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The Yankees and Orioles offered up an interesting game to fill an Easter afternoon on Sunday, but things got really interesting in the bottom of the ninth. Joba Chamberlain had stumbled a bit in the seventh, giving up a two-run home run to Mark Reynolds to narrow the Yankee lead to 3-2, but that one-run lead certainly seemed sufficient after Mariano Rivera came on with two outs in the eighth and (with help from a sparkling grab by Brett Gardner in left) doused a fire started by David Robertson.

Once Rivera got to the bottom of the ninth with that 3-2 lead, the outcome seemed certain. Even after Adam Jones worked a lead-off walk, any feelings of doubt were quickly assuaged as first Reynolds and then Matt Weiters were set down on strikes.

But then things got a bit slippery when Jake Fox singled to right, pushing the tying run into scoring position and bringing up Brian Roberts, who rocketed Mariano’s 33rd pitch of the afternoon into the right field corner, easily scoring Jones and giving pinch runner Robert Andino a better than average shot at plating the winning run. But Nick Swisher did a good job of digging the ball out and hitting the cutoff man, and Robinson Canó was able to nail Andino at home, preserving the tie and sending the game into extra innings.

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Say what you will about Peter Gammons, but I love him. There was a time, when Gammons was a regular on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, when I encouraged my children to refer to him as Uncle Peter. (My wife, incidentally, was not a fan of this.) Sure, his Boston Globe columns could be long-winded–perhaps even elitist, if a baseball writer can aspire to elitism–and there were the nagging questions about the accuracy of some of his reporting, but it never really mattered that much to me. I’m not a journalist, after all, I’m just a baseball fan, and Gammons always gave me exactly what I wanted. Heck, I even liked his guitar-nerd habit of dropping in bits about the Moody Blues or Third Eye Blind.

Anyway, like him or not, he’s got an interesting column about the Yankees over at MLB.com. In a nutshell, Jeter’s working hard, Ruben Rivera was a bust, Jesus Montero is the real deal, and Joba (gasp!) looks like the old Joba. Enjoy.

[Photo Credit: Justine Hunt/Boston Globe]

Babe Ruth was clearly the best player in Yankees history, Yogi Berra earned the most World Series rings, and Joe DiMaggio was, well, Joe DiMaggio, but somehow Mickey Mantle still stands apart. He came of age along with millions of baby boomers who curled the brims of their hats to match Mantle’s, imitated his swing, and even limped like he did.

Quite simply, he was the Mick.  Jane Leavy explores the man and the legend in her recent book, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood.  Ms. Leavy was generous enough to talk with me about her book and a few other topics.

Enjoy…

Bronx Banter: Behind every good baseball book, you can usually find an author who grew up loving the game, who grew up playing catch with his father…

Jane Leavy: Ah, ah, ah… Watch that “his,” watch that “his,” Hank!

BB: But I think that’s what I want to get at, the fact that typically most of these writers are men who were boys growing up wanting to be baseball players and then settled for being writers. I was just wondering how much of that was true of you as a child?

JL: Well, I don’t think past the age of probably five I really thought there was much prayer I was going to be a baseball player. I think the inheritance of a passion for a game, whether it’s baseball, since baseball claims a supremacy in that, though certainly I know people whose devotion to the New York Football Giants or the Jets or even, God help us, the Redskins, is handed down along with the season tickets the same way. But baseball certainly has a claim on that matter of inheritance, and yes, I inherited my love of the game from my dad. I don’t think I had any illusion that I was going to be out there on the field with the guys, and that was pretty sad. I could dream, but that’s different. And I do think that that makes a big difference in the way that women write about sports. I’ve often said, and I really do believe this, reporters are supposed to be outsiders. There’s always been a little bit of a competitive thing going on when the guys who wish they could’ve been the second baseman for the New York Yankees are trying, almost, in their question to prove to the interview subject that they know as much and they could’ve been out there with them and the whole nine yards. I don’t think any woman is going to go into a locker room with that same notion. Reporters are supposed to be outsiders, that’s what we are. When you’re a woman in a locker room, that’s what you are. You’re an outsider.

BB: It reminds me of something that I heard Suzyn Waldman once talk about. She said that when a player is traded, a male reporter will immediately think about how it impacts a team, whereas she would always realize that behind that player there’s a family that’s being uprooted, and she felt like her female perspective allowed her to see more of a situation than just what was going on on the surface. It seems like you’re kind of saying the same type of thing, I suppose.

JL:  Well, I don’t think you can make the acute generalization that every male reporter is gonna not wonder about how somebody’s nursery school age kids are gonna feel, or how every baseball wife is going to deal with yet another relocation. Not every guy is an insensitive boob, and not every woman is an empathic shoulder to cry on. As a reporter, it’s partly determined not just by personality, but by assignment. If you’re just out there to write the game, whether you’re male or female, it doesn’t matter. For a while, once in a while I would trade bylines with a male friend just to see if anybody noticed. I think I wrote this actually once. When I first started sports writing, the gig was can you write so that nobody could tell you were a girl. You had to prove that it was an okay thing to be. I do believe, and this is what I was saying, there are advantages, though it’s certainly a double-edged sword, particularly early on – but there are advantages to being a woman in a locker room. There are things that guys tell women that are different than what they tell other guys. And there are questions that women may ask that are different than what a guy may first ask. I always use this example. I’ve heard countless numbers of men say to a player, “Well, that slider didn’t do much, did it?” The question presumes that they know exactly what the pitch was. Well, maybe they don’t. Half the time the hitters don’t. But a woman, certainly this woman, would presume nothing. I would say, “What was the pitch? Do you know what that pitch was? And where was it? Where did it go? What was it supposed to do?” That’s what I meant about the competitiveness. I didn’t feel the need to show my bona fides in that way.

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On the one hand, I love the playoffs.  After living and dying through 162 games, your reward as a fan is to watch your team as one of eight — and now four — still in contention for the world championship.  On the other hand, I hate the playoffs.  My TiVo is suddenly not good enough, so I have to plan my world around a baseball game being played three thousand miles away.  Heaven forbid I should miss a single pitch.  How bad is it?  A couple days ago my wife suggested that we schedule a date night for next Thursday.  The good husband answered quickly, “Sure, sounds good.”  But the bad husband inside was secretly calculating: Friday, Saturday, off-day Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, off-day Thursday… No problem! Look away.  I am hideous.

