Tagged: Ballgames
Game 126: Walk-off.
Hot damn, late-inning breaks go OUR way this time! I can’t remember the last time we had a walk-off win, and since wins are at a premium for us at the moment, it made this extra special. The White Sox are a poor team, so I hoped we wouldn’t need to resort to late-inning heroics to take the game, but since the Yankees can’t be bothered to score more than 3 or 4 runs a game, we have to work with what we get. The second best part of tonight’s slate of games is that the Cubs, the poor, poor Cubs, beat the Orioles. I KNOW. I couldn’t believe it either. My hometown team always finds a way to come someone’s aid, and this time it was ours.
Our rotation has been a bit of a dog’s breakfast, or catch as catch can if you want to use another metaphor. Shane Greene took the mound tonight, giving us a serviceable performance — 5.0 IP, 9 H, 3 ER, 2 BB, 7 K. Not great, but not awful, either. I think “middling” is a good word to describe it. Shawn Kelley, Dellin Betances, and David Robertson made up the relief core, giving up a total of 2 H, 0 ER, and 6 K with no walks. D-Rob ended up with the win, as he was the pitcher of record when Martin Prado singled with the bases loaded, scoring Ichiro.
Speaking of Martin, he went 2-5 with 3 RBI, which is 75% of our entire offensive output all night. Jacoby Ellsbury went 2-4 with an RBI, which makes up the other 25%. Am I the only one bothered by that? Not the fact we won, but the fact that our offense is so woeful, two people are solely responsible for the reason we won the game. Some of these guys are killing me. I shouldn’t ask for more than 4 runs tomorrow, because we’ll end up getting shut out, but it would be nice if we managed to actually score, and score with some authority. Come on fellas, I know you can do it.
Game 124: Damn it.
I know, that’s not an inventive title, but it was my initial reaction upon learning we’d lost the game after yet again, giving up runs late. The sad part is, I was upset for about 30 seconds, and then I just sighed. The Yankees have broken me. I just looking forward to the end of this miserable season, in the hopes that during the off-season, we make some changes that help us be competitive next year. I know there are many other teams who’d kill to have our problems, but I suppose being burdened with being the New York Yankees makes it hard to swallow down said problems, without feeling like you’re choking on them.
Michael Pineda was our starter last night, and much like Chris Capuano on Tuesday, he threw a quality start — 6.0 IP, 4 H, 2 ER, 1 BB, 3 K. That shouldn’t be the line for the starter of the losing team. Also like Tuesday, the bullpen blew the lead late, giving up 4 runs in the top of the 7th. We can’t win games if our bullpen can’t hold the leads we give them, and we’re playing a team right now who we should be able to soundly rout, even in our current decrepit state.
The offense wasn’t much better than the pitching, managing only a paltry two runs, even though we had 10 hits. One would think that with 10 hits, we did more with them than just two runs, but alas……we’re the Yankees. We like to make everything difficult. Derek Jeter went 2-4, Jacoby Ellsbury went 2-5 with an RBI, Chase Headley went 2-4, and Ichiro went 2-4. Our other RBI came from Stephen Drew, who went 1-3. Everyone in the starting lineup except Teixeira and Prado had a hit. We should have won this game, just like we should have won Tuesday night’s game. My only hope is we don’t get swept tonight, though I’m not holding out hope on that one.
Game 123: I’m afraid to admit I expected that.
The Yankees have this incredibly annoying habit of playing well against good teams, and playing like crap against equally poor teams. The Astros are 20 games under .500. The Yankees are 3 games above it. Who do you think won the game last night? You have three guesses and none of them are “the Yankees.” I should be glad that everyone else in the division lost last night, except for Baltimore, who seems determined to make up for years and years of being mocked by baseball fans around the country.
David Robertson let me down. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it hurts. The Yankees had fallen behind 4-2, and then we scored 2 runs in the bottom of the 6th to tie it up. All is well until the top of the 9th, when D-Rob comes in to preserve the tie so we can possibly win it in the bottom of the inning, and he gives up a 3-run HR to Chris Carter…..which promptly gives Houston a 7-4 lead, and naturally we do jack and shit to end the game. Chris Capuano took the mound as our starter, and didn’t have the best night, going 5.1 innings, giving up 4 ER on 8 H, with 2 BB and 8 K, but after that, the bullpen was quite solid in relief. That is, until Mr. High Socks decided to rather uncharacteristically cough up the game. I know I shouldn’t be too hard on him, he’s essentially our Mo in terms of being the closer, and Mo had more than a few shit games himself, believe it or not. 99% of the time, if he took the mound, the game was over, you could start picking up your things to head home. That 1% though….he liked to keep it interesting, I guess. I hope our pitching tonight is better than it was last night, because that was a totally unimpressive display.
