I predicted that the New York Yankees would go 5-3 last week. They went 4-3 and it would have been 5-3 if the game yesterday had not been rained out. The postponement was the second time this year that was problematic. Earlier in the season, the Yankees lost two games to the weather against the Indians. At the time, the Indians were playing awful and their pitching was a mess. It was the perfect time for the Yankees to catch them. Instead, those two games were made up after the Indians had time to regroup and start rolling. The result was a split of those two games. Yesterday could have concluded a second sweep of the Blue Jays at a time when the Blue Jays are really floundering. Will history repeat itself? As a team, you want to catch a team when they are down. The opportunity was lost.
So we enter a new week and the Yankees are back out on the road. They start the week in Baltimore and finish in their own personal house of horrors in St. Petersberg, Florida. This is going to be a very interesting week. Here is a preview of the week to come.
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Last week, I predicted this little-engine-that-could New York Yankees’ team would go 3-3 and figured that was a reasonable expectation. I was way off base as the team finished the week 5-1 with five straight wins after opening the week with a loss. I also noted that Vernon Wells‘ Cinderella story was turning back into a pumpkin. But somebody kept the clock from reaching midnight as Wells again became the carriage that carried the Yankees this week. He hit two homers in the five games with five ribbies and only struck out once all week. Of course, he did not walk all week either, but why quibble. Wells also made a couple of great plays in the outfield.
Lyle Overbay had a very good week with two doubles and a homer for an OPS in the last five games of .929. And my perennial punching bag, Jayson Nix, had a great week and finished the week with an OPS over one. But the real story this week was the pitching, which featured good outings from the entire rotation except for Phil Hughes and the Yankees still won his game. The Yankees allowed only seven runs in the four non-Hughes games. The bullpen was solid and Mariano Rivera picked up four saves this week. He did not look dominant in doing so, but again, the job got done.
So what happens this week? The Yankees play a troublesome double-header in Cleveland to make up two postponements there. But then they travel home to play Seattle and Toronto for six games at home. At some point this week, Curtis Granderson will be back and that will be a welcomed sight, though it will be interesting to see what Joe Girardi does with his outfield. So, here is a preview of the week to come in Yankees baseball.
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I mentioned in an article last week that I enjoy pouring over Yankee lists using the Play Index at Baseball-reference.com. This time, on a whim, I searched for players who finished their Yankee career with a 1.000 batting average. I found five. Two of them do not really count because they also played elsewhere in the majors. Those two were Chris Latham, who had two plate appearances for the Yankees and recorded two hits and scored three runs in 2003. He was a Twins’ product and put in parts of five years in the majors. Then there was Mickey Witek who played six years for the New York Giants, mostly during the WWII years before his one at bat and one hit with the Yankees in 1949. So those two really do not count. The other three included a guy who piqued my interest because he was born and still lives in Maine where I live and because his one hit has a lot of history to it. He was a pitcher by the name of Larry Gowell and his two game career occurred in 1972.
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The Yankees finished their ten-game home stand by winning seven of those contests. That perhaps blunts the two of three they lost to the Oakland A’s over this past weekend and masks a bit that the Yankees should have swept the Astros. In the long view, seven wins out of ten is a lot better than the other way around, so quit complaining, right? Hey, it is my column and I will if I want to. After a day off today, the Yankees begin a road trip that starts at dreaded Coors Field where anything can happen and then finish the week at Kauffman Stadium against a Royals team that is no longer a pushover and sits currently a half game behind the Tigers in the AL Central. It should be a wild ride.
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Searching for and creating all-time Yankee lists is one of the things I like to do in my spare time. As such, it seems that Baseball-reference.com’s Play Index was personally made just for me. I do not consider paying for that service an inconvenience. I consider it one of life’s necessary expenses. This time, I was trying to get a sense of which Yankee player has had the biggest hits. I decided to use WPA (Win Probability Added). I will try to define that statistic in a moment. But for the sake of getting this article off the ground, suffice it to say for now that WPA measures how a plate appearance affects the outcome of a game. I found fifteen games where the WPA score for a game was over .800 (roughly 80% of a win). Bobby Murcer had five of them. No other Yankee has ever had more than two such games.