A.J. Burnett is also hideous, but rumor has it he’ll be pitching in this series, a fact that by itself gives the Texas Rangers a pretty good shot at advancing to the World Series.  The more I think about that, the more I think about belt-high fastballs and looping curve balls and line drives back through the box, the more worried I get.  If I were in charge, I’d pitch Burnett against Cliff Lee in Game 3, essentially conceding that game to the Rangers.  As the rotations stand now, it almost looks like Girardi is conceding both Games 3 and 4, meaning that Sabathia had better win the opener and Phil Hughes had better win Game 2.

What if they don’t?  What if Josh Hamilton comes to Yankee Stadium and remembers that Home Run Derby in the old Stadium?  What if Elvis Andrus gets on base seven or eight times and steals fourteen or sixteen bases?  What if Ian Kinsler plays like Ian Kinsler again?  What if Cliff Lee gets to pitch twice?

If you want to know what I really think, the Yankees will win this series, but it won’t take a miracle for the Rangers to win.  I just hope that when I’m sitting in the movie theater on Thursday night, I’m still looking forward to the World Series.

In my head the baseball season is divided into three distinct parts.  The first, of course, begins on Opening Day, a red-letter day on my calendar.  (Incidentally, I can’t be bothered with spring training.  I know that sounds like blasphemy, but with teams wearing t-shirts instead of uniforms, players with wide-receiver numbers, and pitchers jogging around the warning track while a game is being played, it just doesn’t feel like baseball to me.  Sue me.)  Those first few weeks of the regular season are like gold, but not for the reasons you think.  I’m a Yankee fan, you know, so it’s been sixteen years since I needed the false hope that Kansas City fans cling to in April.  For me, those games are a reunion with old friends.  “Look, there’s Nick Swisher!  And hey, Robinson’s swing looks just as quick as it was last year.  Wait a minute, can Derek Jeter possibly have — gulp! — grey hair?”  Even Michael Kay’s voice, absent from my living room for six months, is welcomed back with a smile.

The second part of the season begins on a different date each year.  The day after the Yankees clinch their playoff spot, I take a break.  I have little need for what usually amounts to five or six games of makeshift lineups and anticlimactic results, and the freedom from the nightly pull of the game feels like a vacation.  Auditions for the 25th spot on the playoff roster remind me too much of spring training, and after living and dying through 158 games, I just don’t have the energy left to care about who Royce Ring is and whether or not he might make the postseason roster.  If I see him standing on the chalk on the first Wednesday of October, I’ll pay attention.  (I must admit, though, that I loved Joe Torre’s old tradition of allowing one of the elder Yankees to manage the final game.  Who can forget watching Clemens come to the mound to pull David Wells, or, as Emma reminded us, Bernie Williams sending himself to the plate for a pinch hit double.  Good times…)

The third part begins today, and it’s the only part that really matters.  You sweat and bleed with the team for 162 games spread over six months, and suddenly five games in seven days will determine the value of the season.  The Yankees will match up against the Twins in the first round of the playoffs, and I can’t even pretend to be concerned.  Sure, once I sit down in front of the TV there will be butterflies, and I’ll get nervous if Minnesota manages to jump out to an early lead, but right now I keep coming back to one thing — it’s the Twins.

We’re not supposed to say things like that.  Somehow the characters I string together here are suspected by the superstitious to have some affect on CC Sabathia’s fastball or Alex Rodríguez’s psyche.  If I predict victory, or worse yet, if I assume victory, I’m somehow casting some terrible jinx over the team.  Rubbish.  Jinxes are for little girls who say the same word at the same time and count to ten to silence their best friend.  There are no jinxes in baseball.

So here’s how things will go.  CC Sabathia is CC Sabathia, so let’s just write down Game 1 as a Yankee win and move on.  In Game 2 the Twins have the audacity to pitch Carl Pavano.  I can’t find a link to support this, but I’ve also heard that they’ve brought in Jeff Weaver to relieve in that game.  This is the Twins’ only hope.  Pavano throws eight solid innings, Weaver comes in for the save, and the entire island of Manhattan bursts into flames, taking the Bronx down with it.  But since I can’t see that fairy tale coming true, I’ll put my money on the Yanks in that game also.

When the series shifts to New York for Game 3, Phil Hughes will finally get a chance to erase any bad memories he might have of last October when he takes the mound in the potential clincher.  Like a lot of folks, I think it might’ve made more sense for Hughes to pitch in Minnesota, but Joe Girardi surely made that decision because he preferred Andy Pettitte over Hughes in a possible Game 5.  What Girardi doesn’t know, though, is that there will be no Game 5.  Hughes will cruise in Game 3.

Yankees win, the Yankees win.  Cue Sinatra.

If you hung on to the bitter end on Sunday night, then you can imagine what a pain in the ass this game is to try to write about.  For the first six innings the story line was about the continuing ineptitude of the Yankee bats, as Boston starter Daisuke Matsuzaka was dominant throughout.  The recap for that game was called “The Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and the story pretty much wrote itself: the Yankee swoon continues, the Twins and Rays are now the top two teams in the league, and the Red Sox and ’64 Phillies are looming.

But then the seventh inning happened and I ripped that first story up.  With one out and Mark Teixeira on first base, Alex Rodríguez came up to face Dice-K, a pitcher against whom he’s always struggled.  A-Rod quickly dug himself into a two-strike hole, then lashed at an inside fastball with a swing very much like a Rafael Nadal two-handed backhand.  At contact my first hope was that the ball would dunk in in front of an outfielder, but then as the camera panned upwards both outfielders were racing towards to the gap in right center and suddenly I was hoping it would be over their heads.  A split second later it was scraping over the wall and the Yankees had a 2-1 lead.  A-Rod was the hero, and what’s better than a hero story?  Again, the story would write itself, and it would carry the title “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

And then we got to the ninth inning.  Mariano Rivera had come in to get the final out in the eighth, and now he needed only three more outs to send everyone home happy.  Jed Lowrie almost ended the suspense early, but his rocket to right was cut down by a vicious wind and settled harmlessly into Nick Swisher’s glove.  Ryan Kalish followed with a single, and that’s when all hell broke loose.  Kalish quickly stole second, then a few pitches later stole third without a throw, and suddenly we were ninety feet away from a tie game.  Bill Hall then hit an absolute missile towards third, but the drawn-in A-Rod really had no shot, and the game was tied.  Proving that he had been paying attention earlier, Hall stole second and then third.  (You don’t have to be a SABR member to know that Mo has never allowed four stolen bases in the same inning.)  Now the winning run was on third, still with only one out, and the only thing keeping me off the ledge was everything I knew about Mariano Rivera.  But this wasn’t the Rivera we’re used to seeing.  He struggled with his control throughout, and eventually yielded a sac fly to Mike Lowell, giving the Sox a 3-2 lead.  This time, the story was titled “Cuts Like a Knife.”

