burger to eat. But I’m letting this go because a path of tallying offenses doesn’t lead anywhere I’d like to go.

The season looked lost when they showed their stink side to the Astros last week. But a winning streak cures all and that’s what’s underway. Keeping up the winning ways this road trip will be a challenge, so at least they are starting off laughing.

(Photo by Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images)

I listened to the first couple of innings of the ball game on Friday night on the radio. I was on a Trailways bus headed upstate to visit my cousin and a few friends for the weekend. As the game started, we were stuck in traffic. Outside–I think we were near Newburgh–it began to ran. Game started like this for the White Sox: base hit, base hit, home run. The next two batters hit long outs–one to the warning track, the other one to the wall.

Welp, it’s gonna be one of those weekends, I figured.

But the Yanks rallied to beat the Sox, won again on Saturday, then yesterday, another comeback. I heard their rally, David Robertson give up a game-tying home run in the 9th and then Brian McCann’s game-ending, pinch-hit homer in extra innings, on the radio again. This time I was in the passenger seat of my buddy’s car. He met me upstate and we had lunch with a friend. Now we were taking a few short cuts to avoid traffic–which we did–and on a lovely, late August afternoon, we listened to John Sterling bring us home. This was no fun for my pal, I should note, as he’s a Red Sox fan, but he was in a good mood so he didn’t mind.

I was happy too and so were the Yanks.

Final Score: Yanks 7, White Sox 4. 

[Picture by Bags]

Joe Day was a Good day.  Here’s rooting for more goodness this afternoon when the Yanks have to contend with the formidable Chris Sale. Never mind the summer breeze: Let’s Go Yank-ees! [Photo Credit: AP via Lo Hud]

Lousy first inning, no problem. Late magic.

Here’s hoping fer s’more today!

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Bags]

Brandon McCarthy: stud. 

[Photo Credit: Danny Ghitis via MPD]

I’m not asking, I’m telling with this. 

The latest unpleasantness. 

There is a special kind of quiet that accompanies baseball in the middle of August. I noticed it on Monday night when I caught the first couple of innings of the Reds Cardinals game. It wasn’t silence more like white noise. There it was again last night at Yankee Stadium. Maybe it’s the Yankees–they are a mediocre team playing for a crowd accustomed to something better. Or maybe it’s just the time of year. People are on vacation, and even those of us who work each day, well, the pace is slower. It’s time for swimming and corn and tomatoes not for getting too excited.

There were moments for cheering, like when Martin Prado got a big, game-tying hit. And there was  enough umph for booing too, which is what David Robertson heard as he walked off the field after giving up the 3-run homer that sunk the Yanks in the 9th. Robertson has been terrific this year and I only hope he didn’t take the boos personally. The outburst proved that not everyone was asleep.

Final Score: Astros 7, Yanks 4.

[Picture by Bags]

All season long I’ve played a game with myself as I watch Derek Jeter. He gets a base hit and I wonder how many he has left? Gets a double and wonder, hey, I bet he’s only got 8 more of those left. That kind of thing. That feeling–that there is a finite amount of hits and runs–is also how I’ve been thinking about the team. They win or lose close games as if they were rationing runs.

Yesterday, thanks to a solid start by Hiroki Kuroda, who retired 17 Rays in a row at one point, a big strike out by Shawn Kelley, and the usual strong work from Betances and Robertson, the Yanks won. They were no-hit by Jeremy Hellickson until the 5th inning. Then, after a walk (Drew) and a double (Prado), Brett Gardner slapped Hellickson’s 90th pitch into center for a base hit. Jeter and Ellsbury followed with singles, too, and later Mark Teixeira hit a solo home run.

You’ve got to appreciate the runs, the wins when they come because it’s as if there is just so many to go around. This has been an unspectacular season–some find it outright boring–but there is also something satisfying about each win because they feel so hard-earned.

[Picture by Bags]

If there’s been one consistent annoyance about Derek Jeter’s game over the years it’s his penchant for the sacrifice bunt. Sometimes, of course, it’s the right move. Sometimes, he’s just following orders. But there are time, like yesterday in the 9th inning with Brett Gardner on second and nobody out, where I yelled, “just swing away, Jeets, drive him in, don’t just move him over.” Well, Jeter tried to bunt anyhow, four times in a row. He took two pitches for balls, another two for strikes. And then he singled past the second basemen, and Gardner scored the go-ahead–and winning–run.

On an afternoon where the Bombers got another impressive start out of Shane Greene, they edged-out the Rays, 3-2.

[Photo Credit: AP via Chad Jennings]

I’m sharing this picture of an unidentified member of the World Famous Wheelie-ing Elvi taken by Tom Pennington last night in Arlington (and brought to my attention by It’s a Long Season) because it’s a lot more fun than anything that happened in the Yankees’ 5-0 loss in Tampa.

Michael Pineda was impressive in his return and Dellin Betances was dynamite until he gave up a game-tying solo home run, but when Adam Jones hit a back-breaking 3-run home run off Shawn Kelly, all you could do is sit there and take it. The Yankees have been kicking the crap out of the Orioles–or at least getting the better of them–for 20 years. This season, the Orioles are enjoying some sweet revenge.

They’re due.

Final Score: Orioles 5, Yanks 3. 

The Yankees scored 10 runs on Friday night and didn’t score again until Jacoby Ellsbury hit a solo home run today in the 9th inning.

Right.

The up-and-down Yankees end the weekend on a down note, falling to the Indians, 4-1.

[Featured Image via]

Yanks had their chances but could not do anything with them as they fell to the Indians 3-0 after the organization honored Paul O’Neill.

[Photo Credit: Bruce Davidson]

And survive a comeback…Carlos Beltran with a grand slam.

Final score: Yanks 10, Indians 6. 

And more good news–Michael Pineda is on his way back.  The one note of concern–Brian McCann suffered a mild concussion. 

Drawing by Jack Kirby.