River Avenue Blues

Thoughts following ALDS Game Two

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(Patrick McDermott/Getty)

A split in Baltimore for the first two games of the ALDS wasn’t ideal, but it’s far from the worst case scenario. The final three games of the series will be played in Yankee Stadium, which I consider advantage Yankees even though the Orioles won six of nine there this season. We’ve been through this “Team A did this against Team B in the regular season and therefore have the advantage in a playoff series” dance how many times in the last few years now?

1. The ALDS is now a best-of-three and it’s great that all three games will be in the Bronx, but the playoff schedule this year is such a mess. If this series happens to go five games, the winner will have to use their fifth starter in the ALCS because Games One and Two of that series immediately follow Game Five of this one. How ridiculous is that? Finish with the best record in the league and that’s the reward? The new playoff system was rushed into place this year and the schedule is a nightmare. I wish they would have just waited until the Astros moved to AL next season and made all the changes at once. I guess the teams and the league stood to make too much money by implementing it this year, half-assed or not.

2. As our Bullpen Workload page shows, pretty much every reliever on the ALDS roster other than David Robertson will have had a full week of rest going into Game Three. That’s a good thing because for a long time those guys were really getting worked hard, but a full week off is entering the danger zone of being rusty (poor location) when they finally do get into a game. They’ll need all the rest they can get because playing five games in the next five days is a very real possibility, but there was so much time off between the end of the regular season and the start of the ALDS that these guys might need an inning or two to regain their feel.

3. While on the bullpen subject, you ready for a weird stat? The Yankees haven’t had a save opportunity in the playoffs since Game One of the 2010 ALCS. They won Game Five of that series in a blowout, won Games One and Four of the 2011 ALDS in blowouts, and won Game One of this series in a blowout. Twelve games since their last postseason save chance. Weird.

4. What the hell happened to the routine play? Derek Jeter threw away a ball while Mark Teixeira and J.J. Hardy let ground balls get through their legs in last night’s game, but it’s not just that. Routine plays are being botched all around the postseason — pop-ups are falling in, pitchers are throwing away bunts, all that stuff. Basic plays you practice on the first day of Spring Training. It’s just unbelievable to watch all these easy routine plays turn into game-changing mistakes. The World Series is going to come down to whoever turns the most routine plays into outs, I guess.

5. The Yankees have to do a better job against the Orioles’ left-handed hitters, specifically Nate McLouth and Chris Davis. Those two are a combined 6-for-16 (.375) in the series with a two-run single in each game so far, and that’s against New York’s top two left-handed starters in CC Sabathia and Andy Pettitte. They’ve kept Adam Jones and Matt Wieters in check while keeping Mark Reynolds in the park, so those guy aren’t killing them. McLouth, who was on the verge of playing in an independent league a few months, and Davis are. Those two are going to bat first and third in every game of the series forward and the Yankees have to do a better job of keeping them off base and more importantly, doing damage when there are runners on base.

6. Total homers hit in the postseason so far: ten in ten games (counting the two wildcard play-in games), so one per game. All of those have come against the supposed numbers one and two starters of team, right? No one started their number four or five guy out of necessity. Even when Johnny Cueto got hurt in the first inning of Game One, Mat Latos come in to pitch in long relief. The MLB average this year was 0.94 homers per game. Runs per game in general are down — 8.57 runs per game in the regular season to 7.25 in the playoffs — and you know why that it is? Because stringing together a rally with multiple hits against top pitchers is much harder than hitting homers off them. Good pitchers make fewer mistakes, and when you get a mistake you have to make it count. I will fight the ridiculous “you can’t hit homers off good pitching in the playoffs” narrative ’til the death, right after I finish watching this Edgar Renteria highlight.

Yanks can’t support Pettitte in Game Two loss

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It’s a best-of-three series now. The Yankees fell to the Orioles by the score of 3-2 in Game Two of the ALDS following another rain delay, this one only 40 minutes or so.