But the ninth inning wasn’t over.  Even after Derek Jeter flied out to start the bottom half, I still had hope.  Nothing Jonathan Papelbon has done recently makes me fear him, so I wasn’t surprised when Nick Swisher started a Yankee rally with a sharp single to right.  When Teixeira kept the line moving with a single of his own, I just knew A-Rod would end it all with another dramatic home run.  Didn’t you?  Alas, he took a well-earned walk, loading the bases for Robinson Canó.  With MVP chants raining down (the first time I’ve noticed those for Canó), Robbie showed how far he’s come over the past two years.  He took two tough pitches to get into a hitter’s count at 2-0, then laced the expected fastball into right field to tie the game at three.  With the bases loaded, one out, and Jorge Posada and Lance Berkman, I was sure the game was in hand.  My only question was whose face would be covered in pie at the end.  But Posada struck out and Berkman flied out and we moved to the tenth.

The Boston tenth was uneventful, unless you count the fact that Joba Chamberlain looked good, and the stage was set for a walk-off in the bottom half.  With Hideki Okajima on the mound, things got interesting almost immediately.  Curtis Granderson roped a line drive for a single to right, then Brett Gardner reached when he was able to beat out an intended sacrifice bunt as Victor Martínez’s throw hit him in the back, allowing Granderson to race all the way to third.  As Jeter stepped towards the plate, I just knew Captain Clutch would wrap things up, and I started typing a story called “You Never Forget Your First Pie.”  Terry Francona made me rip that one up, too, when he walked Jeter intentionally to load the bases with nobody out.  Greg Golson was due up next (long story), but Joe Girardi sent Marcus Thames up in his place.  Thames did what he does — he hit a bullet — but it was snared by Adrian Beltré, who threw home for the first out.  Due next was Juan Miranda (long story) who worked an anticlimactic bases-loaded walk to end the game.  I don’t even know if he got any pie.  For a quick moment my story was called “Walk This Way,” but then I quickly realized that that was kind of lame.  The Yankees started bouncing around a bit, but then they quickly realized the same thing.  A walk-off walk isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, but a win is still a win.

Yankees 4, Red Sox 3.

[Photo Credit: Kathy Willens, AP]

We like round numbers.  Did CC Sabathia’s season get any better on Saturday night in Baltimore?  Certainly not.  All he did was what he always does.  He took the mound, took control, and after a relatively quick three hours, he got the win.  Same old CC.  But even so, Saturday night was special.  On Saturday night Sabathia earned his twentieth win and became the first pitcher in baseball to reach that milestone.

It was also the first time in Sabathia’s career that he had won twenty, and afterwards he admitted to being proud of the accomplishment, but he also correctly reminded reporters that the win was bigger for the team than it was for him.  With the Rays continuing to win and the Twins staying close in the hunt for the best overall record, every game counts.  (And by the way, I can’t tell you how irritated I am that I’m checking Minnesota Twins scores in the middle of September.)

While CC was doing his thing on the mound, the hitters were killing the Orioles softly all night long.  It was never anything terribly spectacular, just a train that kept rolling from one inning to the next.  In the beginning it was about doing the little things: a two-out base hit by Posada plating two in the first, a sacrifice fly by Jeter scoring one in the second, a ground out by Jeter scoring another in the fourth.

But the lumber got louder in the fifth, as Robinson Canó homered deep to right, a shot that was rocketish enough that he was able to pose a bit at the plate before trotting around the bases and collecting his 100th and 101st RBIs.  (With Robbie joining A-Rod and Mark Teixeira in the Century Club, this year marks the first time in Yankee history that three infielders have driven in a hundred runs in the same season.)  The offense nicked the O’s a few more times before Curtis Granderson closed out the scoring in the ninth with a three-run home run to dead center field.

Lots of good things happened for the Yankee hitters in and around those highlights.  Jeter collected two hits to extend his hitting streak to seven, Nick Swisher hobbled off the bench rap a single and a double (and later ham it up during an extended on-field interview with Kim Jones), A-Rod continued to hit the ball hard, and Brett Gardner finished with a tri-cycle.  (A tri-cycle is when you get everything but the home run.  I just made that up.)

But the big story was the Big Man.  Mr. Sure Thing wasn’t nearly as good as he was the last time out in Tampa, but he was still able to do what he had to do to get the win.  Yankees 11, Orioles 3.

I’ll tell you what I see.  Sure, the Yankees dropped a tough game — and a tough series — to the Tampa Bay Rays, and will spend at least two days in second place, but things aren’t as bad as some people might have you believe.

Let’s take a look at Wednesday night’s game.  With Phil Hughes taking the mound in the deciding game of a three-game set, I can’t say that I clicked on the TV with an overwhelming sense of confidence.  Hughes hadn’t started a game in more than a week, and it’s been months since people were talking about him as a Cy Young candidate, but even with his recent struggles he still entered the night with a respectable sixteen wins.

For most of the night the Rays got the Phil Hughes from April, not August.  After the game he spoke about the importance of using all his pitches, and indeed only half of his 106 pitches were fastballs.  He mixed in curves, change-ups, and even a handful of cutters to keep the Rays in check as he retired the first twelve batters to start the game.

Trouble arose in the fifth, just about two seconds after I caught myself wondering how Joe Girardi might weigh an elevated pitch count versus a potential no-hitter.  The thought shattered as quickly as it crystallized when Evan Longoria ended the mini-drama with a single to center.  Two batters later a guy named Dan Johnson deposited a rope into the stands in right, giving the Rays a 2-1 lead.

That single Yankee run had come in the first inning, but it shoulda been woulda been coulda been so much more.  The suddenly-frisky Derek Jeter led off the inning with a single and stole second base as Curtis Granderson fanned for the first out.  After a Mark Teixeira single and an Alex Rodríguez walk loaded the bases, Robinson Canó started the Score Truck rolling with a single to left.  Rays starter James Shield was struggling, the vultures were circling, and it looked for all the world that the Yankees would get off to a good start… and then Lance Berkman bounced into a double play.

The Yankees would put runners on in every other inning save the fifth for the rest of the way, and Shields always looked on the verge of destruction, but somehow he wasn’t pulled until the seventh inning and the Yankees weren’t able to score again until he left.  Chad Qualls entered the game with one and out and the bases empty in that seventh inning and lined up against Jeter.  Jeter spun away from Qualls’s first pitch, but he wasn’t quite quick enough, as the pitch appeared to have ricocheted off his left hand.  I was on the phone with Alex at the time, and our conversation screeched to a halt as we both visualized a playoff run with Ramiro Peña playing shortstop.  As Jeter was tended to at the plate, we were treated to a replay of the hit by pitch — except there was no hit by pitch.  Just as Jeter had dropped his lead hand from the handle in order to spin away from contact, the ball had hit the bat and bounced harmlessly away.  The shrewd Captain somehow thought to instantly grimace and grab his arm, convincing home plate umpire Lance Barksdale that he had been hit.

