After the top of the sixth inning Tuesday, the Yankees were trailing Felix Hernandez and the Seattle Mariners 3-0. King Felix had thrown just 77 pitches and allowed just four hits and a walk through five dazzling innings. Meanwhile, C.C. Sabathia had just allowed two runs and was painfully laboring through the middle innings of the game.
FREEZE
At this point, the Yankee should lose this game. Hell, every MLB team should lose this game. Down three to Felix with Sabathia giving ground and just 12 outs to go? Fuggettabouttit.
An hour later, the Bombers were celebrating on the field, congratulating Mariano Rivera on his 16th save in 16 chances this season. They had held the M’s scoreless in the final three innings and put up four runs of their own. Come September, no one will remember this game for anything more than a Yankee win and a Seattle loss, even though the Yanks win probability score fell to 12 percent after C.C. surrendered a two-run homer to ex-Bomber Raul Ibanez in the sixth.
So how exactly did the Yanks turn near-certain defeat into victory? By relying on the backbone of most big baseball comebacks: middle relief.
See, the dirty little secret of baseball comebacks is that they almost never hinge on the big names, the Canos and Riveras of the game. When a team is trailing by 3+ runs in the fifth inning or later, two facts inevitably emerge:
1. The team trailing has pulled its starter and is relying on bullpen pitchers other than its closer.
2. Allowing any more runs would be fatal to the team behind.
It’s hard enough to overcome a multi-run deficit late as it is — throw in a bullpen that gives up an insurance run for every two you score and it becomes impossible. The biggest comeback I’ve ever seen came from 2011 Cleveland Indians, who were 12 runs down in the sixth inning before pulling off a miraculous victory. Down 14-2 after five innings, the Indians got six consecutive scoreless frames from four middle relievers, including a scoreless 12th by the infamous John Rocker, who picked up the win. Sure, we all remember Omar Vizquel’s ninth-inning, two-out, two-strike, three-run triple that tied the game and nearly gave Jon Miller a heart attack. But without the middle relievers, Cleveland had no chance, offensive surge or no.
In my opinion, there’s a psychological component to comebacks that relies heavily on middle relievers. If you believe your bullpen will hold the opposing team scoreless the rest of the way, you know that you only need X amount of runs (X=deficit+1) to win. But if you expect your pitchers to keep hemorrhaging runs, you won’t have the spark any significant comeback needs to catch fire.
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Last night, the Yankees were down 3-1 when C.C. exited with one out in the top of the seventh. On came Shawn Kelley, a former Seattle middle reliever who had a 6.14 ERA for the Yanks coming into last night’s game. With runners on first and third and one out, the Mariners needed only a soft ground ball or 250-foot fly ball to re-take a three-run lead and blunt the Yanks’ rally. Instead, Kelley got Kelly Shoppach to stare at strike three and retired Ibanez on a fly out to left. Inning over, and when Cano got the Yanks’ only hit with RISP all night — a game-tying two-run double on a great piece of patient hitting — Kelley was suddenly the unsung hero.
The rest of the comeback was pro forma. Lyle Overbay hit a go-ahead sacrifice fly, David Robertson pitched himself in and out of trouble in the eighth, and Mo worked a perfect ninth for the save and a 4-3 win. For his trouble, Kelley got the win and more than a few postgame claps on the back. But Kelley’s role in last night’s victory was more nuanced and important than a W on the stat sheet. He kept the Yankees in a position to come back. And that’s as important as the comeback itself, because the latter couldn’t happen without the former.
A couple weeks ago I covered the most impressive aspect of the Yankees’ remarkable pitching thus far this season: Mariano Rivera. Today it’s the second-most impressive group: the C.C. Sabathia-led starting rotation.
