Happy Days are Here Again

I feel good and vindicated now that the Yankees have reverted to form, now that some Yankee fans took a step back from the ledge, now that the Yankees drubbed the Mets this weekend. Like we’ve said all along, the shortcomings with this team right now are not located within the cogs of the offense. There are some bench problems lingering about and a few bullpen concerns that need to be wrapped up. But if what we see is what we get than I’m buying it right now.

Now we shouldn’t get too elated about drubbing the Atlanta Braves and New York Mets who both belong to the most woe begotten division in baseball right now. And returning to properly played American league baseball might take some of the veneer off the picture. The Yankees could have really put something together if they had not taken 2 weeks off that included dropping 2 of 3 to the Nationals and Marlins. So now back to big boy ball and we’ll greet the Mariners at the little league park in the Bronx.

Now it’s no mystery that the rotation has performed better on the road than at home:

Sabathia-      5-3 3.19 ERA, 3.06 K/BB road vs. 2-1, 3.99 ERA,1.93 K/BB home
Chamberlain- 4-0 2.74 ERA, 2.06 K/BB road vs. 0-2, 5.18 ERA,1.71 K/BB home
Pettitte-        4-1 2.71 ERA, 1.76 K/BB road vs. 3-2, 5.77 ERA, 1.72 K/BB home

It’s also no mystery that many of the pitchers just aren’t happy with how the little ballpark in the Bronx has been playing. They pitch away from contact and thus walk more batters. Simple. So what’s that mean for the immediate future? Who knows. But if I had to give an over under and walks Joba gives up tonight I’d say over 4. I feel good about that.

The Mariners have a great pitching staff as well and I’m just going to be so unsurprised when they leave town on Thursday to hear them say nasty things about the place. That’s how it goes these days. Anyone who thinks each story and quote about how small Yankee stadium plays doesn’t kill Brian Cashman and boys upstairs are nuts. As good as the Mariners have been in terms of pitching this year I still expect a slugfest in the Bronx this weekend. What else can we expect nowadays?

• Let’s get this straight- the early chatter from some media and radio personalities who would rather have Ramiro Pena stay on the Yankees are missing the boat. Pena has shown some potential this year and he needs regular AB’s to develop. Keeping Ransom around who is a 32 year old journeyman is the more prudent one to keep- he won’t be “developing” anytime soon. This is how you treat prospects- you let them develop (Take note, Mets).
• Had enough fun with the Cano as a 5 hitter experiment? Me too.
• For as bad as the bullpen was early, it’s been terrific of late. They’ve done so well lately that they’re good for 12^th in the majors in WXRL, or Win Expectation Above Replacement. Remove Brett Tomko and his abominable contribution and the Yankees crack the top 10 best bullpens in baseball.

Doom Gloom and Suicide: Or Other Notes on the New York Yankees

The Yankees are in idle at the moment, content to waste away in their newly beloved secondary role in the American league east. But is this really as bad as it seems?

The apocalypse prone New Yorker may be ready to declare the team dead in the water at this point and there certainly are plenty of problems. The offense seems stuck in a rut after Mark Teixeira fell back to earth and Alex Rodriguez never got it going. Damon cooled off and Nick Swisher is an enigma at this point. The starting pitching has been inconsistent too, from Andy Pettitte to Joba Chamberlain, they’ve had incredible lows and some tantalizing highs.

Regardless though, this team is still in good shape. Two weeks ago they were riding a crest of a 6 game winning streak, looking great flirting with first place until they ran into the big bad Red Sox in Fenway, the start of this recent skid. And although they’ve been loosing more often than not lately, they’re seven games over .500 and would be in the playoffs if they started today.

Now before the season began I think any objective portrait of this team would have led to the conclusion that they’re still not better than the Red Sox. And they’re not. But they have a rotation that should improve and with the new found success of the bullpen, the pitching woes should go away. Offensively this team is obviously one of the strongest in baseball. You have Alex Rodriguez, one of the most prodigious hitters in baseball who has not even STARTED to hit so far. Considering Melky Cabrera and Brett Gardner are 4^th outfielders they’ve filled in very well so far. Cano has been up and down but has hit much better than last year and Nick Swisher has largely been positive. Posada, Jeter and Damon all have been hitting in the twilight of their careers.

Now are there concerns? Of course. The rotation doesn’t HAVE to improve- it could remain a complete mystery all season. Burnett could certainly be every bit of the frustrating pitcher he’s been so far for the rest of the season. Wang has been the most obvious outright disaster on the team. There can’t be many people who feel confident about him going forward. But if Wang doesn’t right the ship Phil Hughes has made incredible progress and has shown he can more than take the place of CMW. The Yankees are somewhat unexplainably  17-20 against teams under .500. No question that’s a major concern as well.

So let’s step back from the ledge a bit. It’s been a crummy few weeks for sure. The team has been extremely frustrating, the manager extremely effusive the inconsistency extremely disheartening.

