"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

April 23, 2012

The other Rangers

There's a gratuitous surplus of videos on the Youtube, of cats watching things. I mean, we get it. Cats' eyes follow objects very devotedly, and it's hilarious because they just keep going back and forth!

That said, I think that's probably what the lot of us looked like tonight, as we tried to find optimal viewing at an Upper East Side, eyes darting back and forth between the big screen on one end (showing the Yankee game) and the high defs on the other end (showing the Ranger game.)

As expected, the NYR game was getting the lion's share of the attention, being Game 6 and all. But this is New York and these are the Yankees, so the importance of a good idea from Fatso still ranks pretty high on our priority lists.

And try as we might, no one could come up with a great parallelism line that captured the whole NYRangers and Texas Rangers and NYYankees playing at the same time thing. Seriously. I've thought about it, and beyond the obvious "LOL! Rangers and rangers!" outbursts, I'm coming up empty.

Which is immaterial really, since THE GOOD GUYS WON ALL AROUND.

The Yankees played EXACTLY the way I like them too. Not 100%, just enough percent to win. I don't care they started giving up runs to the (other) hottest team in baseball right now. I mean, Texas lineup is stacked. It happens.

Tubbo struck out his cost-of-entry-that-sometimes-I-take-for-granted 8 batters, as he took the Yanks through 8 innings, slicing through the lineup like it was a warm meatloaf. 4 runs on 7 hits, 1 BB, 8K (Weirdly, Texas' starter Holland had like the same line numbers as RoundBoy, except they were all in different places. 7 runs, 4 BB, 9 hits, 1K. Ours are better.)

So that was pretty stellar, as was the swift work Mo "I won't seem so old when the next person who asks when I'm retiring gets popped with a 92 mph cutter in his press pass" Rivera did to get the save.

Nice, neat pitching.

Oh yeah, there was some hitting. Speaking of old, Derek Jeter is...well, preposterous, really. He's acting like someone stuck a Game Genie in his back or something. Or, as Arod so awkwardly noted, "It's like he's 25 and it's 1999 all over again!"

(You gotta hand it to Arod, he tries SO. HARD. Like Scott Howard the teen wolf.)

I think Arod's publicist may have told him to try to incorporate as many historical references as possible, to create the illusion that he's a long-time Yankee and not a hired gun. I know I may be in the minority, but I love Arod and to me Arod's a true Yankee. He's the best player in baseball and he plays like it. That's Yankee stuff.

But then there's THE true Yankee. The Game Genie. The Power Glove kid.



After a 4 hit game this weekend, Jeter follows it up with another one. 4 for 5, with a ribbie and 2 runs. Alright, I don't understand something though.

Every single discussion of this scorching streak Jeter's been on, has been couched in a bigger discussion of his age. It's always stuff like "playing like he's 25" or "the 37 year old has just hit his 4th hit of the game."

But I would think that if any player was playing the way Jeter is right now, it'd be ridiculous. So, I get it, 37 is so old that he still remembers when phone numbers on TV had letters in them. But he's clearly not THAT old or he wouldn't be playing like this.

If he were legitimately over the hill, he'd play like it. So by that logic, we can assume that he's not old, and hence we should look at his performance as impressive in it of itself, without using his age as a barometer for exactly HOW impressive it is.

Speaking of 25 year olds, Holland is overfeated against the Yankees. None wins. With a 9 point bajillion ERA, and he just signed like a 30 million dollar 5-year extension this year. So what does Coach Ron have to say about this young star?

"He's very consistent."

Yeah. I guess. That's one way of looking at it. (See, shit like that scares me, because you hear it now to mute a bad outing for a young pitcher, but I bet you my feet that soon you're going to be hearing that from other--more influential--people who have been screwing up repeatedly. They're not "screwing up." They're being "consistent.")

Although not as desirably "consistent" as Holland, Arod did pull a 3-run ding out. It's not just that the Yankees are hitting so well, it's the WAY they're hitting. How they look at the plate, the pitches they're swinging at and not swinging at. They look markedly different as a whole from last year, even without looking at the numbers, and just looking at their plate presence.

It's fascinating, and I'm into it, and I'm dying to know what a Kevin Long session is like. I want it to be like a college art class, where everyone's painting at their respective easels and Kevin Long is gracefully weaving in and out of the players nodding and giving encouragement and every so often pausing and thinking for a bit, before imparting some pithy, dramatic critique of the work.

I'm sure it's pretty much exactly like it is in my head. Like 0% of everything ever.

The Socks also scrounged together a win, and if there's a Yankee fan in the world who doesn't think the game on Sunday was cancelled not because of the weather but in an effort to cut their losses and avoid having to show their faces again to their legendary predecessors, then I don't know who that Yankee fan is.

Keep it up, Yankees. Like Aristotle said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act. But a habit."