Earlier today, I mentioned in a post on this weekend’s sweep of Toronto that I would address the Yankees’ sterling pitching thus far this season. In truth, though, the Yankee pitchers should be grouped into three categories: starters, relief pitchers, and Mariano. Starting today, I’ll take each group in turn, working backwards from the ninth inning. That means we begin with closer Mariano Rivera, and his historically good month.
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Roughly 360 days ago, Mariano tore the ACL and meniscus in his right leg (the leg he pushes off of on every pitch). The typical recovery time for that injury is 9-12 months for a healthy athlete in his prime. Mo turned 43 in November, a year older than Trevor Hoffman was when his command and velocity failed him — and Hoffman didn’t rip up his knee. But there was Mariano in spring training mowing down hitters, and deep down I knew, like in-my-bones knew, that he was still himself.
A month later, Mariano has his all-time record for saves in a calendar month (nine), a 10:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio, a 1.80 ERA and the beginnings of a legendary goodbye tour. Unbelievably — or in Mo’s case, believably — he has been as inexorable at 43 as he was at 33, if not more so. Check out the log of his 10 appearances this year. Each time he’s thrown exactly one inning. He’s thrown more than 20 pitches only three times. He has allowed two meaningless runs in games he ended up saving. He’s allowed three extra-base hits — two doubles and an Evan Longoria home run. Of his 145 pitches so far this season, 99 have been strikes. I could go on, but do I really need to?
If anything, Mo has gotten better as the month has gone on. His cutter velocity in his first couple appearances was topping out at 89-90 mph, but in his save over Toronto on Sunday he was regularly hitting 91-92 mph with the cutter. A difference of just two miles per hour on a pitch may seem negligible, but for Mo it’s the difference between solid contact and a broken bat, or between a broken bat and a strikeout.
Oh, and I may have buried the lede here, but Mariano this month has displayed the most pinpoint accuracy of any pitcher I’ve ever seen. Better than Maddux. Better than Glavine. Better than everybody. The simple fact that his deadeye backdoor cutters are considered rote proves my point. For his career, Mariano has a roughly 4:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio, with a career high of 12.83:1 in 2008. This season currently ranks second behind ’08, and that’s with umpires squeezing Mariano at every turn (at least through my pinstripe-tinted glasses). Between the velocity and the accuracy, Mo has been thriving with his cutter-fastball repertoire, and there’s no reason to think that will change.
Mo has said repeatedly that this will be his final season, and in typically classy fashion he has been meeting with a select group of fans/volunteers during every road series. Get a good look, baseball diehards of America. You’ll never see anyone like Mariano Rivera again.
Coming Wednesday: I break down the Yankees’ other relievers, including (gulp) Joba.
Here’s what the smartest guy… er, biggest smart-aleck I know wrote about the 2013 Yankees during spring training.
The potential for early season carnage is the highest for any Yankees squad since 1992, back when Lee Gutterman was the closer and Hensley Meulens was a regular starter
Whoops. Two problems here. First, Meulens played just two games for the Yankees in ’92 (though he was a starter in ’91). Second, that “early season carnage” I was so afraid of? It’s been there like I expected — except the Bombers have been on the giving end.
The team that most pundits picked to finish at the bottom of the AL East just swept away the Toronto Blue Jays over four games, getting clutch hits in Sunday’s 3-2 win from Brennan Boesch and Lyle Overbay. Neither of these players were on the roster when I made my gloomy preseason predictions, but they’ve combined to start 26 games so far for the Bombers.
The rest of the Yankees’ castoffs, has-beens and never-weres have been even more impressive. Travis Hafner, whose baseball peak came in 2006, is hitting .305/.423/.695 with six HRs and 14 RBIs in 20 games at DH. Vernon Wells, who was almost historically atrocious over the past two season for the Angels, has been reborn in pinstripes, batting .294/.358/.553 with six HRs and 12 RBIs in 22 games. That’s 12 HRs and 26 RBIs in less than a month for two guys who the Yankee brass HOPED could contribute over the course of the season.
