Rock Bottom, Revisited: Sweep to Make You Weep

Amazing that I don't post for almost 3 months yet the same issues are at the forefront of the Yankees' universe. Situational hitting has been an absolute nightmare all season long. It is almost unfathomable that a collection of hitters with as impressive track records as the Yankees' hitters have can look so utterly incapable of picking up runs when they are ripe for that picking.

I tuned into yesterday's game in the 7th inning. John Lakcey appeared to be on the ropes as he'd yielded an RBI single to Johnny Damon, giving the Yankees a 2-run advantage and a serious threat for more. Damon and Melky were on 2nd and 3rd, respectively, following a head-scratching yet still acceptable sacrifice bunt from Derek Jeter (2 runners in scoring position with 1 out is better than a potential rally-killing double play, something Derek has become extremely familiar with this year).

My viewing seemingly brought extremely bad omens to what appeared to be a promising situation. Bobby Abreu, who has been one of the team's better hitters with RISP this year, sharply grounded to second. Melky, running on contact within the infield, was gunned down at home. That brought up the team's worst offender in potentially run-producing situations lately, the flailing reigning MVP A-Rod. A strikeout later, Lackey was out of the jam.

2 innings later, the Yankees bullpen allowed 10 runs, completely flushing a great performance from rotation addition Dan Giese.

That 7th inning offensive flop carried over this afternoon: 2 for 12 with RISP, 14 men left on base total. They were within a few big hits of winning all 3 games against the best team in baseball. That, considering that Ian "2008's Biggest Flop Award Recipient" Kennedy only lasted 2 innings in his start Friday, makes this weekend's sweep even more disappointing.

The team limps into Minnesota with extremely bleak postseason prospects. Tampa Bay has not slowed down and has a comfortable 8.5 game lead in the AL East. The only solace to take from this so-far disgustingly ugly road trip is that Boston has done nothing to separate themselves in the Wild Card race-a 4 game disadvantage, considering how bad the team currently looks, is in no way insurmountable. Especially since the teams still play each other 6 times before season's end.

Needless to say, though, a lot has to change in order to make this season anything more than a total wash that will ultimately be chalked up to too many injuries and too much inconsistency. A good place for something to change would be in Minnesota, a team that is still ahead of the Yankees record-wise and could ultimately be a team they have to contend with for the Wild Card. Back tomorrow with the pitching match-ups and a preview of the series.

Rock Bottom?

A complete embarrassment courtesy of the Mets tonight on ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball. Chien-Ming Wang wilted in a long, 30-plus pitch 4th inning and the putrid offense could not string anything together against Oliver Perez. A nice response followed the horrid 4th inning, as Matsui's 2-run home run sliced the deficit in half. However, the game's turning point was when Jose Molina led off the bottom of the 5th inning with a double.

Nobody out, runner at 2nd, the score at that point was 4-2 (should have been 6-2, or worse, thanks to the ill-fated reverse home run call against Carlos Delgado). Johnny Damon has the opportunity to drive in Molina, or at worst advance him to 3rd so Abreu and Jeter have a chance to produce and close the gap. Damon's at-bat was synonymous with the team's struggles offensively all year: his approach at first seemed to be patience, waiting for a pitch to drive and thus drive in Molina. However, as soon as he took a strike from Perez, he switched to simple advance-the-runner mode, squaring to bunt and bunting foul, putting himself in a 1-2 hole. At this point, advancing the runner is the clear priority, and mercifully, Damon succeeded in getting Molina to 3rd with a ground ball to first.

What follows is the real nightmare, the microcosm of the Yankees' offensive season thus far. It captures not only the team's horrible struggles with runners on base, but also Joe Girardi's insane stubbornness and inflexibility, with a little misguided loyalty mixed in, in the face of numbers, logic and failed experiments.

First, the lineup has looked absolutely terrible against left handed pitching. Everyone knows this. I can't remember the Yankees beating a left handed pitcher, all year. It doesn't happen. None of the lefties hit other lefties. Matsui might have good numbers against lefties, but he bails out horribly when he's facing a lefty and leaves himself insanely vulnerable to breaking balls. Damon, Abreu, Giambi, Cano...they look awful against left-handed pitching. Their numbers are awful against left handed pitching. And yet...they are all in the lineup against Oliver Perez? Really?

Unbelievable. Shelley Duncan and Morgan Ensberg have done nothing to earn their playing time, but they are supposed to mash left handers. That's why they are on the roster. Oliver Perez is not Johan Santana, he is hittable, he seems like an ideal candidate to plug in right handed bats against.

