1 day ago
Posts
"I DON'T KNOW."
"No, but seriously. How are you gonna do the recap now? This is really bad. Wow, have you ever missed one?'
"No."
"Well, I don't know how you're gonna do this one. You're screwed."
Kevin has apparently been taking classes from my mom's school of alarmist behavior for the pupils studying the science of generating maddening senses of urgency.
So...yeah, guilty. I woke up 4 innings into the game. Keith, knowing I'm useless on the weekends, even tried to give me a pre-game wake up call, but I had shut my phone off after the "This is Why I'm Hot" alarm made me want to slice off my own ears.
The Zelda/sugar panacea of last night worked for a little while until antsiness set in, and I met up with Strange et al. NYC is so weird on holiday weekends. I'm kind of liking the quiet. But quiet is probably an expected result when you sleep til 2:30 in the afternoon.
Here's what I got on today's game:
- Kevin: "Andy's good. But everytime I watch him pitch, I feel like he's going to remember he's old -- mid-windup -- and start to suck." Couldn't have said it any better myself. I know exactly what he means.
- Cano and Tex homered. Kevin: "He should run around the bases pretending he's texting."
- Phil Hughes got the save, and Mo is reportedly "pain free." MAYBE, is it possible, that Girardi's seemingly haphazard randomness in his bullpen decisions is actually paying off? Think about the 15 inning shut out. We all went beserk with him when he brought in Hughes for a cup of coffee, (if that, maybe just a shot of expresso, actually) and then he's made to look brilliant because while Boston had depleted their entire pen, we had our ace reliever all rested for the next game still.
- Pettitte wasn't exactly as sharp today as his last one, when he took a perfect game into the 7th. (Keith: "I wanted him to get that so badly. It would have been such a bonus to what feels like a magical season." Yeah, I'm starting to realize my friends are officially way more articulate than me.)
As a side note, the far-reaching drama of the Bullpen Debate is amazing. You can't escape it.
No matter what kind of discussion you get into about the Yankees, it's almost a prerequisite that you set aside some time to get into a fruitless yet heated argument about what the right thing to do with the pen is.
Last night of course the discussion comes up and it's amazing this adamant nature these things take on after even just a few drinks, ("No man, you and I both know that red-orange looks more orange than red and Crayola f-ed up.")
So, we're arguing about Joba like we're gonng actually get anywhere. And I realized I can't remember the last day where I didn't at least once get into any kind of where-do-you-stand-on-our-relievers rhetoric.
And for anyone who thinks it's "getting old," how do you think I felt the entire time the presidential election was going on? You had your party, now baseball fans are having ours.
So here's me meeting my Joba Quota of the day (Quoba?) Look at what he did yesterday. Or didn't do. Whatever. And tell me how pulling out on his fastball, overly relying on his slider, for 59 pitches is in any way good for him.
Someone mentioned they feel bad for Joba because he's gettin jerked around, never knowing what's expected of him, no regularity, no certainty, no structure. (Based on the sounds of his childhood, I'm not sure he has any real basis of comparison when it comes to structure and discipline. The fact he has a locker is probably more organization than he even knows what to do with.)
I don't feel bad for Joba. (Neither did other arbitrator Casey who brings up the "laughing all the way to the bank" point.)
And that's exactly why he's a starter. Because he is, indeed, laughing all the way to the bank. Justifying his salary is a lot harder when he's only pitching the 8th inning.
But yeah, let's keep him on this 3 inning blow-out-his-arm plan. It's working out great. Yes, he had a couple of great starts. But WHY do those eclipse the shitty ones??
Kevin: "I don't know. I just don't think they ever should have moved him. They destroyed his arm." My sister and I have said that you know our friends are lunatics when Kevin is being cited as "the voice of reason."
That's a lot.
It certainly takes him enough pitches to get the job done. An interview with Tom Seaver on the MLB network a few weeks ago revealed that Seaver had a pitch count limit, too: 135.
Man up, Joba. If you're gonna have your arm coddled, then make the pitches count for something.
Anyways,
Back to today's game.
- I think I know what our weakness is now. Fielding pop-ups. Jorge Posada, the master of the bloop base hit, has reeped the benefits more than once ...cough, ALCS 2003 Game 7, cough... of the "who has this one? Infield? Outfield? Let's just try not to collide and embarrass ourselves, and let the chips fall where they may" cheap shot. It looks like the outfield and infield aren't in sync enough or something, because I've seen on multiple occasions the ball awkwardly bounce in front of an outfield, or an infielder getting tripped up in trying to back up enough, etc. It's such a meh way to get on base.
- Jeter's 2 hits make him 7 shy of breaking Gehrig's record. I don't give enough credit and thought to this fact, but when I stop to let it register, it's really amazing what we're watching here. I think about when my dad talks about Mickey Mantle and how I hate saying "I love Dimaggio/Gehrig/Ruth/Mantle etc etc" because I've never seen them play. And then I think about how some day people will be talk about Jeter like this. And Mo. And if for no other reason than proxy, most of the other Yankees, like ARod and Posada. And it's very humbling and striking at once.
- Cano made an AMAZING throw to home to enable Posada to tag out Bautista and minimize the run damage of the inning. Nice gun, Robbie. (I love how AP writers and the like will soooo subtly insert their bias into their recaps, like "so and so appeared to be out, but was called safe anyway." Thanks for giving us all the facts.)
Ok, I'm off to the beach. It's 8:30 which means I'll get in around 12. I'm accomodating the fact I can't figure out what day we're on when I wake up in the morning and assume I'll wake up disoriented for about 3 hours on Sunday before looking up a train schedule.
Got a bit of a late jump on the day this morning and missed a lot. And tomorrow all I'm responsible for doing is sticking my feet in the sand. And the game. I could do worse.
0 Comments:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)