It’s not just Wells and Hafner, though. Overbay, who was cut by the Red Sox on March 26th, has been a defensive wizard at first base and has three HRs including Sunday’s game-winner. Jayson Nix, perhaps the biggest never-was on the team, has several key hits and has been solid at third. Boesch has been largely disappointing, but he’s a young talent who should improve as the season goes on. Other than the forgettable Ben Francisco (3-for-29 so far), the Yankees’ ragtag bunch has been more than good enough to supplement Robbie Cano, Brett Gardner and marquee offseason signing Kevin Youkilis in the top half of the order.
To be fair, the Yankees are 15-9 because of their pitching first and foremost. But that’s for another post, because as diehard Yankee fans and overall baseball guru Rich Greenberg might glibly say, you have to score to win. And in the Yankees’ four-game sweep, the winning hits came from Cano, Overbay, Hafner and Overbay again. With Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez and Curtis Granderson (and now Francisco Cervelli) mired on the disabled list, this collection of Yankee castoffs will have to come up big night after night for the Bombers to sustain their hot start.
Caught the Yanks’ 5-3 comeback win live from the Stadium last night, on a beautiful early spring evening that drew shockingly few fans to the ballpark. The announced crowd was 31,445 in attendance, but the actual number was probably south of 30,000. I don’t know if it was the opponent (Blue Jays), the time (a Thursday night), or the lack of star power in the Yankee lineup, but it was stunning to see the Stadium that empty.
The few fans who did show up saw the latest preternatural hitting display from Robinson Cano. With the Yankees trailing 3-1 in the bottom of the third, Cano came up with two on and two out against Toronto starter Mark Buehrle. One of the Blue Jays’ marquee offseason acquisitions, Buehrle is a crafty left-hander with 175 career wins, one perfect game and one absurdly good fielding play in 2010. But he wanted no part of Cano and quickly fell behind in the count, 3-1. With runners on first and second and Vernon Wells on deck, Buehrle had to find the plate with his 3-1 pitch, and Cano was waiting:
Buehrle tried to sneak a fastball past Cano on the inner half of the plate. Newsflash: You cannot sneak a fastball by Robinson Cano unless it’s four inches off the outside corner. Cano possesses the quickest wrists I’ve ever seen for a Yankee, quicker than Alfonso Soriano. Sure, he can be undisciplined at the plate, and he has a tendency to roll his hands over on outside pitches and ground out weakly to the right side. But that’s just nitpicking, which I can’t help doing with Cano because of how athletically gifted he is.
Cano is the most athletic player I’ve ever seen on the Yankees, but more significantly, he’s probably the most athletic second baseman in MLB history. Cano has a ballplayer’s build: six feet tall, 215 lbs. The greatest second basemen were all either short (Joe Morgan, Roberto Alomar) or white (Rogers Hornsby) until now. As good as Alomar was in the field, he couldn’t make a no-look throw across his body while traveling away from first base. Hardly anyone can. Cano probably does it 50 times a year.
Cano’s closest historical peer is probably Rod Carew, a lanky lefty second baseman who batted .388 in 1977 and finished with 3,053 career hits. But Carew averaged 4.8 home runs per season; Cano has seven dingers already this season after blasting a career-high 33 in 2012.
Last night, Cano was the difference between winning and losing. Sure, Hiroki Kuroda gutted out six innings after being tagged early, and Mo got the job done in the ninth. But the best second baseman in Yankee history (yes, already) made the key play of the game with his sweet, sweet swing.
Welcome to Love/Hate, where I rant about 5 things I like about the Yankees right now, and 5 I don’t. This week’s edition is sponsored by C.C.’s noodle arm.
LOVE: Brett Gardner’s peskiness. The 2013 Yankees may have lost seven of their top nine home run hitters from last year, but one thing they gained was Gardner, who is basically a poor man’s Johnny Damon at this point. Gardner has played a strong center field in Curtis Granderson’s absence (though his arm strength is reminiscent of Bernie Williams), and he has shocked me with two home runs so far this year, not all that far from his career high of seven. But Gardner’s strength will always be his speed on the bases and his gnat-like ability to stay alive at the plate.