Yet, Girardi refuses. Is this him being the against-the-grain-thinking manager? Or is this him being a Joe Torre holdover, running out his most talented players in a "big" game regardless of match-ups and right/left-handedness? I thought Girardi was a numbers manager, more so than a feeling/loyalty manager? What I thought is apparently not reality.

Bobby Abreu, in his big at-bat with a runner on 3rd and 1 out, with the game still a tight 2-run affair, strikes out looking on a 2-2 slider. This, after his first two ABs resulted in 1-3 groundouts, results of his feebly pulling off Perez's pitches because he can't handle facing left handed pitching.

Jeter puts a good swing on a 2-2 pitch from Perez and drives a ball to left center, but it's into Death Valley and Derek knows he's got nothing from the moment of contact. The inning ends, the game still 4-2 and the Yankees having just wasted a golden (and rare) opportunity to drive in Jose Molina after a leadoff double. The top of the order, no less, had someone to drive in that wasn't Johnny Damon or Derek Jeter. And yet they couldn't do it.

The rest of the game was a hideous mess of Chien-Ming Wang's struggles and one of Ross Ohlendorf's whipping boy outings. 11-2 as a final score didn't have to be as lopsided as it was. Joe Girardi deserves blame for plugging in all the lefties two days in a row.

Jason Giambi deserves some blame for that 4th inning and his continuing butchery of the first base position. Johnny Damon still can't get a hit. Derek Jeter continues to try and look like he's trying, but nobody else does. Melky Cabrera isn't hitting anymore. Alberto Gonzalez is not an everyday player, by any stretch of the imagination, at any position.

This seems like the ultimate low-point. Getting absolutely spanked on national television against the regional/market rival, with your ace pitcher taking the loss and your offense continuing to generate nothing. Oliver Perez leaves the game and tips his cap to the Yankee Stadium Met-heavy crowd. Disgraceful. Jose Reyes hits a meaningless, tack-on home run and raises a finger into the air and styles his way around the bases.

And there's no response from the team in pinstripes. When will the response come? Will their response be on the field, or in the front office? How long are we sticking to the "our hitters are going to start hitting, I know it!" stance?

These questions need to be answered sooner rather than later. I hope for an exciting off day tomorrow, in some form or another.

Sunday Sweep

Darrell Rasner outperforms 2/3 of Generation Trey in his first start of the year, and the Yankees offense rides Seattle pitching out of town their snide now standing at five straight losses. The lineup continues to thrive from the top down, with the added treat of the two rotting corpses wearing #24 and #25 contributing at least slightly in the onslaught.

So Rasner justifies the organization's pregame vote of confidence, and now the team can look ahead to an off day knowing they once again followed a 3-game losing streak with 3 consecutive wins of their own, and find themselves a game over .500, hopefully not bound to fall back to even or below in this upcoming series with Cleveland starting Tuesday.

From Scranton's game today, Kei Igawa had a so-so outing going 7 innings, giving up 5 hits, 4 runs and 4 walks, while striking out 8. One of those 5 hits was a 2-run home run to Durham shortstop Reid Brignac, but otherwise, this seems to be pretty par for the Kei Igawa course at AAA so far this year. The rumblings seem to point to Igawa making a start in Detroit, which becomes a more frightening prospect the more one thinks about it. It would be Saturday, Fox's 3:55 EST game of the week, against a team fresh off sweeping the Yankees at home with the deepest lineup in the American League at this point.

It's amazing to me that my expectations for Igawa are so pitifully low without even seeing him throw a pitch in 2008. His results at AAA combined with seeing him during the spring, though, do zero to increase my confidence in his ability to get good major league hitters out consistently for 5-6 innings.

As I've thought about it, though, I understand more and more the thought process behind calling up Igawa for at least an audition at this point in the season. The organization probably wants Kennedy to make 2 or 3 starts in Scranton before they consider re-inserting him into the rotation (based on his level of success, of course. If he struggles to get minor leaguers out, then in Scranton he'll undoubtedly stay). Plus, they have so much money that, as of now, looks like it's been wasted on Igawa. Sooner or later, you want to see if your team can get something back for the $46 million you threw at him. If anything, you can bring up Igawa for the spot start, then try to ease him into the role of left-handed reliever once Kennedy warrants re-insertion.