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The New York Yankees won five out of seven this week as they swept the Toronto Blue Jays four games to none over the weekend. I expected the team to lose two of three down in St. Pete against the Rays. I did not expect a sweep of the Blue Jays, though I did believe the team would win the series. My prediction was 4-3 for the week. The only trouble for the team is that their counterparts in the American League East keep winning too. The Red Sox continue their blistering pace and the Orioles won all week as well. All four teams in the AL East other than the Toronto Blue Jays have won seven of their last ten. The Yankees remain two and a half games behind the Red Sox in second place, a half a game up on the Orioles.
In theory, this week coming up works really well for them. They remain home for the entire week and the next weekend is sandwiched in between two off days on Thursday and Monday before the team heads out on a road trip. They play the struggling Houston Astros for three games and then have a three game set with the Oakland Athletics, a team that has lost eight of its last ten games. Making the theory a reality is always the tricky part. So let’s take a closer look at the week ahead.
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The New York Yankees have won four straight series and that is what Joe Girardi likes. C.C. Sabathia picked up another win. Andy Pettitte won another start. Heck, even Ivan Nova won one of his two starts. Hiroki Kuroda pitched well enough to win his start but that game became a bullpen win after the bullpen blew Kuroda’s. And perhaps we are a greedy and spoiled bunch, but it certainly seems like the last two series should have been sweeps. The team went ahead, 4-2 on Sunday just to see the bullpen cough up four runs to give the Blue Jays the last game of the series. Back on Thursday, the Yankees were down a run heading into the ninth and Francisco Cervelli smacked a homer to tie the game. But David Phelps–who figured prominently in both losses this week–got roughed up in the twelfth inning. The week could have been better…should have been better. But it could have been worse too.
Mariano Rivera added three more saves to his career total this past week and added to his total saves record (613) and his games finished record (898). After six games, Rivera’s statistics are again in line with the rest of his stupendous career.
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Joba Chamberlain has been a personal favorite ever since his sizzling debut in 2007. There is just something about the guy that makes me root for him. But in the entire time he has been with the Yankees, it has always been at the back of my mind that he reminds me of somebody. For years, I could not put my finger on who it was. The round face, the straight-billed cap, his sometimes blank looking expression all hearkened back to someone from my past. I gave up a long time ago of figuring out who it was.
And then Jonathan Winters died recently. Winters had been a guy that has made me laugh for decades on end. To celebrate Winters’ life, I took a stroll on YouTube to see if I could watch some video of Winters in action. And then it struck me. When Winters played Lenny Pike in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, his performance was the highlight of a movie I enjoyed as a boy seeing in a drive-in movie theater. So I clicked on the video and watched. And there before me was the answer to what Joba Chamberlain’s looks brought back for me.
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The second week of the season went quite a bit better for the New York Yankees than the first week did. The team is holding its own in the standings despite its rag-tag offense. Other than Phil Hughes, the rotation had a good week with Andy Pettitte, C.C. Sabathia and Hiroki Kuroda all pitching well. It was too bad that there were two postponements in Cleveland as the Yankees could have further enjoyed the soft underbelly of the Indians’ rotation. But otherwise, it was a good week, concluding with a series win against the rival Orioles.
Monday is an off day so the Yankees uniform manager will not have to worry about preparing all those #42 uniform numbers (unless the team wears them on Tuesday—have not heard). And then Tuesday, open a series against the Arizona Diamondbacks at the Stadium.
The first game of that series will feature Ivan Nova (pronounced, “Nover,” up here in Maine) versus Brandon McCarthy. Both pitchers have struggled early in this season (and Nova going back to last season). McCarthy will bring good control and a heavy sinker and is getting a lot of ground balls this season. He also features a cutter and a curve.
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