From 1949 to 1964, the Yankees missed the playoffs three times and were indisputably the greatest dynasty in baseball history. Sure, the Braves made 14 consecutive postseasons from 1991-2005 and the current Yankees have been in the playoffs in 17 of the last 18 years (dating back to 1995, the Bombers have the missed the playoffs just once, in 2008). But the Truman-Eisenhower-JFK-LBJ dynasty existed when only one team from each league made the playoffs, and the World Series was postseason enough.
So the Yanks had won 13 pennants and nine World Series titles in 16 seasons going into 1965. But the Bombers had been living on borrowed time, relying too heavily on the fading bats of Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra** and the aging skills of Whitey Ford. By ’65, Berra was retired, Ford was relying on guile and the Mick had the knees of a 50-year-old man. Even Elston Howard was 36 and at the tail end of his career. Of the team’s top players, only ace Mel Stottlemyre was in his prime.
**Things you learn while rifling through BaseballReference.com: Yogi Berra finished in the top four in the AL MVP voting SEVEN YEARS IN A ROW. Including three firsts and two seconds! Yogi might the all-time case of a player’s outsized personality overshadowing a historically good career (though Clyde Frazier might topple him once he’s done stylin’ and profilin’).
The ’65 Yankees were weak on paper and equally weak on the field. After winning 99 games in 1964, they went a dismal 77-85 the next season, beginning a drought of 12 years between playoff appearances. The average age of the starting lineup was 30 years old, and no regular had a better line than Tom Tresh’s .279/.348/.477. I haven’t seen an inning of game footage from that year, but the numbers say that the ’65 Yankees were a formerly great team on a slow road to the bottom.
Here are the facts: A media outlet called the Miami New Timespublished an article Tuesday on the results of its lengthy investigation into a Miami anti-aging clinic called Biogenesis — which the article calls “the East Coast BALCO” — in which it released documents that it alleges to be from a former Biogenesis employee. The documents, allegedly carbon copies of ones written up by Biogenesis owner Tony Bosch, suggest that Alex Rodriguez was using illegal performance-enhancing drugs from 2009 to 2012. The drugs include steroids, human growth hormone, testosterone boosters — basically a laundry list of every substance that’s been banned by the MLB.
A-Rod admitted before the 2009 season that he used PEDs from 2001-2003, while he was at Texas, but claimed he stopped before he joined the Yankees in 2004. We’ll assume for the purposes of this post that the allegations in the New Times’ article are true, so that means A-Rod used PEDs throughout the 2009 postseason, when he carried the Yankees to their only World Series title since 2000. The logical outgrowth of that fact is this damning thought: A-Rod has been juicing all along, or at least from 2001 on.
Like the Manti Te’o story last week, it’s far too early to accept the Biogenesis story as gospel and sentence A-Rod to the Sports Hall of Shame with Lance Armstrong, Pete Rose and the other famous-athletes-turned-serial-liars-turned-disgraced-pariahs. Nor will I entertain any discussion that the Yanks’ 2009 title is somehow tainted**. The important baseball issue here is that if the MLB suspends or otherwise disciplines A-Rod for this latest scandal, the Yankees front office will try to void the remaining five years of A-Rod’s contract.
**If you want to call the Yanks’ title tainted, that’s fine. Just so long as you say the same about the Red Sox’s titles in 2004 and 2007 (Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz and Pedro Martinez have all been linked to steroid use with evidence at least as strong as the allegations against A-Rod). For that matter, let’s call the Giants’ 2002 NL pennant tainted (Barry Bonds). And the Orioles’ 1997 AL East title (Rafael Palmeiro). And the Oakland Athletics’ 1989 World Series (Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco). Hell, let’s just call every World Series champion for the past 25 years tainted and move on. Or we can avoid such an asinine discussion entirely.