Our offense wasn’t much more impressive than our pitching, sad to say. Aside from a few batters who had great nights at the plate, most everyone else stunk it up. Jacoby Ellsbury went 3-4, Martin Prado went 3-4 with 2 RBI, and Brian McCann went 1-4 with 2 RBI. There’s our offense, folks. Not much else to say about it, really. It’s to the point now where I don’t care how many people get hits, just as long as we get enough hits to win the ballgame.
Game 118: The Drama Club™ returns with a vengeance.
Apparently the Yankees wanted to wait until the absolute very last second to pull this win out, which means The Drama Llama has come back to visit. Who can resist that face anyway? Wouldn’t you like to take him home and feed him carrots or something? Maybe stick a little Yankees hat on his head and walk him around the neighborhood. When your neighbors ask who that is, just say “Why, it’s the drama llama of course!”. Oh the fun you’d have.
Anyway, the Yankees got a bit of a break when it was announced that Joba would be pitching on Sunday, meaning we would be spared back-to-back sh!tastic starts by Mitre and Gaudin. At least it’ll spare the pen somewhat. With that in mind, Andy Pettitte took the mound for the Bombers and looked to get the Yanks to their 4th win in a row and a chance to go 30 games over .500. He did it very well. 6 innings, 2 ER, 6 H, 1 BB and 10 K. 10 strikeouts. Apparently CC Sabathia’s performance yesterday rubbed off on him or something. It’s a shame he couldn’t go 7 innings, but with 111 pitches, you don’t want to risk catastrophe. Bruney, Hughes and Rivera pitched the next 3 innings, giving up a combined 1 hit and 2 Ks, both of which belonged to Phil Hughes. God, I love Phil Hughes. Mo got the save, Yankees win. And isn’t that the best thing of all?
Now, I know we scored 11 runs in the first game of this series, which means we wouldn’t be scoring a ton of runs tonight. It’s just how this team operates. Look at games where we scored 10 or more runs and then look at the number of runs we scored in the game immediately following it. It’s an interesting drop-off, maybe during the off-day we have coming up, I’ll blog about it. But in any event, we got the runs we needed to win the game in the top of the 9th, which does qualify for late-inning heroics. The first run came on a fielder’s choice by Jerry Hairston, scoring Jorge Posada. The 2nd run came on a single by Derek Jeter, scoring Melky Cabrera. The third and tie-breaking run came off the bat of the arguably the MVP of this team, Mark Teixeira. It was his 30th homer of the season, putting him just one behind the AL leader Pena, out in Tampa Bay. The fourth and final run came off the bat of Nick Swisher, scoring Robbie Cano. What can be said about this team? We go down early 2-0 after a shaky 1st by Andy. Then we cut that in half by getting a run across in the next inning. Then a bad miscue by the Mariner’s shortstop ties the game for us. Just when it looks like it might go into extras, Mark undoes that and gives us the lead. Get that win anyway you can.
The Yankees are now 73-43, an amazing 30 games over .500. We have a 6.5 game lead over Boston in the AL East, and are still in possession of the best record in baseball by 5 games in the win column over the Angels. Our Magic Number to eliminate the Red Sox is now 41 and we are 27 wins away from the century mark. Let’s make it happen!
Stars of the Game™
Game 116: Apparently the Yankees are fond of the little guy.
Well, I said last night that any time a Yankees victory involves dramatics; either a walk-off (like today), blown leads (like today) or all-around nerve-wracking action (like today)…..the drama llama would come out to play. He is cute, isn’t he?
What was not cute, however, was AJ Burnett coughing up the 3-1 lead we gave him. Normally with a pitcher like him, you could give him a 1-run lead and all would be well, but our rotation has a bad case of the yips right now. Thankfully we’ve had some late-inning heroics to rectify that, but come on already. I guess it’s better to get the yips out of our system now than wait until October, but really. Now, AJ’s line wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t fantastic either. He went 6.0 innings, gave up 10 hits [yeesh] and 3 ER, walked 2 and struck out 7. A little less hits and that’s a really good line. I guess we should be lucky we gave up 14 hits to the Jays and they only managed to plate 3 runs, one of which was on a wild pitch. Coke, Robertson, Hughes and our new guy Gaudin filled out our relief corps this afternoon, with Gaudin picking up the win. He threw 2 innings of shutout ball and struck out 3 in the process, so he definitely deserves a mention in the Stars section of this post. Great job!
