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

May 22, 2012

In the movie License to Drive, Corey Haim goes on all sorts of crazy adventures when he doesn't even have a license, and all to win over Heather Graham. What could possibly go wrong. Except everything goes wrong and he brings home his grandfather's car all but totaled.

The movie concludes with Corey Haim getting a reprieve from his parents' enraged discplinary dolings, because his mom goes into labor and he has to drive her to hospital. Except the car is so smashed up that the only gear that works is reverse.

That's how I feel about the Yankees win on Tuesday. First I'm thinking, Wahoo! The Yanks look great! Off-season is over!

Then everything goes to hell, and my date with Heather Graham aka baseball keeps getting more and more soured by every new pitfall. So you think, man we can't catch a break. Then it hits a head last night and we're bracing ourselves for the worst, but end up with a win tonight.

Except...nothing is ever f'n easy. 3-2. Barrrrreeely scraped that one out and only because Tex went from not knowing where 1st base was on Monday, to doing some kind of Geena Davis-esque move on Tuesday, to save a run and thus save the game.

Good work, Tex. Good job, Hughes.

Hughes won again. Which is great, but I hate the fact that we need Hughes to be a strong pitcher. I'd prefer to have him nicely pigeonholed as the wild card if it meant we had an auto-W on CC and Andy and Fill in the Blank Starter/Kuroda days.

I'm happy for Hughes because when you think about it, he had a HUGE hole to climb out of (in his career, not the game). He used to be great, then bad. And instead of going the Justin Chamberlain route of staying bad, it looks like his taking shit seriously. Justin never did that. (Who takes himselves out of commission by virtue of overaggressive trampoline jumping?)

Hughes did give up a homerun to put the Yanks in an 0-2 deficit. I just read a stat that said Hughes has given up what amounts to an average of a homerun per every 4 innings he pitches. Considering that he's surrendered a bomb in every single one of his 9 starts this year, I'm thinking maybe it's like the same kind of thing as not swinging at the first pitch?

I always take a pitch, ALWAYS, and it doesn't really behoove me to do so in softball. So a perfect meatball will come down and I'm 0-1, and then the next couple of pitches I see will be all over the place. Anyways, my point is, good or bad, it gives me consistency at the plate and I like order. Maybe Hughes like to take a ding for the same reason.

Jeter, Cano, and Grandy came through as usual. And the Yanks improved from 0-13 with RISP to 2-7. 

Res es vultus sursum!

So they won by the skin of their teeth. But they climbed out of last place and are playing over .500 (on a side note, has anyone else noticed that the NL Central LEADER is playing .558?)

Maybe it wasn't a huge offensive showing, but I hope these murmurings about someone's head rolling fizzle out. I love Kevin Long, and the Yanks have the MLB right where they want 'em. Just wait. I was going to say something about it always being darkest before dawn, etc etc. But I don't know if I've found that to be true. It gets lighter out before dawn is upon us. I would know.