Everyone goes through peaks and valleys, through ups and downs through good games and bad. So before we prepare for the end and before we talk about who should go and who should stay, we should take stock of where we are and take a deep breath.

Mentally Checked Out in the Bronx

I wondered briefly aloud yesterday if I had cursed the Yankees- if my praise of their offensive abilities had angered some baseball God, or semi-God, or demi-God, or Titan or something. What other explanation is there? It’s all been part of an awful 7 day stretch highlighted of course by being shut-out at home in the rain by one of the worst teams in baseball history while they won the series.

You could look at Sunday as a blip on the radar- which is what it was- since the Yankees have settled into a nice little slide here in the middle of June. A catch with two hands would make it an even worse stretch- imagine getting swept by the Red Sox, again, and then loosing series to the Mets AND Nationals? I never thought I’d owe Luis Castillo so much.

Taking a cursory glance through the New York papers would label Alex Rodriguez as chief slumper, cause of our offensive reverie, reason for our pain. But Teixeira is only hitting .175 over the past week, Swisher .059 (!!), Posada .154 and Damon .227. While Cano, Jeter, Gardner and Cervelli may have had decent weeks they’re not going to carry an offense. Mark Teixeira can do that, Alex Rodriguez can do that. But if you have all your power slumping, you’re going to have bad performances (who would have thought shutout-against-the-Nationals bad?).

It’s helpful of course that as soon as the offense decides to take a week off the starting pitching goes missing. I guess those who would saddle Posada with the blame for Joba’s poor outing against the Mets are pretty quite about now. Cervelli didn’t fare much better tonight. I suppose Kevin Cash might try next. Andy won’t have any ballpark to bemoan tonight. He’s got a perfect friend in Landshark Stadium, future home of our 48th round draft pick.

Isn’t it all getting a little old though, hearing the excuses and watching Girardi gloss over each and every loss? It feels too much like 2008 right now if you ask me. The “well we’ve never seen this pitcher before” or “well he just threw a great game against us!” is getting fairly old. I wonder if anyone told Joe that his excuses fell flat last year with everyone and they’re not going over well this year either.

If the mentally checked out Yankees continue to show up they could find themselves in a very ugly place. The Rays are back for anyone who didn’t know and the Red Sox are still the best team in baseball. The Yankees certainly are not in a position to be mailing in games right now. So I’ll be watching down in Florida for what sort of team shows up- the one already thinking about Saturday morning golf or the one thinking about getting back on track.

Enough is Enough

As a prominent New York radio show host might say, the bloom is officially off the rose. Some Wang apologists might say he actually did not pitch poorly or was just a victim of circumstance. They might say he was cheated out of some calls and got some big outs or they might say he only gave up 3 runs in 5 innings; I’ll say enough is enough.

Girardi is going to review the game tape to see if Wang deserved another start and boy, I hope he watches the same game I did tonight.

Because what I saw was a pitcher who had again lost 2-4 mph on his sinker and who again, consistently left it up in the zone begging to be deposited into the bleachers (Adam Dunn heard your cries CMW, he acted accordingly).

If you want to place the game on the blown call at first and an altogether disdainful offensive effort from the Yankees, that’s your purgative. But lets not skip around the fact that WANG was the one getting lucky- watch those first 5 innings again and count how many times Posada’s glove scrambles up to meet waist high sinkers floating in at 91 mph. The last time I saw something like that the Indians were in the midst of dropping a 14 spot on us.

Yes the Yankees clearly should have won the game- the Nationals were seemingly very familiar with the script and tried their best to give it to us: first and third, one out, bottom of the ninth. How badly does Manny Acta want out of Washington that he pulls John Lannan who with smoke and mirrors baffled the Yankees all night, for Mike MacDougal who wouldn’t know a 1-2-3 inning if it hit him in the face. This is a man with a WHIP of 2.13, who actually had more walks than innings pitched before tonight, who is some kind of Farnsworthian clone- impressive stuff, impressive inability to throw strikes. Manny Acta must have been trying to just end it all there, but alas, a man’s character is his fate (or so said somebody).

But enough is enough. Wang is broken. The effort to remake him through a series of painful starts has failed and it should be recognized as such. It’s time for a “knee” or an “elbow” to flair up and for CMW to pack his bags to Scranton to start all over again. Because while CMW wastes starts and whittles our division positioning away, Phil Hughes has been nothing short of brilliant and is wasting away in his poorly conceived, quasi-bullpen role. It’s high time to return him to the rotation, he’s earned it, and I don’t think its any stretch to portend that the Yankees were playing their best baseball just a few weeks ago with him as a part of the rotation.

I’d also appreciate it if the, “well he’s won 54 games over the past 4 years so he deserves another chance” crowd would wilt away. It’s what have you done for me lately around here, if you haven’t noticed, and Wang hasn’t won a game in over a year. Let’s call it what it is for him right now- over.