The game didn’t exactly start off very well, with Derek having to leave the game very early with an injury to his foot – thankfully the x-rays came back negative. Who knows how long he’ll be out though…..I’m praying not that long. Not to mention, Alex got hit on the elbow in the 11th inning, and HE might have some lingering effects from that. Now is not the time for two of our big hitters to come down with the injury bug, so let’s hope that between now and tomorrow’s game they’re feeling better. As for the offense in total today, aside from a couple solo shots and Robbie’s 11th inning heroism, we didn’t do much. The Jays doubled our hit total, as we only had 7 today and Johnny Damon and Robbie Cano made up 4 of those hits. We’re pretty lucky the Jays squandered almost every opportunity we gave them to put the game away. Let’s do better during the next series.
Stars of the Game™
Also getting a Star™ is Chad Gaudin and the rest of our bullpen for really holding it down and keeping the Jays from taking the lead. No photos are available for them yet, but hey…..a mention is a mention!
Yanks get a little luck of the Irish today.
We beat the Red Sox today, and any time we do that…..it’s a good day. March, June, October….doesn’t matter. I noticed the mouse didn’t see any action today…..he’s probably in his hole hoarding some cheese. Hope everyone has had a great St. Patrick’s Day so far, and I hope all the good Catholics out there did their celebrating on Saturday rather than today, since we’re not supposed to celebrate feast days during Holy Week. And I hope you’re wearing some green so you don’t get pinched. Moving on from there to the game, I think we looked really good…..our pitching was a little wobbly but it held and we put up 8 runs, which is a nice bit of offense. And we did all of this with Alex sitting on the bench today. Andy started for us and looked shaky, giving up 3 runs in 3 1/2 innings. Phillips, Albaladejo, Traber and Bruney all pitched after him and did very well, only giving up 1 run and 5 hits amongst them. It was nice to see the kids (and Bruney) getting some work in and doing well.
|
|
Like I mentioned earlier, we scored 8 runs and they all came off the fantastic duo of Bartolo Colon and Julian Tavarez. Two men so grotesque, they make the blind weep. One looks like Mr. Creosote from The Meaning of Life and the other looks like Freddy Kruger got into a fight with a beaker of acid. I think the Yanks got so scared, they just hit the ball to avoid having to look at either of them for too long. And that’s an interesting way to go about doing it. Maybe this year, they need to envision all pitchers looking like that….maybe we’ll win something this year that way. Hey, at this point…..we should be willing to try anything. Godzilla went 3-4 with 3 RsBI, Robbie went 2-3 with 3 RsBI and Bobby Abreu went 2-3 with 2 RsBI. Rounding out the action, Jason went 2-3 and DJ went 1-3. One thing I have noticed about the Yankees this ST is that we’re doing better getting 2-out RBI. That was a problem for us last season…..we’d have a runner on 3rd or even on 2nd and a base hit would score a run (or 2) and we’d continually leave them stranded. I hope the team has been working on the little things to bring runners in when we need to. I’m not saying focus solely on "smallball" (God, I hate that phrase), but I would like to see them utilizing it more often, rather than relying completely on HRs. So overall it was a very good game and a great win over a rival…..even if this is completely meaningless.
|
|
|
Stars of the Game™
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other Stars™ go out to Robbie, Jason and Bobby for their contributions to this afternoon’s win. Way to go, guys!
Phil finally gets a perfect game out of us…..sort of.
A win is a win is a win, even if it is in a rain-shortened contest. And it was a perfect game! Well, a combined perfect game effort but that’s better than nothing. Phil Hughes got the win, and Igawa……shocker coming…..pitched 2 innings, gave up no hits, no runs, no walks. And struck out two. I know, I know…..I could hardly believe it myself. So even in an abbreviated game, we were able to get some good innings out of people who don’t usually give us good innings.
|
|
We only scored 2 runs, but hey…..6 innings isn’t always enough to put up a crooked number and it is spring training. Shelley Duncan went 2-2 with an RBI and and Melky Cabrera got the other run for the Yankees. What I love most about ST is seeing some of the kids playing and getting a shot and impressing the bosses. These could be the stars of the future out there, so it’s always great to watch them. Short but sweet GDP today, but sometimes they’ll be like this until the season starts.
