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April 25, 2012
Well, theoretically we can try to do what we did on Tuesday night in terms of putting things in perspective. But the difference between Tuesday's game and Wednesday's game is that the latter didn't faze me at all. I didn't see the L, I saw the numbers in the box score cels.

The former, however, is concerning. NOT concerning in a microphone-waving-barkingp-reporter-asking-Girardi-if-it's-time-to-press-the-panic-button kind of way. But in a seeing-your-kid's-grades-go-from-As-to-Cs-over-the-course-of-a-semester kind of a way. A loving, not insidious, eyebrow furrowing.

I was on the roof earlier, and I think it's easier to put things in perspective when I can see the stars. When it's overcast, NYC feels like it's been squirreled away from the rest of the world, leaving all 8 million of us to asphyxiate on a thick fog comprised of our individual problems.

When the clouds part, you still feel a little bit confined, but it's like this scene in Cube, (one of the weirder and more inane/disappointing movies my youngest sister pitched, in our ongoing pursuit for a horror movie that will scare us).

But when it's a night like tonight and you can see all the dippers, and the moon is hanging casually in the sky, grinning like he had gone to town on some Orange Fun Dip...well on nights like tonight, the city is bigger, and everything is far, and nothing seems insurmountable.

Almost nothing is insurmountable, anyway. Because it would appear that the Yankees' inability to patch together a competent rotation may be getting filed in the Insurmountable folder. Or maybe the baseball gods are turning the Mets' age-old pitching misfortunes into a communal New York pool of pitching issues, all are free to wade awkwardly.


So a night after ItHadtoBeYu comes in to pitch all 23,0298 of his pitch aresenal, ItsBadtoBeHughes comes in to put the question to bed about whether the Yankees are comfortable with their rotation, e

Our Wonder Bread. Their Texas Toast. Who Hughes is lucky that Kuroda was in charge of that game. All Hughes had to do was beat a handful of relievers. It was like the identity crisis edition of the pitching matchups. Closers turned starters, relievers turned closers, Starters to relievers to starters. And Hughes couldn't go toe to toe with his own breed of ill-defined hurlers.

To be clear, Hughes looks terrible. Ive always defended him, but I am not confident in his raw stuff anymore. He didn't look like he was having a bad outing. He looked like the kid in Rookie of the Year, who slips on the ball and loses his special powers, and then he just starts staring at his arm with equal parts horror, fear, and relief.

Hughes got the relief part down, anyway. When he was taken out of game in favor of relief, after hitting his 2nd batter of the day.

According to our boy, though, his solution is fairly simple:

Something has to change. I just have to keep working hard. That's all I can do. I feel good with the stuff I'm throwing," Hughes said. "Every outing like this is disappointing. It's tough to deal with, you just hope things get better before they get worse."


Hard work. Good answer. But you should never say "That's all I can do." It basically means, "I'm going to probably disappoint you."

Not even 3 innnings had passed before teh Rangers were up 4-0. Yankees' bats weren't abysmal tonight, especially given that fact they had 8 hits, spanning from top to bottom of the lineup.

Jeter knocks another 2 hits, and I'm happy for him. Grandy, Arod, Chavez, and Martin are all hitless though. Maybe here's where the perspective stuff comes into play, not on the pitchng but on exactly how good or bad is the Yankees' batting order right now?

As I've said before, who the hell am I to presume that Girardi isn't making the right move with certain decisions? What he forgot about baseball, I'll never know.

But I gotta say it, I think the batting order is confusing in terms of the whole maximizing power thing. Kind of like the "grow" computer game.

Wow, actually, a lot like that. Play it, you'll see what I mean.

I mean, maybe we should just bite the bullet and acknowledge that Ibanez is new and all, but we may want to consider moving him up in the order since this is a baseball game and not a Top Ten Cutest Boys in Homeroom list.

Or just go up and ask him how long he plans on hitting bombs when we need them most. If he says, "many more games" then we'll know.

"We need to find a reference that supports a statement saying that applesauce can talk."
"I'm right on top of that Rose!"
"So when do you think you'll find it by?"
I want to meet the people who apparently already know before even starting a search, where in the bajillions of corners of the cyberworld, something is. And their only question is whether to use firefox or explorer, and maybe to see if they can see themselves on Google Earth satellite thing.

So, if you do decide to ask Ibanez what his plans on in terms of consistency, be shrewd about it, coach.
In other productive offense news, there were the Rangers, who scored more runs, but actually only teed off on Hughes with only slightly more gusto than the Yanks handled Feldman over 3 innings.

2 runs on 6 hits. It's okay,. The Rangers beat us and made themselves look like the best team in baseball in doing so. Their batting order was terrifying at every turn. It's true. They looked a lot better than I thought, but I think Hughes was the ugly one in the group who doesn't make the other girls look hotter, as they had hoped, but rather brings down the entire property value of the gang.

And compared to the frightening "are we near the end of the order yet?" mentality accompanying Texas' offense, the Yankees were looking like something different, like something that COULD be scary, but was all discombobulated and hence inefficient/neutered.

Like Saw IV. Probably was scary but I spent all my energy trying to decipher the sequence of events, which were very much out of order.

Speaking of Saw, there's this.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't give Phelps some play for his run hemorrhaging. 3 BB and 3 runs on 5 hits isn't terrible. If it's over 6 innings. But all that AND a pair of long balls over the course of 2IP? He's Hughes Part Deux. Seriously, watch the way he pitches. Even his face sort of resembles NotYu.

Ah, so let's move past this one, because I've actually reached that rare moment when I can't keep my eyes open a single second longer. It's weird when it happens, and there's always a little part of me that's scared my body is going to like sleep so much that it'll do it for 20 straight hours. Or, you know, that I'll have nightmares.

Risk I'm gonna have to take right now though. Thursday we'll see the Good Guys Rangers take the ice in Game 7 at the Garden. That'll be a fun game to watch. If "fun" meant "tortuous" and "watch" meant "face wall/sit under table/lie in the middle of 42nd street/occupy whatever location is deemed "lucky" based on game ebbs/flows."

Yankees back with us on Friday, I'll see you then, for the phenomenal game we got on the docket. Nova v Verlander. (If pitching matchups were recognized in Words with Friends, that one would be a really point-rich move. All those's v's and all.)

Now time for z's.*


*A joke only a mother would love.
†I swear on my PF Flyers that I did not plan that.

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