Cano can do!

Not that one pinch-hit, solo home run to win a game on the road and save a team from a disastrously dispiriting loss can make up for batting a paltry .170 over the first thirteen games, but on Monday night Robinson Cano did show why manager Joe Girardi is so high on him, and why your humble blogger thought Cano was a pre-season candidate for MVP in the American League.

It will take a few 3-for-4, 3 RBI nights for Cano to vault himself into elite player status, but anyone who saw the ease of that home run swing in Tampa can see just how much talent Cano possesses. Over the last two weeks, Cano has repeatedly said that he felt he was swinging well, and that very well may have been true. But anyone who has watched Cano reach out, again and again, to try to pull outside pitches, only to pound them into the dirt for weak groundouts to second base, knows that Cano may have been swinging well, but his swing decisions were terrible. That changed, at least for the time being, on one swing Monday.

Cano will always be a free swinger (he walks only once every 23.5 plate appearances, but strikes out once every 8.3 trips to the plate), so pitchers who can locate balls outside are going to tempt him into bad at-bats every now and then. But if Kevin Long -- who after Monday's game was called the "greatest hitting coach I've ever worked with" by a 4-for-5 Alex Rodriguez -- can get Cano to cut that strikeout rate and raise the walk ratio, Cano's MVP odds will increase tremendously.

And my pre-season prediction won't look quite so insane..... which is what I really care about, right?

Kennedy deserved better

Rules are rules, and baseball history is littered with pitchers who could have had better records if it weren't for piss-poor relief perfomances, but it's tough to reason out how Brian Bruney can walk away with a win last night, and Ian Kennedy gets nothing to show for a pretty good outing.

Bruney has been one of the bullpen success stories thus far in 2008, but that wasn't the case on Monday. A horrible first inning of relief saw Bruney pelted for two home runs, including the first major league dinger for Evan Longoria. Billy Traber wasn't much better, surrendering a two-run shot of his own before Bruney came in to go Traber one better. By the time both relievers had finished making a mess of the seventh inning, Kennedy's 7-2 lead was gone. Sure, Bruney got the first two outs of the eighth before making room on the mound for Mariano Rivera, but for him to get the win just because of Cano's timely pop just seems wrong.

Bruney better buy a big dinner for Kennedy back in New York Wednesday night. He owes him at least that much.

It's gotta be the dome!

Fifteen hits. Five for extra bases, including four solo home runs. A .357 batting average for the game (and a .381, on-base percentage). A stolen base. Clutch hitting with the pitchers struggling. Could all that have been due to the move indoors and out of the frigid weather of the northeast? Probably. (Consider: the Yankees are a mixture of aging vets with creaky bones and young Latin players from sunny climes. April's showers can't be good for these guys...)

While the hitting with runners in scoring position still isn't top-notch (.286, 2-for-7 on Monday), the Yankees did just about everything else right at the plate on Monday. Games with 8-7 scores are the kind most people think the Yankees will need to win in order to reach the postseason in 2008. Personally, I'll take a 2-0 Wang win over Monday, anytime. But a win's a win, and being .500 is better than being below average. And if it takes getting warm indoors in Tampa, then maybe dome baseball has its uses after all.

Now, can we just get some relief pitching tonight?