As if all that weren’t good enough, the replay caught a moment that was pure Jeter.  As he was spinning and grimacing, eyes squeezed tight to shut out the pain, he opened one eye and peeked from beneath the brim of his helmet to notice that Barksdale was awarding him first base.  You know what they say about Jeter.  He’s got an edge.  (Grandpa Maddon, by the way, was too busy getting kicked out of the game to appreciate any of these theatrics.  As it turned out, the ball had dribbled into fair territory after striking the bat, and after instructing one of his players to field the ball and throw it to first, Maddon expected an out to be called.  He was disappointed and eventually removed from the game.  I’d have loved to have been down the tunnel with him to catch his reaction to what happened next.)  What happened next was that Granderson popped a home run to right, scoring Sir Derek Olivier and giving the Yanks a 3-2 lead and a view to a one-and-a-half-game lead in the division.  (When asked after the game where the pitch had gotten him, Jeter honestly replied, “In the bat.  But the umpire told me to go to first.  What am I supposed to do, say no?”  All that, and honest too?)

You’ll find the bottom of the seventh cross-listed under J for Johnson and K for karma.  Hughes was still cruising, having retired six of seven hitters since the Johnson home run in the fifth, before yielding a two-out single to Matt Joyce.  That Man Johnson came up again and caught a 2-1 fastball that drifted a bit and yanked it out to put his club in front for good.  Sure, the Yanks would mount a decent rally in the eighth, and even manage to get A-Rod up in the ninth as the potential go-ahead run, but Rafael Soriano took care of things nicely and the game was over.  Rays 4, Yankees 3.

So some will have you believe that the Yankees are limping out of town a beaten bunch.  Girardi is inept, the Rays are simply too good, the Red Sox are charging, and even the Minnesota Twins are in the hunt for the best overall record.  Everything, it seems, is falling apart.

Really?  As difficult as this series was, don’t forget that the Yankees played these games without Nick Swisher and Brett Gardner and used the second game — the only game they won — to give Ivan Nova his fifth career major league start.  Even so, the Yankees could easily have swept this series given a little luck.  The fact that the Rays could also have swept tells us not that the Rays are going in the opposite direction but that these are the two best teams in the game.

This glass is half full.  Relax and have a drink.

On the last Monday of the summer, so long as you’re not being technical about it, the Yankees dropped a ho-hum matinée to Buck Showalter and the Baltimore Orioles. A.J. Burnett was on the mound for the Yanks, and if we can all agree that CC Sabathia is the Sure Thing, Burnett is pretty much the opposite. He’s kind of like that hottie who sat next to you in history class. Most days she’d ignore you completely, but other days, for no apparent reason, she’d look in your direction and flash a smile that would make Galileo wonder if the sun really might not be the center of the universe.

To be fair to Mr. Burnett, he was decent last week against the A’s, and there was hope that he might be able to string a few good starts together to build some momentum for the playoffs.  What’s baseball, afterall, without the hope?

Burnett pitched fairly well, but just well-enough to lose.  The O’s scrapped together a few hits to take a 1-0 lead in the third, but Alex Rodríguez erased that deficit with a monster shot off the back of the bullpen wall in left.  It was his 100th RBI, which is historic.  This is A-Rod’s thirteenth straight season with a hundred RBIs, a streak matched only by Lou Gehrig and Ol’ Double-X, Jimmy Foxx.  It’s also is fourteenth time overall that he’s reached the century mark, something no one else in the history of the game has ever done.  Not bad.

But back to Burnett.  The Baltimore bats rang a bit louder in the fifth, but Burnett again escaped with just a single run allowed when Brian Roberts was nailed at second attempting to stretch his RBI-single into a double.  Things unravelled a bit more in the sixth when Burnett started the frame by allowing a single to Felix Pie and a walk to Nick Markakis.  Things like this happen, but Burnett compounded the problem by wild-pitching the runners to second and third.  He struck out Luke Scott, which was nice, but Matt Wieters followed with a sacrifice fly and it was 3-1.

The Yankees scored twice in the bottom half of the inning to level the score, but the tie didn’t last long.  In a virtual replay of the fifth inning, Brian Roberts delivered a two-out RBI-single (this time to right) and was thrown out at second.  The inning was over, but it didn’t really matter.  The Orioles had a 4-3 lead, and they’d bring it home from there.

Two quick notes before I go.  First, Derek Jeter is looking a bit better.  His final at-bat last night was a line drive out to right field, and he built on that by stroking a double off the wall in right center to lead off the game this afternoon.  Baby steps.

Second, Joe Girardi is, at least, consistent.  But as Ben Franklin once said, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.  A-Rod walked with two outs in the eighth inning, and Girardi reflexively sent in a pinch runner.  I know I’ve complained about this before, but it still makes me absolutely crazy to see him take his best hitter out of a one-run game.

Okay, that’s all from here.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some aïoli to make and some burgers to grill.

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.

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.

If we’re to believe Professors Hershiser, Morgan, and Miller, this was a successful weekend for the Boston Red Sox.  Or it was a successful weekend for the New York Yankees.  By only splitting the four-game season in the Bronx, the Sox leave town with the same six-game deficit they brought with them, and since the Rays have been scuffling as well, the Yankees are still two games up in the division — never a bad thing.

The disappointing thing, though, is that this game could easily have gone the other way.  Phil Hughes had a bit of trouble in the second inning, giving up two runs on a handful of stolen bases and infield singles, but then recovered nicely.  Aside from a two-out double in the fifth surrendered to Victor Martínez, Hughes was perfect the rest of the way.  He fell victim to his high pitch count and left after six innings, but Kerry Wood, Boone Logan, and Joba Chamberlain held down the Sox hitters over the final three innings, giving the Yankees three different chances to win in the later innings.

Jon Lester was almost unhittable for most of the afternoon, not faltering until the seventh inning when Jorge Posada opened the frame with a ground ball single to left field.  Marcus Thames came up next and smoked a rocket towards the bullpen in right center field.  The game hung in the balance for just as long as it took the ball to fly from Thames’s bat to the very tip of the wall.  Another inch — seriously — and it would’ve scraped over the wall, tying the game at two, but the fence held the ball in, gently dropping it onto the warning track in front of Jacoby Ellsbury.  On the radio broadcast John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman went on and on about the terrible bit of bad luck that had just kept the Yanks from evening the score, but it’s not like they were in bad shape with men on second and third and no one out.  Five pitchers later things looked even better as Lester plunked Austin Kearns to load the bases.  With Curtis Granderson, Derek Jeter, and Nick Swisher lying in wait, the game would surely be tied at the very least.

