After a long and somewhat disappointing offseason, baseball came back to the Bronx this afternoon. The players quickly found that they were no longer in sunny Florida, as the Yankees and Tigers faced off in chilly, grey New York. The Tigers took an early lead, but big hits by Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson, along with a great performance by the bullpen solidified the Yankees first victory of the season, as they won 6-3.
Behind ace CC Sabathia, the Yankees worked a quick 1-2-3 inning to start the 2011 season. CC worked the count full before getting Austin Jackson to strike out swinging. Curtis Granderson, who was questionable with an oblique strain, then made a fantastic diving catch for the second out before snagging a fly ball from Magglio Ordonez to send the Yankees up for their first hacks of the year. The Yankees had a chance early, when Justin Verlander walked both Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez, putting two on with two out for Robinson Cano. Cano worked the count full before striking out and getting the Tigers out of trouble. Still, Verlander had thrown 31 pitches in just one inning of work.
Sabathia got into trouble right away in the second. Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez hit back to back singles, while Ryan Raburn worked a walk. Jhonny Peralta drove a sac fly to center and the Tigers had the first run of the game. Cano snagged the second out, before CC finished the inning with a K, minimizing the damage. Still, the Tigers held an early 1-0 lead.
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Update (12:06 P.M.): For those of you wondering about the weather, it sounds as though they will be trying to start the game on time. The forecast gets worse as the day goes on and into tomorrow, and with this being the Tigers only trip to New York, if the game is called off today and can’t be played later, the teams will lose an off-day later in the season, (and Detroit will have to make a one-day trip to New York) or will have to play a double-header on Saturday. So expect them to do their best to get this game in as early as possible, including probably playing through as much rain as they can.
Happy Opening Day! It was a long hard winter, but we’ve finally arrived. The Tigers are in the Bronx to play a game that counts, C.C. Sabathia will take the mound for the Bronx Bombers, and everything is right with the world. After months of worrying about Cliff Lee, A.J. Burnett‘s curveball, Derek Jeter‘s age, Alex Rodriguez‘s hip, Rafael Soriano‘s contract, and who the 5th starter is going to be, for one day at least, none of that matters. (Real) Yankees baseball is back, and will hopefully be with us until late October. Lineups after the jump.
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WELCOME TO OPENING DAY!!!!
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Well, we made it. Opening Day is here. Winter is (mostly) behind us and it’s time to play ball. We’re kicking off this magical day with our second annual roundtable. For the first year or two of this site’s existence, a roundtable consisted of me asking questions to myself. Last year, there was a bit of a team to have a legitimate roundtable. This year, the seating is at a premium, thankfully.
We’ve sent out an array of questions to all of the contributors to the site and their answers are below. The questions:
- A general stat line for the Yankees in 2011: number of wins, finish in A.L. East, how they’ll do in the playoffs (including the identity of the team they play when they win the WS or are eliminated).
- An explanation for your prediction in (1) above, focusing on what you think will change the most on-the-field from 2010 to 2011.
- Which teams do you think will make the playoffs in both leagues?
- Predictions for the performance of a single player you think will be critical to the Yankees’ success in 2011.
- Your prediction for the most important off-the-field Yankees story/distraction in 2011.
- Biggest Yankee midseason pickup?
Hope you enjoy. Weigh in below with your thoughts. And get ready for the 2011 season!
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As much as I’d love to breakdown and project every Yankee player in the manner I did for Derek Jeter and Mark Teixeira (and seriously, I would), I neither have the time, nor the energy to do so before the start of the season. Instead, over the next two weeks, I’ll be doing a four-part series where I share my thoughts and projections for most players on the Yankees projected 25-man roster. Here’s how the series will play out.
Part 1 – The Infield/Catcher
Part 2 – The Outfield/Designated Hitter
Part 3 – The Starting Rotation
Part 4 – The Bullpen
The projection system I’m using is one I created during the 2010 DC Snowpocalypse for the sole purpose of identifying undervalued players for one of my fantasy baseball drafts.* While I’ll be the first to admit there are revisions and refinements that still need to be made to the system, it does a pretty good job of identifying a player’s true talent level. Additionally, for reference, I’ve included projections from Marcel and Bill James (available freely through Fangraphs), so you can make appropriate comparisons.
* Yes, I was channeling my inner Billy Beane. Then again, what do you expect from a guy whose IIATMS screen name and original blog was titled “Billy Beane is my Hero.” To make a long story short, I breezed to a first place finish in my league before biting it in the playoffs in typical Moneyball fashion. It was irony in its purest form.
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Thanks to our friends at Starter, we’ve got a quick, last minute contest to give away TWO FREE TICKETS TO OPENING DAY!
To be eligible you need to follow both IIATMS and Starter on Twitter. The winner will be drawn at random tonight, around 11pm EST.
Winner MUST be able to pick the tickets up at the Starter offices in midtown NYC in time to make the game. Winner will have to email me and I will put you in contact with the folks at Starter.
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UPDATE: The winner is @adamlustick. Thanks to all that entered. We’ll try to do a bit more of these this year!