The Ichiro Reach Around

I can’t even explain that. Ichiro Suzuki was dead at the plate on Robinson Cano’s two-out double in the first, but then … that … happened. Sort of a double pirouette to avoid the tag and get the hand in to score the run. The TBS broadcast showed about a million different replays from all sorts of angles, and they all showed the same thing: Ichiro avoided the tag. You could see it on Matt Wieters’ face after the safe call. We give umpire Angel Hernandez a real hard time, but he got that call right. (.gif via Chad Moriyama)

Anyway, that inning featured a lot more than one great slide. Derek Jeter (line drive to right-center) and Ichiro (grounder that Mark Reynolds tried to barehand) opened the game with singles in 0-2 counts, starting the night off on the right foot. Alex Rodriguez lined into a 4-6 double play that could have easily been a 4-6-3 triple play had Ichiro not scurried back to first in time. Robert Andino made a diving stop to catch the line drive before flipping to J.J. Hardy at the bag to double off Jeter. Just bad luck for Alex, he scorched the ball back up the box but the defender made a great catch. Cano picked him up with a rocket double into the right field corner to score Ichiro, but yeah that was a terrible send by third base coach Robbie Thomson. Gotta love those first inning runs though. Second straight night too.

(Rob Carr/Getty)

Deja Vu

After the Yankees scored a run in the first, the Orioles rallied back to plate a pair in the bottom of third. Pretty much a carbon copy of Game One, right down to the hanging breaking ball to the left-handed batter that resulted in the two-run single. The two-out rally started with bloop hits from Robert Andino and Nate McLouth, at least one of which broke a bat. J.J. Hardy loaded the bases with a four-pitch walk that if you didn’t know any better, you would have though was intentional so Pettitte could face the left-handed Chris Davis. He didn’t seem particularly interested in challenging Hardy with two men on.

Davis lined the hanging slider into right for a two-run single, giving the Orioles a 2-1 lead. Things could have been a lot worse when Adam Jones’ ground ball scooted by Jeter at short, but Hardy held at third on a ball he would have easily scored on. Replays shows that the third base coach waved him in and that A-Rod deked him by acting like he caught a relay throw from short and was about to apply the tag. No idea if that played a part on the hold, but either way a run that should have scored did not. Wieters popped up to second one batter later to end the inning, so the base-running blunder really helped the Yankees out.

Blown Chances

(Rob Carr/Getty)

Again like Sunday’s game, the Yankees had a chance to answer Baltimore’s third inning run in the fourth. Unlike Sunday’s game, they didn’t convert it into a run. Nick Swisher struck out to open the inning, but Mark Teixeira (single), Russell Martin (walk), and Curtis Granderson (single) reached base after that to load the bases with one out. In many ways, the two right hitters were due up in Eduardo Nunez and Jeter. They both make a lot of contact and that’s all you’re looking for in that spot. Unfortunately, Nunez’s contact was a pop-up to short and Jeter’s was a grounder to third to end the threat.

The Yankees did plate a run in the seventh, but not after the Orioles extended their lead to two in the sixth. Nunez started the inning with a hustle double — Davis gets an assist for his ill-advised dive in shallow right — and Jeter plated him with a line drive single to left, another hit in an 0-2 count. The managerial machinations went into overdrive after that, as Ichiro tried to bunt Jeter to second only to fall behind in the count 0-2. He wound up grounding into a fielder’s choice, barely beating out the double play. Ichiro then stole second as A-Rod struck which, unsurprisingly, took the bat out of Cano’s hand. Swisher grounded out to end the inning. The steal was just generic “let’s get the man in scoring position” stuff without regard for the game situation — a runner at first is in scoring position when Cano is at the plate. He proved it in the first inning. Gotta let him swing the bat in that spot.