But it didn’t happen that way.  Lester muscled up to strike out Granderson and was relieved by flame thrower Daniel Bard who dismissed Jeter and Swisher on six high octane fastballs.  Threat over.

Mark Teixeira led off the eighth with big home run off of the same Mr. Bard who had been unhittable only moments earlier, and when Alex Rodríguez followed that with a single, things were suddenly interesting again.  But then Mr. Girardi entered the fray.  Now, even though I was a bit critical of his performance in Sunday night’s game, I don’t usually criticize Girardi — or any other manager, for that matter.  But there’s one habit Girardi has that drives me absolutely crazy.  He loves to pinch run, and it doesn’t matter a bit who’s coming out of the game.  So when A-Rod, singled and reached base as the potential tying run, Girardi pulled him in favor of Brett Gardner.  First of all, I love Brett Gardner.  Love him.  And I understand that he’s a walking stolen base, but I have two huge problems with Girardi’s line of thinking.  First, by running Gardner, you’re essentially playing for a tie.  This is fine, except that you’ve just removed one of your best hitters, a hitter who otherwise might’ve helped you win the game when his spot comes around again.  Second, it’s not like you’re running for Jorge Posada; A-Rod can steal a bag.  Gardner then added to my frustration by staying anchored to first for the first five pitches of Robinson Canó’s at bat.  He finally ran as Canó grounded out to second, putting him in scoring position, but if you’re going to pinch run Gardner in that spot, shouldn’t you send him to first base with explicit directions to run early in the count so that Canó, Posada, and Thames would each have an opportunity to drive in the tying run?  But what do I know?

Now back to the actual game.  After Posada walked, Lance Berkman hit for Thames and popped out to left for the second out, then Jonathan Papelbon came on to retire Austin Kearns on one pitch.  Another threat over.

True to form, the Yankees mustered one final rally in the ninth inning when Jeter walked with one out and stole second, but Papelbon wrapped it up by striking out Swisher and Teixeira.  Red Sox 2, Yankees 1.

I’m guessing that even the most optimistic among us were a bit on edge heading into Sunday night’s game.  Josh Beckett was on the mound for the Red Sox, and the Yankees were countering with Dustin Moseley, starting in place of A.J. Burnett, who’s been at least temporarily shelved due to back spasms.  (Unconfirmed reports indicate that these “back spasms” could be the result of torque on the spine caused by his frequent need to snap his head around to follow the flight of home runs.)  The good news coming in, though, was that Moseley had showed promise in his last outing against Toronto while Beckett had struggled against the Yanks this year, allowing 19 runs in three starts.  Both trends would continue.

Moseley worked efficiently through the first four innings, yielding just two hits and two walks.  Bill Hall led off the fifth with a home run, but this was only a minor blip as Moseley needed just six pitches to retire the next three hitters.  On the other side of the scorecard, Beckett was struggling.  After working around two singles in the opening frame, he gave up two runs in the second inning thanks to a Lance Berkman double and consecutive two-out singles by Brett Gardner, Derek Jeter, and Nick Swisher.  (Jeter’s hit was the 2,874th of his career, one more than Babe Ruth.)

Beckett appeared to settle down, looking disturbingly like the old Josh Beckett as he blitzed through the fourth, but Mark Teixeira opened the fifth with a no-doubt home run deep into the right field bleachers, and things unravelled from there.  A walk to A-Rod was followed by a plunking of Robinson Canó (no drama, though — the pitch just nicked Canó’s knee cap), and Berkman plated the fourth Yankee run when he laced a double down the left field line.  My daughter Alison and I looked at her scorebook and noticed that Fat Elvis was 3 for 3, and she said, “You were right when you said he’d have a good game tonight.”

But the inning wasn’t over.  A few batters later Jeter smacked Beckett’s last pitch of the night into the gap in right center, and suddenly it was 7-1.  Beckett grimaced atop the mound as he waited for Francona’s inevitable hook, and I tried to explain to Alison why it was extra delicious to watch Beckett suffer.  “Is he mean?”  Well, no, but he isn’t very nice.  “But if he isn’t nice, doesn’t that mean that he’s mean?”  I didn’t have an answer, so we just turned back to the game.

All that was left was to watch Joe Girardi mismanage the bullpen.  Moseley got in a bit of trouble in the seventh, putting runners on first and third with one out.  With a six-run lead and a low pitch-count (82), it seemed like it might’ve been a good idea to let him try to finish the inning, if only to see how he’d respond to a jam like that, but Girardi pulled him in favor of Joba Chamberlain.  Joba wasn’t bad, he just didn’t get the job done.  He allowed a run to score on an infield single, but that wasn’t the problem.  After getting Jacoby Ellsbury to pop up for the second out, he quickly jumped ahead of Marco Scutaro, and the inning looked to be over.  With a 1-2 count and a 96-MPH fastball in his quiver, Joba tried to get cute with his slider and walked the Boston shortstop to load the bases for David Ortíz.  Minutes earlier the game had been in hand, but suddenly it was just a swing away from being 7-6.  Lefty Boone Logan replaced Chamberlain and made things a bit sweaty by running the count full before getting Papi to ground out to end the inning.

But wait — there was more mismanagement.  Girardi brought David Robertson in to pitch the ninth inning, and I was thinking that it was nice that Mariano Rivera would have  the day off.  But when Robertson walked Ellsbury to put runners on first and second with two outs — and a five run lead on the eighth day of August — Girardi called for Rivera.  He threw one pitch.  Scutaro bounced a ball to Canó, who flipped to Jeter to end the game. Yankees 7, Red Sox 2.

The one good thing about all this is that Girardi’s machinations gave me an excuse to write a little more about Rivera.  In 1990 Dennis Eckersley had what is probably the best season any closer has had in the current era.  His ERA and WHIP were identical at 0.61, but here are the interesting numbers: 48 saves, 41 hits, 4 walks.  Right now Rivera has 23 saves, 19 hits, and 6 walks.  Following that 1990 campaign, Eckersley said (and I’m paraphrasing), “I had more saves than hits and walks combined.  If anyone ever does that, I’ll walk out to the pitcher’s mound and kiss his ass in front of 50,000 people.”  It just might be time to pucker up.

* You can get a cool scorebook just like Alison’s by visiting http://www.ilovetoscore.com/, a New York-based company operated by loyal Banterite, Michael Schwartz.