Media reports from Tuesday evening already have “sources” saying that Yankee ownership will try to void the contract. In fact, it’s possible that the Yankees were somehow involved in making sure this story found its way to the media. Either way, A-Rod has been lying to the team for the last four years — at least — and collecting $28 million a year for his trouble. You can be damn sure that Hal Steinbrenner is ready to burn A-Rod’s pinstriped #13 jersey and send him on his way.
But should the Yankees part ways with A-Rod? Can they? And should we as fans be outraged? Let’s take those one at a time…
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PRACTICALLY, any GM with half a brain would void A-Rod’s contract if they could. The third baseman is owed $114 million over the next five seasons. That breaks down to about $23 million a year. The Yankees, meanwhile, are pushing hard to get their payroll under $189 million by 2014, when a draconian new luxury tax kicks in. That’s why their biggest free agent signing of the offseason was a one-year deal for Kevin Youkilis, and why most experts predict the Yanks won’t re-sign both Robinson Cano and Curtis Granderson when their contracts expire at the end of the season (bye bye, Curtis).
With $23 million extra in their pockets per year, the Bombers could likely re-sign Cano and Granderson should the latter have a bounce-back year in 2013. They could use this season to ease Eduardo Nunez into a possible third base role and double down on improving his fielding, with Kevin Youkilis as a comfortable security blanket in the short term. Or they could test the market in the offseason, when Martin Prado and Michael Young will likely be available.
And what are the Yankees losing, really? Is there a cost-benefit equation in the world that says the Yankees are better off with A-Rod than without him? With him, you get at best a slightly-above-average hitter and top 10 fielder coming off his second major hip surgery in four years. More to the point, what would a PED-less A-Rod look like? Julio Franco when he was 40? Kevin Youkilis right now? But WITHOUT him, you lose the biggest clubhouse distraction since Billy Martin and free up $114 million over the next half-decade. Enough said.
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LEGALLY, it remains to be seen if the Yankees could succeed in voiding A-Rod’s contract. I hope to have much more on this tomorrow, but I will say that no MLB team has ever been able to void a personal services contract with a player because of steroid use. It’s also impossible to say how easily the Yankees could void A-Rod’s without actually seeing the particulars of A-Rod’s contract, and that is not a public document. More to come on this tomorrow.
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ETHICALLY AND MORALLY, should we as fans be outraged?
No. Honestly, no. The fan who is outraged by this is hardly different from this guy:
We Yankee fans may have hated cheering for A-Rod, but we cheered for him anyway. Watch the video from his 600th home run on Aug. 4, 2010 (post-initial steroid admission), when the Stadium crowd gave him a 90-second standing ovation. Or read any of the newspaper articles from October 2009. The New York Times’ Tyler Kepner, perhaps the best baseball writer in the city, penned the following in the wake of the Yankees World Series-clinching win over the Phillies:
At the center of it all was Alex Rodriguez, who had the sense to change his self-absorbed approach by using his February steroids admission as an opportunity for growth.
“I think, over all, I took myself too seriously,” Rodriguez said. “Over all, I think the best thing that happened to me was the embarrassment of all the spring training stuff. I did answer the music and I’m glad to be standing here today.”
Today, after the Miami New Times story broke, Kepner wrote this:
When Sports Illustrated finally exposed Rodriguez as a steroid user [in 2009], part of his response was to smear the reporter, Selena Roberts, by falsely claiming that she tried to break into his home while his children were sleeping. He sounded vaguely like Michael Corleone with that line, except Rodriguez has always been the Fredo of the Yankee family, awkward and envious and insecure.
Such insecurity has surely fueled Rodriguez’s drive to achieve, while also influencing his many bizarre decisions. He has denied many of them, like sending a baseball to some women in the stands during a playoff game last fall, but with his history of lying, who knows what to believe?
