Tuesday's First Pitch: Players being players, injuries and non-dilemmas

2009-11-04T11:51:51-05:00

2009-11-03T11:29:44-05:00

2009-11-04T11:51:51-05:00

http://img.fannation.com/upload/user_profile/image/432/807/thumb/kron.jpg 49 TX

texaswings

San Marcos 433247

1 There's not going to be a game 7 -- and I'm the farthest thing from a yankees fan. the yankees will find a way to get the lead and give the ball to rivera, and that's all she wrote. Having said that, if it does by some miracle reach game 7, sure, start hamels. he's still a lefty and a lefty has the best chance to succeed against the yankees lineup. and he actually did pitch well for four innings in game 3. if he can give them four, five innings of solid work, then you get to the bullpen and it's all hands on deck. 7530183

<div class="photo_container image_right"> <div class="photo"><img src="http://img.fannation.com/upload/si_blog_post_images/46621/aj-burnett-1103.jpg" alt="Aj-burnett-1103" /></div> <div class="photo_attributes" style="text-align: left;">Game 5 loser A.J. Burnett gave up six earned runs in just two innings pitched. Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images </div> </div> 1. Burnett being Burnett A line you've surely heard lately is that $210 million really ought to have bought the Yankees a fourth starter. While there's no "fair" when it comes to a team that spends the way this one does, it's not really a fair criticism. They have a No. 4 starter. He pitched on Monday night and got whacked. Hard as it may be for anyone to recall, the Yankees opened the year with not one but two nominal aces. One was CC Sabathia; the other was Chien-Ming Wang, who gave up 23 runs in his first six innings and never did anything significant over the rest of the year. Most teams, on losing a starter who came into the year with a .730 winning percentage, would get a bit of credit for playing undermanned. The Yankees don't, which is fine -- no one cares to hear excuses for a team with a $210 million payroll, and no one other than a hardcore Yankees partisan is going to feel too much sympathy for the team over the loss of Wang and Joba Chamberlain's late-season meltdown, which has rendered him unfit for postseason starting duty. Still, if the club has only been able to use three starters this postseason, they honestly do have an excuse. More than that, it's to Joe Girardi's credit that he has only used his best starters. A.J. Burnett wasn't hammered on Monday night because he started on short rest. He was hammered because he's A.J. Burnett. Short rest surely didn't help his always-shaky command of his pitches, but the issue is really that he started off with shaky command. If it was better, he could have given some of it up and still had enough to keep his team in the game. Besides, it's hardly as if Burnett had been performing a credible Bob Gibson impression when pitching on regular rest. The notoriously erratic right-hander has had only one start this postseason in which he wasn't a pitch or two away from calamity; what was different this time was just that he didn't make his escape. In each of the last two years he has had five disaster starts, in which he gave up more runs than he pitched innings. Sabathia has five such starts over the last two years combined; Andy Pettitte has seven. The point here is that while there always has to be blame for someone in sports, and especially in the World Series, and especially for the Yankees, sometimes no one deserves any blame at all. The Yankees lost two starters that they had been counting on, went with a solid plan of starting their remaining pitchers on short rest, and one of them did something that should be no surprise, given his track record. If the Yankees win on Wednesday no one will remember any of it. If they lose the Series, lots of people who were just doing their best will take flack. 2. Howard being Howard One of the first basemen in this World Series is hitting .105 BA/.261 OBA/.316 SLG. The other is hitting .158/.238/.263. Can you tell which is which? As it happens, the one with the slightly worse batting line is Ryan Howard, but really neither is worse than the other, and both have been horrifically bad. One of them is getting booed in his home park, though, while the other's lousy play has been met basically with shrugs. What's the difference? Howard has struck out in just over half his plate appearances, while Mark Teixeira has struck out in just under a third of his. That's it. Howard is pretty overrated. He can't really hit lefties; in each of the last two off-seasons, programs of just throwing him breaking stuff inside and trying to avoid letting him ever face a right-hander have at times proved quite effective, and when his swing or approach break down even a little he looks like a 50-year-old Boog Powell. Still, with the bad comes a lot of greatness -- you can't drive in 572 runs over four years without being a hell of a hitter, and it wasn't so long ago that he won the NLCS MVP -- and so you just have to take them together. Was anyone who's now booing him mad when he struck out in a third of his at-bats over the last five years? If not, why be mad now, when he has struck out in half over five games? What's changed? 3. "There's not going to be a Game 7!" cry Yankees fans This is of course getting ahead of things, but does anyone really think the Phillies should start J.A. Happ over Cole Hamels if they get to a Game 7? Happ is a nice pitcher, and if the Yankees had a No. 5 man as good the Series would probably be over. Hamels is an ace. This is true even if he hasn't pitched well this postseason; it's true even if he committed the <a href="http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=AiG54Efupnr8MzuiJQPHtQERvLYF?slug=ti-hamelsmyers110209&prov=yhoo&type=lgns" target="_blank">unforgivable crime</a> of publicly admitting that he feels it when he pitches badly. Surely we should have learned from watching Alex Rodriguez turn into David Ortiz over the last few weeks that if you give a top player enough chances to redeem a cold streak he'll do so, no? 84762 http://img.fannation.com/upload/user_profile/image/813/744/thumb/tim-marchman-fannation.jpg 3 IL

Tim Marchman

Chicago 814404