-Melky tonight continued in his effort to catch the eye of Omar Minaya tonight by diving for a ball in the gap with runners on 1st and 3rd and only 1 out. We all know Minaya loves a guy prone for mental mistakes and boy does Melky fit the bill sometimes.

Great Fun with the Mets

So we’re all talking about the Yankees and the blow out over the Mets today because let’s face it, its not every day we see a 15-0 shutout at home. It looks the offense is back after taking a few days off and now we’re all satisfied and feel good that we managed to take 2 of 3 against the Mets. (Just an aside- do the Mets have the ugliest losses of ANY major league team? What’s up with that?)

Joke-han really laid a doozey out there today, didn’t he? As a casual Met observer even I have to be somewhat concerned about the lack of velocity and the past few starts for Santana. That’s a troubling scenario for the Mets, suddenly shifting Mike Pelfrey into your #1 slot? Yikes.

But let’s not kid ourselves here. This series with the Mets was fun but it was a distraction. Any time you score 15 runs to cap off a series victory you almost have to say, well nothing to see here.

But there is something to see isn’t there? And it starts where we thought the strength of this team would be- the pitching.

Has any of this gone according to plan? Before the season started Baseball Prospectus thought the Yankees would have the best pitching staff in baseball, with a complementary bullpen that wasn’t flashy, was not great but certainly decent.

They pegged the offense as the most likely component to fall apart. They ordained we would score just above 800 runs but we’d win the East on the legs of a sub 650 RA pitching staff. That seems laughable right now given the current circumstances, given the fact that the Yankees apparently built a little league park in the Bronx, given the fact that AJ Burnett has been every bit of the befuddling enigma he was in every season but the last, given the fact that Joba Chamberlain has had understandable growing pains and most of all, given that Chien-Ming Wang apparently forgot how to pitch. Bruney twice visiting the DL hasn’t helped the bullpen and Damaso Marte has been just so…..special this year.

The offense was supposed to have all the problems. The 37 year old catcher who missed half the year surely wouldn’t be able to revert to 2007 form, no? The range challenged shortstop surely would continue his offensive decline of course, right? No way would we get anything from Melky Cabrera or Brett Gardner in center of course, Damon was a lost cause in left and Xavier Nady was going to regress to the mean in right.

It’s early of course. The pitching staff will improve (won’t it?) and maybe even the offense will regress. How much of the early hitting has been the new stadium? Too early to tell really. But let’s state the facts. The Yankees lead baseball with a .wOBA of .366, they lead in SLG%, OPS, ISO, HRs, R/G and TB’s. There were probably more than few critics would have scoffed if you told them this would be the lay of the land on June 15^th.

But these things just don’t work out the way you plan, and that’s part of what makes baseball special.

-Here’s a tale for you- I was watching the game with an avowed Met fan and we were flipping back and forth between broadcasts for the duration of the game. We had debated amongst ourselves and decided that the YES broadcast was generally more fair and even than SNY, but SNY was clearly more entertaining and Keith Hernandez is just a gem in the booth. I had just the “Fairest Broadcast” crown for YES and then David Cone blurts out- “Melky taking that extra base, on that double, that’s what makes him special, he’s such a smart base runner”

Oops.  (I feel I was vindicated when Melky stupidly was thrown out trying to stretch his next hit into a triple- making the dreaded 3^rd out at 3^rd base. And don’t give me the “it’s a blow out” line- another stupid, Met’s like blunder from Melky)

Introduction

Oh, what contrarians the Yankees are.

In the year of the financial meltdown, the reemergence of optimism, in the time to “set aside childish things”, the Yankees set to open 2009 by revealing a billion dollar stadium conceived during the height of Rome but debuting after the Vandals had sacked the place. The stadium to turn a new leaf, to help us forget about the ugly way we said goodbye to the last one. The stadium that would be at the forefront of entertainment which would be sure to inherit the moniker, “Greatest Stadium in Baseball”.

Well that hasn’t worked out so well but surely the plans to debut a new Yankee squad would? Let’s remember after all that before AIG failed or before Citibank failed it was the greatest capitalist institution in baseball that failed, failed to reach the postseason for the first time in 12 years (an ironic instant of fate? An alarming coincidence? A frightful sign?) Unlike the banks though we corrected our own books (Farewell Jason-Adieu Bobby) and with some new products on board we set about to prosper and flourish in 2009.

How has that worked out? Well it has and it hasn’t. We’ve had some problems- with a hip, with some PED’s, with some elbows, with some relievers, with some outfielders, some knees and with some catchers.  We’re just not quite to the top of the hill yet.

And so while some will give you roses, and some will give you the official line, I’ll give you something else. I’m always rooting for the Yankees but I’ll be fair. I’m not going to give you the biased group think, the entitled notion of supremacy or the delusions of grandeur so often permeated around Yankee commentary. I’ll be the Yankee contrarian.