Rodriguez will always have his apologists, mostly people who have never had to deal with him and have never been part of his web of deceit. To some who know him well, including the Yankees and Major League Baseball, he is a source of irritation at best, slippery and duplicitous at worst.
Incidentally, the post Kepner wrote after the ’09 title was titled “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” after the great driving song by The Eagles. I guess that “feeling” was naïveté.
We’re all complicit, everyone, at least all of us who swung from powerful emotion to powerful emotion like a pendulum, just like everyone seems to do about everything in this age of extremes. A-Rod was a pariah when he admitted to the earlier PED use in 2009; then he was a reformed hero when he, and the Yankees, won everything later that year. Now he’s a double pariah, having apparently committed the one unforgivable sin for celebrities these days: lying to cover up a lie. Come clean quickly like Eliott Spitzer, Bill Clinton or Andy Pettitte? Your fans will be pissed, and you’ll lose some of them forever, but most will return eventually, and some will even respect you for “having the courage to come clean” or some similar drivel. But lying through your teeth while saying you’re coming clean, like John Edwards, or Rose, or Armstrong, or A-Rod? There’s no hell hot enough for you.
Yes, A-Rod was wrong. Yes, he’s a profound narcissist, a pathological liar, a terrible teammate and a Hall of Fame asshole. But we’ve wasted too much time feeling intense emotions about this dude one way or the other. Let’s take a deep breath, wait for the facts to come out, and pragmatically explore ways to rid ourselves of Alex Rodriguez. You wouldn’t get outraged at a malignant tumor either — you would clinically and rationally determine how to cut it out, and then you would do it. Here’s hoping the Yankees do just that.
Soriano was brilliant for the Yankees last season, replacing Mariano Rivera as the closer in early May and throwing up a Mo-like 42 saves in 46 chances. Without him, the Yankees don’t sniff the playoffs, much less win the division. But Soriano is mercurial, aloof and sometime petulantly unprofessional. He’s 33, an uncertain age for closers. Most importantly, he wanted to close in 2013, and even the reincarnation of 1978 Goose Gossage was not going replace Mariano. Once Rivera decided he was coming back for one more season, Soriano was playing on borrowed time in the Bronx.
Will the Yankees be worse off without Soriano, who signed with the Nationals in mid-January? Hard to say. As transcendent as Rivera has been, he’s coming off a torn ACL and meniscus and turned 43 in November. If he struggles, the Yanks won’t have Soriano as a security blanket. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter — we’ll happily live and die with Rivera, like we have since 1997.
NICK SWISHER
2012 Stats: .272/.364/.473, 24 HRs, 93 RBIs
I wrote the following after Swisher suggested in August that he wanted a new contract similar to Jayson Werth’s seven-year, $126 million deal with the Nationals:
Paying Swisher, who will be 32 this offseason, $126 million would be akin to walking into a Vegas casino with bags of money and handing the bags to the pit boss. Paying him $63 million would barely be acceptable given his lifetime postseason splits of .169/.295/.323 (in a healthy 38-game sample no less).
Of course, Swisher managed to underperform in the 2012 playoffs even by his own putrid standard. Beyond his .166/.242/.212, 10-strikeout joke of a line in eight postseason starts, Swisher missed a key fly ball in extra innings that cost the Yankees Game 1 of the ALCS and complained about the heckling he was getting from the Bleacher Creatures, as if he should be given a pat on the back for missing the Mendoza Line in yet another postseason. As my Dad might say, there are winners and losers in sports, and Swisher is a loser.
With that in mind, signing him to a four-year, $56 million deal — the contract he got from Cleveland — would have been sheer lunacy. I thoroughly enjoyed the Nick Swisher era and the ebullience he brought to the clubhouse. Unless, of course, it was late in a close game or anytime after Oct. 1. Then I hated it.