I had been planning a longer piece on the historical significance of Alex Rodríguez‘s 600th home run, focusing specifically on the rapidly growing ranks of the four-, five-, and six-hundred home run clubs, but since I couldn’t possibly come with anything better or more thorough than Joe Posnanski’s recent column over at SI.com, I thought I might go in a different direction.

It used to be that hitting four-hundred home runs gave you an automatic ticket to Cooperstown, but then Dave Kingman had to go and mess things up by hitting 442 home runs.  Since any rational person knew that Kingman most definitely did NOT belong in the Hall of Fame, the entrance requirements were rewritten.  Now 500 was the milestone you’d have to hit to assure your place in the Hall, and for a long time that number seemed nonnegotiable.  But you know what happened next.

If you take a look at the top twenty-five players on the all-time home run list and scan up starting with Eddie Murray’s 504 , you’ll see a host of names that will never be enshrined in Cooperstown.  There’s certainly a lingering drug cloud that will keep several of them out, people like Barry Bonds and the Unholy Trinity of McGwire, Sosa, and Palmeiro, but there are others who simply don’t seem to belong.  Gary Sheffield comes to mind, drugs or no drugs.  And I know Jim Thome‘s had a nice career and will finish with more home runs than all but six or seven guys, but somehow I don’t think Hall of Famer when I look at him.

So what do 600 home runs mean for Alex Rodríguez?  It was just a few years ago that people looked at him completely differently.  Boxing had a string of Great White Hopes, but A-Rod was baseball’s Great Clean Hope.  He was the one who could race to the top of the charts, surpassing Bonds and scoring a victory for what we hoped was clean baseball.  (This, by the way, is the part where I resist the urge to launch into a diatribe on the hypocrisy of a sport that allowed amphetamine use for decades, or start talking about the slippery slope of ligament transplants and lasix surgery.  But I digress.)

But with great hope comes great disappointment, and so it was with Rodríguez.  The optimists among us suddenly had no ammunition against the pessimists.  Maybe everyone really was juicing.  Maybe nothing was real.  And so when A-Rod came to bat with 599 home runs in Cleveland and Kansas City, people booed as they waited for history.  There weren’t as many asterisks as we saw in the stands when Bonds was chasing 755, but they were definitely there.

So the question now is, will Alex Rodríguez be elected to the Hall of Fame?  Even though he may end up with something in the neighborhood of 800 home runs, there are those who believe the doors to the Hall are closed to him forever.  Buster Olney doesn’t think his colleagues will ever elect him, but Olney himself has voted for McGwire and plans to vote for Bonds, Sosa, Clemens, and A-Rod once they’re eligible.  Here’s the money quote from his larger explanation:

I think most of the elite players were using performance-enhancing drugs, and within the context of that time — when baseball wasn’t doing anything to stop the growth of drug use — this was what the sport was. And we don’t know exactly who did what. There are a lot of superstar players who were broadly suspected within the sport of having used steroids, but they avoided the crossfire; the only difference between those guys and McGwire was that McGwire had Jose Canseco as a teammate. And here’s the other thing — we don’t know exactly who did what, and when they did it. So I think in order to have a consistent standard when considering the steroid-era players, you either have to vote for no one at all, or set aside the steroid issue and just vote for the best players of the era.

Alex Rodríguez, then, emerges as the ultimate test case.  Most of the big-name steriod users saw their names dragged in the mud after their careers had ended.  A-Rod had the sense to admit what he had done, which might count for something with some writers, and by the time he retires he will have played six to eight years — presumably clean — following that admission.  Certainly some writers will never forget the stain, but I hope that enough do.  Alex Rodríguez belongs in the Hall of Fame.

[Photo Credit: Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated/Larry Roibal]

For a month and a half the Yankees sat atop the American League East, and even though their lead never looked insurmountable, I admit that I’m a bit surprised that they suddenly find themselves in second place after Tuesday night’s loss to the free-swinging Toronto Blue Jays.

It all started well enough.  Dustin Moseley (much more on him later) set down the Jays in the top of the first on six pitches, bringing the home side to bat.  Derek Jeter led off with a walk, Nick Swisher was retired on a blistering line drive to short, and Mark “How Ya Like Me Now” Teixeira launched a large home run into the back bleacher section in left field.  Sure, Agent 599 struck out and Robinson Canó grounded out to end the inning, but it really felt like a good night.  Really.

What happened next was that Toronto starter Ricky Romero turned out the lights.  He set down the side in order in the second, third, and fourth innings, then had his string snapped by a Marcus Thames infield single to lead off the fifth.  Hope!  But Romero responded to this blip by blitzing through the next fifteen Yankee batters to wrap up a dominant complete game victory.  To sum up, here’s how the Yankee hitters did against Romero:

Jeter walk.  Out.  Teixeira home run.  Eleven outs.  Thames single.  Fifteen outs.  Drive home safely.

So Ricky Romero was clearly the story of the game, but I’ll leave that for someone else to write.  What you won’t find in the box score is that Dustin Moseley pitched a great game.  Seriously.  The Blue Jay hitters were aggressive all evening, swinging early and often at Moseley’s assortment of fastballs, cutters, and curves, and if a few things had gone differently, well, Moseley still would’ve lost, but it might’ve been closer.

The Jays scored two runs in the second inning on a double and a single, but Moseley still seemed to be in control as he cruised through the third, using just thirty pitches to record nine outs.  The game turned in the top of the fourth.  A lead-off single by Vernon Wells was almost immediately erased by a 5-4-3 double play, complete with an unconventional underhanded flip from third to second as Agent 599 relived his days as a shortstop.  But before he could relax (or perhaps because he relaxed), Moseley plunked Aaron Hill and gave up a double to John Buck — and then an interesting thing happened.  Newcomer Austin Kearns did a decent job of tracking down Buck’s double in the left field corner and got the ball in to Jeter quickly enough that Hill should’ve been out easily at the plate.  I’ve never seen another shortstop better at handling relay throws, and two plays are etched in my memory as evidence: Jeter jumping towards the third base line to snag an errant throw from David Justice, then somehow contorting his body into position to throw out Timo Pérez at the plate to end the sixth inning in Game 1 of the 2000 World Series; leaping high to grab a sailing throw from Bernie Williams, then beginning his throwing motion before hitting the ground and firing a strike to third base to nail Danny Bautista trying to stretch a double into a triple in the sixth inning of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series.

