Games 125-127
at Toronto Blue Jays
Pitching Match-ups
Tonight, Tuesday August 19
Darrell Rasner (5-9, 5.18) vs. A.J. Burnett (15-9, 4.67)
Wednesday, August 20
Andy Pettitte (12-9, 4.30) vs. David Purcey (2-3, 5.93)
Thursday, August 21
Sidney Ponson (7-3, 4.20) vs. Roy Halladay (14-9, 2.64)
Prognostications
Toronto features its two best starters in this series, who have both dominated the Yankees in their starts against them this season. The third guy, David Purcey, is a soft-tossing left hander that the Yankees have never faced before, which has meant that the offense got shut down and the guy had a career game, regardless of how bad his ERA was coming in. Looking at just the pitchers, you assume the Yankees are going to have a tough time in this series.
Then there is the fact that Toronto is red hot as a team, coming off a sweep of Boston in Fenway and a 3 out of 4 game swing through Detroit earlier last week. Alex Rios has been killing the ball, and he is a perpetual thorn in the Yankees’ side. Vernon Wells returned and has swung the bat well, and he too has a strong career track record of clobbering Yankees pitching.
And then you have the Yankees, puttering along after a terrible road trip and a mediocre yet effective enough 3-game homestand against Kansas City. Pessimism envelops the Yankees at this point based on the difficulty of their schedule and the depth of the hole they’ve dug themselves. The feeling is that they will finish behind Tampa and Boston, and could even finish behind Toronto considering the teams are now only separated by 2 games in the standings, and that could swing Toronto’s way by the end of the night on Thursday.
A.J. Burnett is 2-0 this year against the Yankees and has overpowering stuff, Halladay absolutely dominated them for a CG shutout the last time he faced their lineup, and they’ve never seen Purcey so he’s due for his best game in the majors. All this seems to add up to the Yankees being lucky to win one of the three games, with the potential for a Blue Jays sweep as evident as ever.
Do I believe any of this doom and gloom, and do I admit that this 2008 Yankees season will go out with a whimper in Toronto in late August?
No I don’t, not for one second. It’s all about the Yankees’ offense, and what a lot of people are saying is: “If the team hasn’t been able to hit for the first 124 games, why will they suddenly flip a switch and start now?”
I can’t answer that question directly, but I will say that it shouldn’t be a matter of flipping some type of hypothetical switch. The team has been putting itself in positions to succeed offensively all year long. If they begin to build up some consistency in delivering in those potentially productive situations starting tonight and carrying through the rest of this week, and actually win some tough games and show some resiliency and some determination, then it won’t be a matter of “the light bulb has gone on, the switch has been flipped”. It will be a team playing like a team, a team of highly talented individuals figuring out how it works to feed off each other and collaborate to win baseball games. Something that they were great at for the last 2 years they were together, but have inexplicably forgotten how to do this year.
I say that, considering the reputations and abilities of the players taking the field for the Yankees, it is not impossible that they will start playing winning baseball again. No, their offense will not reach those storied heights that pundits expected them to reach, there will be no 1,000 run season. But to say the offense can’t do enough to win games in the major leagues, to me, is silly.
Granted, it will be difficult to take these types of steps if the pitching struggles, which puts a lot of pressure on the shaky Darrell Rasner tonight. But winning this evening’s first game, no matter how ugly it is or what kind of effort it takes, would do a lot for this team. It means beating someone they haven’t been able to solve all year, and it means beginning to make the case that “Oh yeah, rest of the American League, we are the Yankees and we still do have all these big-name players. So maybe we’re not completely out of the race, just yet.”
I personally think tonight will go a long way towards deciding if the pennant race happens in New York this September or not. This is the type of game that needs to swing the Yankees’ way, because it simply has not all year long. I don’t know how it will happen or if it will actually happen, but I am certainly optimistic that it will. Call me crazy, call me unrealistic, call me a pinstripe glasses-wearing buffoon, but I think it is possible.
NOTE: Hideki Matsui has been activated from the 15-day disabled list. Justin Christian was optioned to Triple-A Scranton to open up the roster space for Godzilla. Japan's power hitter is in the lineup tonight, batting 7th and DHing.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
When a team looks as bad as the Yankees have in the last four days, the days leading up to a game are excruciating. You want to fast forward from 1 p.m. to, in tonight's case, 8 so the game can get here already and the team can try and erase their recent awful play. If you're like me and you read the comments of other Yankees fans across the vast internet wasteland, you really want to see the overwhelming negativity about the team and its players silenced for at least 3 hours. I know those negative vibes won't totally go away until the Yankees are breathing down the necks of either Boston or Tampa, a scenario looking less and less likely as the days wear on, but days like today make you dream.
In my dream scenarios, here are five things that will happen across the remainder of the regular season to get this fast-sinking ship turned around:
#1--Melky Cabrera is optioned to AAA Scranton/Wilkes Barre and told to get his mind right and work extensively on his offensive game. He is promised a call-back when rosters expand on September 1st. Called up for the millionth time this year is reliever Chris Britton. Johnny Damon and Justin Christian split the time in CF, with Damon playing center against righty hurlers and Christian spotting him against lefties.
#2--Phil Hughes, after a strong rehab start in Scranton tonight, returns to the rotation this weekend against Kansas City and starts a string where he pitches the kind of baseball that everyone expected from him at the beginning of the season.
#3--Hideki Matsui has a successful rehab stint and rejoins the team as full-time DH during next weekend's series in Baltimore (wishful thinking, early next week in Toronto, but why risk his knee on the artificial turf?).
#4--Joba Chamberlain works himself back with a clean bill of health and returns to the rotation when the team opens a series on the road in Tampa at the beginning of September, taking Dan Giese's spot after he did a serviceable job filling in. The rotation for the stretch run is Mike Mussina, Andy Pettitte, Joba Chamberlain, Phil Hughes and Sidney Ponson.
#5--Jason Giambi, Robinson Cano and Derek Jeter's offensive games come alive, and with the re-insertion of Matsui, the lineup consistently performs to the level that they were expected to coming in to the season.
Basically, all five of those things have to happen for this team to have any chance at making the postseason. The Melky Cabrera demotion, actually, doesn't have to happen--Johnny Damon playing 90% of the time in CF would suffice, although why not at least give Melky a chance to succeed at AAA and get his confidence up?
I don't believe all 5 will happen, and I don't believe this team is postseason bound. I just hope that they don't cash in their chips now and keep playing like a team that is giving in to the fact that injuries and inferior performances from expected contributors have already ended their season. Hank Steinbrenner today basically said he doesn't have a ton of confidence in the team rebounding this year but is psyched for next year. I don't want to give up yet, regardless of what he says.
