Friday, April 28, 2006
2 out of 3 ain’t bad
After what was probably the most frustrating loss of the year, Shawn Chacon pitched 6.1 effective innings and the Yankees finally remembered that they were facing Mark Hendrickson and scored 3 unearned runs in the bottom of the sixth inning to beat Tampa Bay 4-1. Derek Jeter continues to hit better than he ever has, going 3-3 with a BB, and is now hitting .408/.516/.684. His BB and an error by Russell Branyan set up the Yankee rally. I won’t say anything more about Jeter because I don’t want to be accused of bashing.
Chacon lowered his ERA to 4.56, although if you take out his awful relief outings it’s a more than respectable 3.96. While I’m still worried about him, my worry grows a little weaker with each solid start he makes.
Kyle Farnsworth finally looked like the guy the Yankees paid for, hitting 100 on the YES gun and just looking nasty, and Mariano Rivera shook off a loss yesterday to pick up his third save. The Yankees as a team are allowing 3.9 runs a game, second lowest in the AL (to Detroit). Combine that with an offense that’s scoring 6.05 runs a game, and you have a team that should be 14-6 trailing a team that should be 10-12 by a game in the standings. It’s unfortunate the Yankees have not taken advantage of their very good play so far this year, because I see no way their run prevention remains this strong going forward, and the offense really can’t get much better than it is right now (last two games excepted).
Joe Torre is going to kill me this season. Between starting defensive specialist Bubba Crosby yesterday with an extreme ground ball pitcher on the mound, to starting Bernie Williams in CF with a fly ball pitcher on the mound tonight, to allowing Mike Myers to face a righty (even a bad one) as the tying run, to bringing in Tanyon Sturtze for no other reason than to make Mariano Rivera’s life a little harder, I don’t know what move he made that annoyed me the most.
It should have been a sweep, but the Yankees have won back-to-back series at home now, and send out former 15 game winner Jaret Wright to start off their next series against Toronto in fine fashion. With Aaron Small just about ready to rejoin the team it could be Wright’s last start for awhile. Toronto’s on pace to score as many runs as the Yankees this season, and are slugging .504 on the season, so this one could get ugly.
Here’s your matchups for the weekend:
Friday
R. Halladay (2-1, 3.60) vs. J. Wright (0-1, 7.20)
Ugh.
Saturday
J. Towers (0-4, 8.35) vs. R. Johnson (3-2, 3.73)
Sunday
G. Chacín (4-0, 5.11) vs. M. Mussina (3-1, 2.45)
Another two out of three would be nice. I hate that first matchup though.
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