This play on Tuesday night was a walk in the park compared to those two plays, and Jeter almost seemed surprised that Hill was trying to score.  He double pumped, then pulled his throw about six feet wide of the plate.  What should’ve been the third out of the inning turned into the second Toronto run, and the game was tied at two — but not for long.  Travis Snider reached across the plate to lunge at the first pitch he saw and still managed to pull a lazy fly ball towards right center.  It drifted lazily into the visitors’ bullpen as Moseley stood on the mound with arms outstretched and palms turned upwards in the universal symbol of disbelief.

To his credit, Moseley recovered nicely over the next few innings and became the first Yankee starter to record an out in the eighth inning of a game since July 8th.  His team was down 5-2 as he walked off the mound, but neither that fact nor Moseley’s stat line in the morning paper tell the true story.  He deserved better.  After Moseley left the scene the Jays tacked on three more runs courtesy of one home run each off of Kerry Wood and Sergio Mitre.  Final score: Blue Jays 8, Yankees 2.  (And by the way, what if I had told you back in April that José Bautista would have more than twice as many home runs as our Agent 599 on August 4th?)

So if the Yankees are to avoid a sweep, Phil Hughes will have to find a way to keep the ball in the park on Wednesday afternoon. Sweet Baby Jesus.

I’m fairly certain that it’s been twenty years or more since the last time I scored a baseball game, so on Thursday night I printed out a couple blank score sheets, grabbed a clipboard and a pencil, put on the game, and sat on the couch next to my daughter to teach her how to score a game.  Now, I don’t mean to sound like a cranky old man, but you lose something when you follow a game on your cell phone or “watch” via ESPN’s Gamecast.  Sure, it’s convenient and easy, and any statistic you could ever want is only a mouse-click away, but you can never really get a feel for the game.  It turns out there’s no app for that.

So as Alison and I watched the Yankees and Mariners trade zeros through the first few innings, we noticed several things we otherwise wouldn’t have.  First of all, even though Andy Pettitte and Jason Vargas seemed to be matching each other pitch for pitch through the early going, they were actually pitching very different games.  Pettitte was cruising, facing just two over the minimum over five innings, but Vargas was walking a tightrope.

The Yanks put runners on in every inning, but Vargas was able to wiggle out of trouble each time, thanks mainly to a ground-ball-inducing changeup that bothered the right-handed hitters all night long.  (Jeter, Teixeira, and Posada totalled seven ground balls to the left side of the infield.)

Pettitte’s relatively easy first five innings paid dividends in the sixth, when he had to dig deep to avoid disaster.  The frame opened with consecutive singles by the eight and nine hitters, bringing Ichiro to the plate.  Just as I was explaining to my daughter how dangerous the situation was, Ichiro dropped a bunt in front of the mound.  Pettitte scrambled down the hill towards the third base line to field the ball and promptly fired it down the first base line, allowing the first run of the game to score as Josh Wilson scampered home from second base.  (By the way, I’d love it if someone could explain why this run was earned.)  It was Pettitte’s third throwing error in the past month, and he was visibly disgusted.  After the game, he explained: “I just panicked.  It’s terrible.  I just grabbed it and turned and looked over there, and I’m not even focusing on where I need to throw.  I just kinda threw it over there to a group of people… I gotta stop doing that.”  I’d agree.

Down a run with men on second and third and nobody out, Pettitte somehow managed to limit the damage right there.  He convinced Chone Figgins to ground out to third, freezing the runners, then followed an intentional walk by striking out Russell Branyan and José Lopez.  He scolded himself as he walked off the mound, but the reality is that he had just saved the game when he could’ve lost it.

Vargas finally ran out of gas in the eighth, as he walked A-Rod on four pitches and followed that by allowing a single to Robinson Canó.  Brian Sweeney relieved, then promptly uncorked a wild pitch that moved A-Rod to third, from where he’d score as Jorge Posada grounded into a double play, and finally the game was tied at one.

Managing by the book, Don Wakamatsu brought in his closer, Dan Aardsma, to pitch the top of the ninth, but it didn’t turn out the way he hoped.  After fanning Kevin Russo for the first out, Aardsma walked Jeter on four pitches and then gave up a double to All-Star Nick Swisher, who suddenly can’t do anything wrong.  Swashbuckling Swish was four for four on the night with two doubles and a walk, plus a nifty sliding catch in the field.  With the go-ahead run waiting patiently on third and only one out, Teixeira fouled out to the catcher, bringing the game to Alex Rodríguez.

I dwelled on Teixeira’s failure to get that run in as I explained to Alison that it would be much more difficult to get the run in with two outs.  With the optimism of a ten-year-old, she looked down at her scorecard and told me that Alex Rodríguez was up next.  “He hits a lot of home runs, Daddy.”  He didn’t hit a home run this time, just a base hit to right field, but it was good enough to score two runs and pass the game on to Mariano Rivera.  Alison was right; I needn’t have worried.  Oh, and here’s an interesting stat that I don’t believe but can’t possibly verify.  After the game Ken Singleton told us that of the last 18 times the Yankees have scored a tying or go-ahead run in the ninth inning, Alex Rodríguez has been responsible all 18 times.  Believe it or not.

Rivera, of course, worked a hitless ninth inning, saving an Andy Pettitte victory for the 68th time, possibly my favorite statistic ever.  Yankees 3, Mariners 1.

There’s been lots of talk here and elsewhere about Mark Teixeira’s painfully slow start this season, but I always felt like the most interesting angle had nothing to do with his hitting.  The only question worth asking, I think, was why didn’t anyone care that he wasn’t hitting?  Every Yankee has heard the boos cascading down at one point or another, even the legends.  Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Don Mattingly, Paul O’Neil, Alex Rodríguez — and even Derek Jeter — were all booed during slumps.  But why not Teixeira?

Even as his average hovered in the low .200s, Tex could pop up with a runner on third, strike out with the bases loaded, or ground into a rally-killing double play, all with relative impunity, as evidenced by his jog back to the dugout beneath a cloud of indifferent silence.  Analysts would say it was because the true fans understood that he was still helping the team with his on base percentage and stellar defense, but that’s not it at all.  Mark Teixeira is vanilla.  He hits for a decent average, slugs thirty to forty homers a year, drives in a boatload of runs, plays Gold Glove defense, and helps the team win — but no one cares.  We have no expectations for him, so we can’t be disappointed when he fails, even when it’s happening for weeks and months at a time.

Alex Rodríguez, of course, is different.  His at bats stop conversations and delay trips to the concession stand because we expect greatness each time he steps to the plate.  He could be mired in a slump and facing, say, Roy Halladay, but we don’t wonder if he’ll succeed, we wonder how far the ball will go.  Sure, there are a lot of other variables here — the steroid issue, the enormous contract, the opting out of the enormous contract, the social awkwardness, the shadow of Jeter — but the main thing is the great expectations.