|
|
|
Stars of the Game™
|
|
|
|
|
Shelley Duncan gets the other Star™, but unfortunately, I have no picture for him. Yet. I’m working on it. 🙂
A Tale of Two Plays and “Ground Control to Major Tom”
I was watching portions of the Sox/Indians game last night, because as a Yankee fan…..watching the Sox lose is good times. Now at some point in the game, their official team mascot, Dustin Pedroia…..did something eerily similar in stupidity to something Alex Rodriguez did in the 2004 ALCS. Namely, trying to smack/slap/dislodge the ball from the 1B’s glove while running toward the base. After the play in 2004, which even Bronson Arroyo admitted he understood, Alex was absolutely vilified by the press for it, and called everything from classless to a p*ssy. I’m wondering where the righteous indignation on the part of Red Sox Nation is, in regards to what Pedroia did. For the record, I hated the fact Alex did it in the first place, because it looked absolutely ridiculous. It’s definitely not going into his Cooperstown highlight reel. So……where’s the outrage? Where are the villagers with flaming torches and pitchforks come to run him out of town? If it’s oh-so-horrible for one person to do it, shouldn’t it still be oh-so-horrible when of your own does it too? And please don’t give me the lame excuse that Pedroia is a rookie, Alex isn’t. Shouldn’t you just….oh I don’t know….know better?
|
|
And one final thing. I would LOVE….just LOVE to see Manny take one right in the ribcage. Walk-off HR against the Angels…..celebrate to your heart’s content. A HR when you’re still down by 4 in a game where if you lose, you’re one away from elimination? That makes you look like a fargin’ tool. I know Manny isn’t operating with a full deck of cards and at times appears to have all the cognitive function of a comatose parakeet, but shouldn’t someone at some point tap him on the shoulder (provided it can be found under the mass of Rasta-dreads) and remind him that there is a time and place for everything? The whole "Manny being Manny" act is getting old. I think people are no longer excused for piss-poor behavior in public when they’re old enough to wipe their own butts. It’s the playoffs…..time to elevate to a new IQ plateau, Manny.
|
|
Edit: Great article to be read here –> There’s winning with class, then there’s Manny’s way
Where do we go from here?
Alright…..it’s time to pick up the pieces of wreckage from this season and put them back together again. A lot of questions need to be answered in the coming weeks, and the absolute biggest concerns Alex and what his intentions are. I believe he has until November 6 to resign with the team or else he walks. God, I hope that doesn’t happen. I enjoy watching him put up 54-HR seasons in Yankee pinstripes, I’d like to see that continue. Also, what happens with Mo/Posada and who is the new manager next year, provided Steinbrenner follows through on his threat. So Yankees fans…..let’s have it. Are we looking at a radically different team for ST next year, or will it be the same-old, same-old? Also, if Torre is not back next year, who do you want? Donnie Baseball or Joe Girardi…maybe someone altogether different? I’d comment on the coming ALCS, but I don’t give a ****.
Thanks for the memories, Joe.
I think this is it for Joe Torre. It’s been a great run, really. We all read King George’s edict, so don’t expect Joe back on the bench next season. I only hope whoever they get to replace him does a decent enough of job of not making us wish Torre was managing again. I know it was probably not the best of timing to make that announcement, but Steinbrenner doesn’t do anything by half-measures. I don’t even know if I should be angry, and that’s a little scary. I mean, I should be angry…..but I can’t will myself to do it. I’m more depressed than anything else. I do have a somewhat cogent fear that the next few seasons will resemble those from the late 80s. Torre is gone, Cashman will probably get the axe, Steinbrenner will more than likely hand off the reins to someone else…..sh!t will be ugly. Uglier than this series and this was ugly. Edited to add: Derek Jeter can kiss my a-s-s. He has been f-cking atrocious all series. They’ve all been bad, but way to man up, Captain Clutch.
|
|
|
Edited to add again: Derek’s numbers in this postseason: 3-17, 5 K, 3 GIDP, 0 BB – .176/.176/.176/.352 OPS. Alex’s numbers this postseason: 4-15, 6 K, 2 BB, 1 HR – .266/.353/.466/.819 OPS. Yeah, but let’s blame Alex for everything, huh? Everyone sucked, but can we try to place the blame at the feet of the responsible parties this year instead of just tacking it on Alex like we do all the **** time? Our starting pitching stunk to high-heaven (thanks, Wang) and the offense died. Alex did well enough, although not as well as we all would want…..but he’s hardly near the top of the list. I pray he doesn’t opt out. We’re an 80-win team without him. Unless of course you want to sit through the 80s again, because then by all means….run him out of town.
|
|
|
I was going to insert the standard "trolls need not apply" speech here, but why bother? You illiterate cretins will do what you want anyway. I’ll say this much; don’t make me punish the good and smart people because you’re a stupid dillhole.
Yankees Chick 