Via Andrew Marchand, it seems Curtis Granderson will be in the Yankees’ Opening Day lineup tomorrow. This obviously means he won’t require any time on the disabled list, and Chris Dickerson will be optioned to AAA Scranton-Wilkes Barre. The Yankees will send out the full A-lineup to face Tigers’ ace Justin Verlander tomorrow.
I’m not really in the mood to do this a day before the season starts, but Patrick Reusse of the Star-Tribune has turned in such a ridiculously hilarious harangue against these whipper snappers and they’re new fangled stats, and he got Jim Fregosi to play along, that it might as well serve as entertainment while we wait for games to start tomorrow. Here’s the title and lede:
You can take your UZR and …
2011 BASEBALL PREVIEW All the new-age stats in the world can’t tell as much about a player as the eyes of a baseball lifer.
Yep, this is going to be a good one.
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According to Mark Feinsand, the Yankees have gone ahead and added right handed pitcher Luis Ayala to the active roster. He’ll be taking the place of Pedro Feliciano while the lefty is on the disabled list for most, maybe even all, of April.
The word yesterday was that the team wouldn’t make a decision until tonight, instead looking over the waiver wire for a better option. Barring that, most people expected them to pick lefty Steve Garrison to replace Feliciano. Instead the Yankees are going with the right-hander, who will probably be relegated to little more than mop-up duty.
The Yankees are currently playing their final game of spring training before the regular season officially opens in less than 48 hours (can you tell I’m excited?), and some lingering questions are being resolved.
First, according to Jack Curry, the Opening Day lineup will feature Brett Gardner leading off with Derek Jeter batting second. I sort of expect this to be the way they construct the lineup for most of the early season, at least against right-handed starting pitchers. No real complaints about this, at least until Jeter starts grounding into a lot of double plays. (As an aside, I’m not actually sure if capitalizing Opening Day is grammatically correct, but I’m going to do it anyway because it’s the equivalent of a national holiday to me.)
Secondly, the biggest roster question remaining is who will take Pedro Feliciano‘s place in the bullpen while he’s on the DL? There are two other relievers left in big league camp, left-hander Steve Garrison and right-hander Luis Ayala, and most had figured one of those two (likely Garrison) would get the job, but Chad Jennings reports that the Yankees will scour the waiver wire for a better option before making a decision to bring one of the two North, with an official decision likely not coming until tomorrow at least.
The last remaining question then is whether or not Curtis Granderson will be on the active roster or the disabled list come Thursday, something I doubt we’ll have a final decision on until Thursday morning or so.
Over at ESPN New York, Wallace Matthews has a column that, while it goes out of its way to say it’s to early to call Jesus Montero a bust, is pretty much calling Jesus Montero a bust. It’s not really a bad column so much as it evinces the general lack of knowledge I think most MSM reporters have of prospects and player development (after all, their job involves following the big league team all year, there’s not a whole lot of time left over to become an expert on the prospect game), and there’s been enough analysis devoted to Montero this spring, so I’m just going to put a few points of rebuttal below the jump.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This posting was completed by the staff here at IIATMS. It’s never easy to get a group of people to agree on a course of action much less the content/plan to achieve the goal at hand. Nonetheless, the team here worked wonderfully in debating the team’s X-factor and the posting below represents their cumulative efforts.
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On October 23, 2010, the day after the Yankees were summoned into the black night of the postseason, the team’s hoped-for 2011 starting rotation looked something like this:
CC Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Andy Pettitte, Phil Hughes and A.J. Burnett.
That rotation was the so-called “Plan A”. Five months later, after Pettitte’s retirement and Lee’s decision to take his talents to Citizens Bank Park, the 2011 starting rotation looks like this:
CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, Phil Hughes, Ivan Nova and Freddy Garcia Bartolo Colon Freddy Garcia.
The “Plan B” rotation is … something less than Plan A. But Plan B is not awful. Plan B was pretty much the Yankees’ starting rotation for the second half of the 2010 season, while Pettitte was on the disabled list with a strained groin. The Yankees weren’t great without Pettitte, but they were OK: between July 19 (when Pettitte went on the DL) and September 18, 2010 (the day before Pettitte returned to the starting rotation), the Yanks won 32 games and lost 25, a .561 winning percentage.
A .561 winning percentage over a 162 game season is worth about 91 wins. 91 wins might be good enough to win the 2011 American League wild card. Or it might not. The Yankees would like to add three or four wins to that total if they could. Who on the Plan B rotation might add three or four wins to the Yankees’ projected total, by performing better in 2011 than he did in 2010?
The obvious candidate is A.J. Burnett. Which is why we’ve named Burnett the Yankees’ 2011 x-factor.
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(This is the final post in a series previewing each American League team before the 2011 season. For previous posts in the series, click here.)
2010 record: 89-73 (3rd place A.L. East)
2010 run differential:
Key additions: Carl Crawford OF, Adrian Gonzalez 1b, Bobby Jenks RHP, Jarrod Saltalamachia C, Alfredo Aceves RHP
Key losses: Adrian Beltre 3b, Victor Martinez C, Mike Lowell 1b/3b
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