All of which brings us to Tuesday night’s game in Oakland.  The Yankees had just tied the score at one in the top of the third when Teixeira came to the plate with runners on first and third, and that’s when the idea of an A-Rod grand slam first popped into my head.  Three pitches later Teixeira was writhing in pain after being plunked in the back by an errant fastball from Trevor Cahill, and the bases were loaded for Mr. Rodríguez.

Any base hit would’ve been fine, but I expected more.  After getting the benefit of the doubt on a check swing call that pushed the count to 3-1 instead of 2-2, A-Rod jumped on a flat sinker and banged it off the bleachers in left center field, 423 feet away.  A-Rod’s response to these no-doubt home runs has always been interesting to me.  Reggie would pause for a second or two, and then take a few deliberate steps towards first before breaking into a Cadillac trot around the bases, all designed to give everyone — Reggie included — ample opportunity to admire what he had just done.  A-Rod instead bolts from the box and immediately turns his head towards his teammates, none of whom are looking at him.  They’re celebrating and following the flight of the ball, and when A-Rod looks into the dugout he seems to be channeling Sally Field: “You like me!  You really like me!” He needs their approval and can’t wait to get around the bases and into the dugout so he can accept their congratulations.  You could psychoanalyze this all you want — or maybe I just did — but all it really means is that he wants to be loved, and I love him for it.

A-Rod’s slam gave the Yankees a 5-1 lead, and that was more than enough for CC Sabathia, who has been pitching like CC Sabathia for the past six weeks.  Following his start in that disaster game in Cleveland on May 29, CC’s record stood at 4-3 with a 4.16 ERA.  Since then he’s rattled off seven straight wins and lowered his ERA with each outing, dropping it to where it now stands at 3.19.  He was dominant again on Tuesday night, striking out ten in seven and two-thirds innings and never really allowing the A’s a look at the game.  He gave up a couple of singles and a walk to the load the bases with two outs in the fifth, but recovered to strike out Daric Barton, who slammed his bat down in disgust at the call and was instantly tossed by home plate umpire Mike Winters.  (And is it just me, or are a lot of opposing hitters getting run lately?)

If all that wasn’t enough to crush the Athletics’ spirit, A-Rod added a second home run (and an second glance into the dugout) with the next half inning, and that was pretty much it.  Yankees 6, A’s 1.

[Photo courtesy of US Presswire.]

Photo by Associated Press

Believe it or not, I was in Oakland on Monday morning. A family road trip for the Fourth of July weekend had us driving back and forth across the San Mateo and Bay Bridges all weekend long, and Monday found us on the east side of the bay as we started our trip home. Much has been made recently about rule changes that have made it more difficult for teams travelling across the country, and the Yankees certainly faced an uphill battle after playing in the Bronx on Sunday afternoon, flying to Oakland on Sunday night, and squaring off against the A’s on Monday night, but I’ll ask that you not feel sorry for them.

I’m guessing that during their seven-hour trek from Yankee Stadium to their hotel in Oakland, their journey was a bit softer than mine. While they were lounging in luxury, watching DVDs and flagging down cocktail waitresses on a chartered flight, I was battling holiday traffic, oppressive heat, outrageously filthy gas station restrooms, and three fussy children. At the end of my journey I knew I’d have to watch the game and file a game report, all without the help of greenies or amphetamines.

But I digress. The Yankee hitters, perhaps suffering from jet lag, weren’t overly impressive. They got on the board in the second inning when Nick Swisher doubled, Curtis Granderson tripled, and Francisco Cervelli singled — all with two outs — to jump out to an early 2-0 lead, and Mark Teixeira added an insurance run with his 14th home run in the sixth. That was pretty much it, but it was enough.

Javier Vazquez was on the mound on Monday night and continued his resurgence, throwing 110 pitches over seven strong innings while allowing only only three hits, two walks, and a single run. His only struggle came in the third inning, as Chad Pennington tripled with one out and then scored on a Coco Crisp sacrifice fly. He worked around a walk and a single in the fourth, allowed a walk to start the fifth, but then retired the next nine batters in a row to finish his night. Joba Chamberlain and Mariano Rivera took care of the final six hitters, and the deed was done. Yankees 3, A’s 1.

I am not a soccer fan, not by any stretch, but I’m incredibly fired up about today’s World Cup match.  We’re a bit late posting this thread, but feel free to pull up a chair as you watch the U.S. boys take on Ghana.

Stephen Dunn/Getty Images

When I was a young boy growing up in Southern California but obsessed with a team that played three thousand miles away, I often went to sleep listening to Dodger games.  In those dark days of the early 1980s when not even George Jetson dreamed of the internet, there were three ways that I could get a Yankee score.  One, I could wait until the next day and read about it in the morning paper; two, I could wait for the sports report on the local news at about 11:20 and hope they included out of town baseball scores; or three, I could listen to the Dodger game and hope I could stay awake to hear the scoreboard recap.

I usually chose option number three, which meant that I would lie in bed and listen to Vin Scully spinning yarns about Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays and Stan Musial.  Thirty years later, I sometimes watch Dodger games — not for the game, but to listen to Scully.  And so when faced with the choice this afternoon between spending ninety minutes in traffic and $300 in tickets to take the family out to Chavez Ravine, or watching the game on the couch with Vin Scully on the mic, I chose Scully.  (The added bonus being that I could spend the afternoon rearranging the garage, much to my wife’s delight.)

Leading up to this series, I focused completely on all the feel-good stories.  Grandpa Joe Torre would get to see the four kids he raised into Hall of Famers (I know you want to quibble with that, but that’s not really the point), Captain Don Mattingly would pose for photos with Captain Derek Jeter, and people like Tommy Lasorda and Reggie Jackson would have good fun recounting past battles.  What’s funny to me is that I didn’t remember the snarky angle — Alex Rodríguez would be on the same field as Torre, the guy who sold him out to SI’s Tom Verducci in September of 2006, dropped him to eighth in the lineup in an elimination game a month later, and then finished the job by going back to Verducci for last year’s tell-all, The Yankee Years.  Even if I forgot all this, the Associated Press did not, as almost half of their game recap focused on the Torre-Rodríguez rift.  (For the record, I love Joe Torre, but I hate the way he handled A-Rod.)

But there was an actual game played on Friday night, and it was a good one.  On the Dodger side, things started out nicely as they scratched out a run against CC Sabathia in the first inning with a lead-off walk and stolen base by Rafael Furcal, a ground ball to first by Andre Ethier to move him to third, and an RBI-single to right by our old friend Manny Ramírez (more on him later). (more…)