All hail Helen!!

All hail Helen!!
Helen Carmona and your humble blogger

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Yankees 5, Mariners 1

Don't try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they're fascist. -- Crash Davis, speaking to Nuke LaLoosh, in Bull Durham.

Strikeouts may very well be vestiges of a far right-wing regime, but I'll take them any day. Thank goodness the Seattle defense was asleep behind starter Erik Bedard early in last night's game, because once Bedard got rolling in the middle innings, blowing the ball by Yankee hitters, he was fun to watch -- fun only because the Yankees were already up 3-1 thanks to four Mariner errors, and the Yankees' own starter, Chien-Ming Wang, was keeping the Mariner lineup off the bases.

After Bobby Abreu grounded out to second base in the bottom of the fifth, for the second Yankee out, Bedard struck out four of the next six Yankee batters. That's never fun for a Yankee fan to see, but for a baseball fan who has been bombarded by the increase in run-scoring in the Bud Selig era, watching a pitcher dominate brings a little tingle of excitement, even when that pitcher is wearing enemy colors.

But when Yankee reliever Kyle Farnsworth stepped to the mound in the seventh inning, and started throwing an unhittable fastball from the very first pitch, the tinge of guilt was gone, and it was simply fun to just sit back and enjoy a pitcher going for broke. Farnsworth netted ten strikes out of his economical 14 pitches thrown, and notched two strikeouts in his one inning of work, but it wasn't the strikeouts themselves that were so fun to see; it was the way Farnsworth completely overwhelmed Jeff Clement and especially Wladimir Balantien.

It looked unfair to the hitters, which is the way baseball is supposed to look when a pitcher is on his game. We don't see it much anymore, and when it comes around, it reminds us how much fun baseball can be when the game isn't taking three and a half hours as managers change pitchers after every late-inning home run.

Is Wang the new Pettitte?

Now that he's 6-0 in 2008, there's no longer any debate about whether Chien-Ming Wang belongs in the conversation with baseball's other top aces. The questions now are how high canhis win total go this season, and how much more important he's been to the Yankees than just a pitcher with a solid won-loss record.

Wang's 44 wins since 2006 place him four ahead of Brandon Webb for the most in the majors for any starting pitcher. But look at these numbers: 27-7, 22-6, 11-0. Those are the numbers related to Wang's starts the game after a Yankee loss.

Wang has taken the hill 34 times in his career the day after the Yankees lost the previous game. In thos games the Yankees are 27-7 overall; Wang's personal record is 22-6; and after last night's win, Wang is 11-0 in the last 11 starts after a Yankee loss.

For years, starter Andy Pettitte was known as the streak stopper, the one Yankee starter who was so competitive that he took Yankee losses personally and went to the mound the day after a loss and stopped the other teams in their tracks. Time and again, Pettitte got the Yankees back onthe winning track. Now, apparently, that's Wang's job.

For all Wang's success over the last three years, Yankee fans have never been sure whether or not he was a successor to a David Cone or a Pettitte as a knife-in-the-heart pitcher who could stare down an opposing batting order like a front-end ace should be able to do. But Wang's new pitch, the slider, looks more and more like an out pitch every time he throws it. he only had four strikeouts last night, as opposed to his nine last Sunday in Cleveland, but Wang is clearly now a top-level major league ace. It's still hard to believe, after last year's 19-win season, that Wang wasn't even in the top five of the Cy Young voting. That doesn't look like a problem this season.

And Cy Young voters wil have to take into account not only Wang's record, but who he's beaten, head-to-head. I know pitchers always insist that they're not facing the other pitcher, but the other lineup, but when Wang has two wins already against a lights-out C.C. Sabathia and a hard-charging Bedard, that can't hurt his credentials when it comes time for the awards to be handed out.

And why stop at Cy Young? With the way the Yankees have needed wins, and with the way Wang has kept this team from being a lot worse than 15-16, has there been another player in baseball who has exemplified the word 'valuable' the way Wang has? To heck with Cy Young; bring on the MYP!

How offensive?

Last night's win wasn't all about the pitching, but when was the last time we looked down a Yankee lineup and saw only one .300 or better batting average?

Last night's lineup had exactly one .300 hitter: Hideki Matsui at .313 (and a juicy .409 on-base percentage). All season, a chorus of Yankee fans and bloggers, including me, have wanted to blame the shoddy pitching for the lackluster record, and when it came to offense I've always pointed to the poor team average with runners in scoring position as a main culprit. But the Yankees don't just hit poorly with runners on base; they hit poorly all the way around.

Among hitters elegible for the batting title (3.1 at-bats per game the team has played), Robinson Cano and Jason Giambi are the two worst hitters in the American League. Shelley Duncan, who doesn't have that many at-bats, is hitting .190. Jose Molina has seen his hot start cool to a .218 clip. Morgan Ensberg is at .235, and even Derek Jeter and Melky Cabrera, at .284 each, aren't tearing up the baselines with their cleats. (Although any Yankee fans will take .284 from Cabrera, whose all-around-player stock is rising every week.)

Tha Yankees were handed their lead last night from a lackluster Mariner defense that committed four errors in the first three innings. Against Seattle starter Felix Hernandez today, the Yankees may need similar generosity. (Ironically, the Yankee with the best career numbers against Hernandez is Cano, at .571. Cano got a rest last night, and replacement Alberto Gonzalez went 1-for-3 with a run scored.)

Season to date

The Yankees are 15-16 and infourth place in the AL East, three games behind the first-place Red Sox and two games behind Baltimore and Tampa Bay, both tied for second place. The Yankee win last night ended a three-game losing streak. The Yankees are 1-3 on their current nine-game homestand.

Saturday's starting pitchers

Yankees: Mike Mussina, RHP (3-3, 4.73 ERA)
Last start: Mussina pitched five innings in Cleveland, holding the Indians to two runs, giving up four straight hits in the fifth inning. Seattle leadoff hitter Ichiro Suzuki has made a living off Mussina, hitting .409 off the Moose in his career.

Mariners: Felix Hernandez, RHP (2-1, 2.22 ERA)
Last start: Hernandez was on his way to a 3-0 record, pitching seven shutout innings against Oakland, but the A's touched him for four runs in the eighth and chased Hernandez. Despite striking out ten batters, Hernandez took his first loss of the season. Hernandez is 1-0 against the Yankees, allowing one run and five hits in a seven-inning start last season.

1 comments:

New York Yankees Blog said...

Wang is not the new Pettitte. Enough said.