For at least the rest of this week, the Yankees' rotation seems to make a little more sense, thanks to great performances from Wang-Mussina-Rasner consecutively. Andy Pettitte will look to rebound from 2 straight lackluster performances Tuesday, but more importantly he'll look to keep the ball rolling and make it 4 straight wins.

Ugly Times Call for....

Well, that statement seems like it can't be finished right now. I don't think Joe Girardi knows what to do to fix the problems that have befallen this team, and I don't think there is going to be any near-distant solution. The Yankees currently look flat-out terrible, from top to bottom.

Most people will point to injuries as the reason. Then there are those people that will say that injuries are simply just an excuse. I think both stances at this point in baseball are cliched and over-used. You can't point to just injuries, and yet you have to come up with various reasons for why a team with great expectations would perform so miserably at times this year.

For one, there's the obvious problem of the starting rotation. A night after Andy Pettitte did not provide the shut-down, deep-inning performance needed to wash away all the dark clouds that currently hover over the name Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy continued to be inconsistent, and maddeningly inconsistent at that. In some innings, hell even in some parts of innings, he looks like he knows what he's doing and has the game in control.

At other moments, such as the tail-end of the top of the 3rd, he loses all control, stops locating his pitches and turns into a batting practice pitcher. He clearly has the ability to get people out in the major leagues, but he also is far too inconsistent within his starts to be relied upon to get his team into the 6th or 7th inning.

Now that Hughes is gone until God knows when, Kennedy should see that he has an opportunity to guarantee himself a spot in the big-league rotation for the entire season. Since the rotation has thinned out minus Hughes, he has to literally pitch his way out of the picture, rather than being pushed out. I think the positive moments of his last 2 starts are what he needs to build on, meaning just throwing quality strikes and not letting innings get away from him when things start going bad.

I was at the game on Wednesday night, and the fact that tonight (Thursday) was a mirror-image is extremely dispiriting. Mostly due to how utterly dead both the Stadium and the team were on Wednesday night.

What amazes me is how this team can greatly resemble the blase, lackadasical team that started showing up a little too often in the later Joe Torre years. How did Joe Girardi earn that "win every day", intense focus, on his team at all turns, reputation? His team looks as flat right now as they've looked in the past 4 futile years under Torre.

The crowd all bailed on Wednesday once the Tigers tacked on a run off Kyle Farnsworth, which happened along with a hilarious series of events where I was sitting:

A guy in a Babe Ruth jersey stood up and started booing voiceferously as soon as Farnsworth was announced. This led to a guy, seated a few rows back, riding the booing fan for being a bad fan and booing before the guy even threw a pitch. They had a slightly heated debate about Farnsworth's value and the unwritten rules of Yankee fan-dom, but then things settled down...until Kyle served one up to Placido "Chokes up on Half the Bat" Polanco, who absolutely destroyed Yankee pitching during the series. This led to the previously-booing fan and his friend standing up and taunting the other fan, while everyone left in the stadium proceeded to either boo, groan, or head for the exits. Lovely.

Another comedic moment came when, at one point, the stadium's scoreboard announced that none other than Carl Pavano was warming up in the Yankees' bullpen. This led to some laughs from the crowd and a quick correction by the Stadium staff. Oh to dream, that a guy earning 11 million dollars to do nothing all year might actually get up in the bullpen on a cold April night.

Yeah, the Stadium was completley empty by the 9th inning (mostly). This seemed surprising to me, but then I realized that this is no longer the Yankees squad of old that might actually be capable of a late-inning, last gasp rally. This team, on the other hand, is incapable of staging any sort of rally, late inning or not. They had Jeremy Bonderman (and Nate Robertson a night later) completely on the ropes in the early innings, yet can not deliver anything close to a knockout punch.

People will chalk this up to the absence of A-Rod and Posada from the middle of the lineup. However, it's a problem that stretches from the top of the lineup to the bottom. People like Jason Giambi and Robinson Cano would still be looked upon to deliver with men on base if A-Rod and Posada were in the lineup; now that they're gone, the onus shifts, and the likelihood of their succeeding appears to be dwindling. Perhaps now that the other 2 big bats are subtracted, Cano and Giambi are overexposed. Or, perhaps Giambi is completely washed up, and Cano is too impatient to work his way out of a slump without looking completely lost.

No way can this team hope to do anything without their lineup becoming more consistent, more balanced, even with key cogs missing. People that are not expected to deliver, need to deliver nonetheless, or else it will be a long, dark summer in The Bronx.