Teixeira led off the eighth with a single but didn’t advance any further because Martin struck out, Granderson struck out, and Nunez popped up into foul territory to end the inning. I wanted Brett Gardner to run for Tex there because 1) that run is really important, and 2) his spot in the lineup isn’t guaranteed to come up again in the game. Even if it did, Raul Ibanez and Eric Chavez were both on the bench. Plus Teixeira is so slow he practically needs a walker, which is why he didn’t score on Granderson’s single in the third. Maybe they pitch everyone differently with the speedy Gardner on first (more fastballs?), but it doesn’t matter now. The Yankees had their chances to score runs and even went a not terrible (but not great) 2-for-8 with runners in scoring position. Teixeira’s single was their final base-runner of the game and Gardner never pinch-ran. Bullet left in the chamber.

(Rob Carr/Getty)

Admirable Andy

Three runs in seven innings is a pretty typical Andy Pettitte start, meaning rock solid and dependable. Allowing three hits to lefties (one by McLouth and two by Davis) was quite annoying, but otherwise he only allowed seven hits total (six singles) and walked just one against five strikeouts. Two of the hits were bloops and another two were weak little ground balls just beyond the reach of Jeter and Cano on the middle infield.

Pettitte allowed the leadoff man to reach base in fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth innings, but not all of that was his fault. Jeter made a throwing error on Reynolds’ ground ball to start the fourth, Teixeira allowed a ground ball to get through his legs to start the fifth (he’s lucky it hit the ump otherwise the runner would have been on second), and Andy shouldn’t even have been sent back out for the eighth. Forty-year-old pitcher nearing 100 pitches facing the molten hit Davis for the fourth time with a rested bullpen and a day off on Tuesday … get a fresh arm in there. What the hell. Anyway, David Robertson came in to clean up the inning and no damage was done. At one point he threw like eight straight curveballs. Pettitte did his part, he kept his team in the game all night.

Leftovers

(Patrick McDermott/Getty)

The Yankees had a four-pitching inning offensively in the fifth, part of a span in which Chen got five outs against the middle of the order on eleven total pitches. Teixeira and Jeter were the only players with two hits apiece while everyone else other than Swisher and Martin had exactly one knock. One of the two walks was intentional (Cano in the eighth) and the other was drawn by Martin. Nine of the final eleven Yankees to bat made outs, and one of the exceptions was Cano’s intentional walk. The Orioles have a really good bullpen and they rebounded to nail things down after the Game One disaster.

Hernandez had his typical ridiculous strike zone, which at times apparently shifted from being big on the right-handed batter’s box side to big on the left-handed batter’s box side. That’s just the way it goes with him though, and both teams got screwed at different times. I will say that the 1-1 called strike to Nunez in the fourth inning (strike zone plot) was a killer that changed the entire complexion of the at-bat. Here’s a strike zone plot for the entire game. Ugly.

Some Buck Showalter weirdness: After Ichiro’s stolen base in the seventh, Showalter replaced Darren O’Day with the left-handed Brian Matusz only to have Matusz intentionally walk Cano. Usually you’d just let O’Day issue the walk since he was coming out of the game. Pitchers always seems to lose the strike zone a bit after an intentional walk, and sure enough Matusz’s first real pitch was in the dirt for a wild pitch that allowed the runners to move up. Maybe Buck was going to pitch to Cano and changed his mind after bringing in Matusz? Just a really weird move that ultimately didn’t come back to bite the Orioles.

Box Score & WPA Graph

MLB.com has the box score and video highlights. This one was pretty straight forward, no?


Source: FanGraphs

Up Next

Tuesday is a travel day, so these two clubs will reconvene at Yankee Stadium for Game Three on Wednesday night. The start time for that one will be either 7:37pm or 8:37pm ET (on TBS) depending on what happens with some of the other playoff series. Hiroki Kuroda will get that start against rookie right-hander Miguel Gonzalez. Check out RAB Tickets for any last minute deals on tickets.

