All hail Helen!!

All hail Helen!!
Helen Carmona and your humble blogger

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Enough already!

I know Phil Hughes was terrible on Sunday night, but I'm laying the blame for the early 3-0 hole on A-Rod.

When you're the reigning league MVP, when you're destined to become one of the top 20 run producers of all time, when you're coming to the plate to face a pitcher who can't find the strike zone, when you have two runners on and only one out -- and when you're making more money this week than 90 percent of the fans will make this year -- you don't swing at the first pitch, even if it's a straight fastball down the middle. And you especially don't swing at the first pitch when it's a breaking ball on your shoetops. But that's what A-Rod did, and just like that, the Red Sox get a groundball double play, and Dice K gets off the hook that he tried, over and over again, to hang himself with all night long.

But leave it to the 2008 New York Yankees to fail to make him pay the price.

There were tons of reasons for this loss: A-Rod and Robbie Cano going a combined 0-for-10 and leaving a combined seven runners on base; Johnny Damon grounding into a double play instead of moving the runners over with the tying runs on base and no one out in the eighth; and Phil Hughes, Phil Hughes, Phil Hughes.....

How pissed off can you get at a rookie pitcher in his first start in the worst possible environment for a Yankee rookie? Fenway Park, freezing temperatures, first-inning control issues. It was unlikely Hughes was going to last long. But that's not the story of this game.

The story -- again! -- is the failure to go after pitchers in trouble. I'm too depressed to do the numbers right now, but what is the current Yankee average with runners in scoring position? .oo3? .002? Those guesses can't be too far off. Fans don't mind losses, even in Boston, but we do get tired of this failure to capitalize on situations where this team should be scoring at least two more runs per game. For all the talk of Kevin Long being this other-worldly hitting coach, he sure isn't turning around this atrocious offensive approach.

In the first inning, if A-Rod lays off that first pitch from Dice-K, it's a 1-0 count. Now Dice-K has to throw a fastball to avoid going down 2-0, a count that would have really given the Yankees a lift in this game. At the very least, A-Rod could have sat back, taken a strike to go 1-1, and maybe later in the at-bat forced Dice K into a situation where A-Rod would likely have gotten a pitch he could have driven somewhere. And even if he had eventually struck out, that would have been better than a first-pitch double play grounder. Ugh!

I was projecting a conservative 16-13 April record, considering the road schedule and the weather, but now that prediction seems not so much conservative as it does wishful thinking. With this offense, try flipping that record, and the Yanks will seem lucky to be that good at the end of this month.

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