ALDS Game Two Thread: Yankees @ Orioles

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Joe Torre used to always say that Game Two was the most important game of a playoff series because if you won Game One, you’ve got a chance to really take control of the series. On the other hand, if you lost Game One, you’ve got a chance to get back in the series and tie things up. I respectfully disagree — I’m in the “the most important game is the next one” camp — but it wasn’t a coincidence that Torre always lined Andy Pettitte up for Game Two. He trusted him to either give the Yankees a 2-0 series lead or tie it up a 1-1.

Pettitte will be on the mound in Game Two tonight after CC Sabathia pitched the Yankees to a win in Game One, with a big assist from the offense for their five-run ninth inning. Andy made three regular season starts after coming off the DL, allowing just two runs in 16.2 total innings. He stretched his pitch count up to 94 last time out and should be good for 100+ offerings tonight, especially after eight days of rest. The entire bullpen is fresh as well following Sabathia’s outing. Here are the lineups…

New York Yankees
SS Derek Jeter
LF Ichiro Suzuki
3B Alex Rodriguez
2B Robinson Cano
RF Nick Swisher
1B Mark Teixeira
C  Russell Martin
CF Curtis Granderson
DH Eduardo Nunez

LHP Andy Pettitte (5-4, 2.87)

Baltimore Orioles
LF Nate McLouth
SS J.J. Hardy
RF Chris Davis
CF Adam Jones
C  Matt Wieters
1B Mark Reynolds
DH Jim Thome
3B Manny Machado
2B Robert Andino

LHP Wei-Yin Chen (12-11, 4.02)

It’s been raining in Baltimore most of the day, but things are supposed to die down later tonight. Whether the rain dies down enough for them to get the game in without a lengthy delay remains to be seen. Hopefully the can get a full nine innings in and there won’t be a mid-game delay. Anyway, the game is scheduled to start at 8:07pm ET and can be seen on TBS (or TNT if the Nationals and Cardinals are still playing). Enjoy.

Update (7:51pm ET): Guess what? They’re in a rain delay. A start time has not yet been announced, but appears that the delay will be shorter than last night’s. At least I hope it will be.

Update (8:10pm ET): The game is scheduled to begin at 8:45pm ET.

Pettitte hints at 2013 return (again)

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(Abelimages/Getty)

Andy Pettitte’s return from a one-year retirement stint has been a smashing success to date, though a fluke leg injury cost him more than two months of the season. The 40-year-old left-hander hinted in August that the extended DL trip put the thought of returning to the Yankees to pitch in 2013 into his mind. Simply put, he hadn’t gotten all of the baseball out of his system due to the injury. While speaking with the media yesterday, Pettitte reiterated that returning as a player next year was still a consideration, if not downright likely.

“I know one thing: I know the competition and the desire to compete is still there, and I don’t feel like I kind of got that itch out from the 70 innings or so that I threw this year,” said Andy. “I was expecting to do a little bit more work than that. But we’ll see. We’ll see how this goes, and then I’ll factor everything probably in … it’s going to be a situation where you, again, just need to go home, see if I want to do this again.”

The Yankees would, without question, welcome Pettitte back with open arms next season if he decided to return for another year. They’d probably give him a sizable raise as well, considering he only pulled in $2.5M this year. Brian Cashman admitted to offering Pettitte upwards of $12M back in December, before the left-hander decided to return. He told the club to move forward with their offseason plans without him, and that money wound up in Hiroki Kuroda’s pocket.

For now, the most important thing is Game Two of the ALDS tonight. Pettitte has made 42 (!) playoff starts in his career, so this certainly isn’t his first rodeo. He’s pitched on all sorts of rest and through every weather imaginable, so a little drizzle and eight days off shouldn’t be much of a concern tonight. There’s a good chance retirement will again cross Andy’s mind if he helps the Yankees win the World Series, and as much as I love the guy, I sure hope we get to find out in a few weeks.