Bronx, N.Y., July 21, 2004 — It took reliever Bob File 27 pitches to negotiate his way through the Yankee fifth inning Wednesday night, and the 26 that followed Enrique Wilson’s first pitch home run to right resulted in no more runs for the home team, as Wilson’s blast topped their score off at 10 in the 10-3 win.

In that frame File threw 21 strikes. Blue Jays starter Pat Hentgen threw 41 pitches in the five-run Yankee second, and he only threw 16 strikes. You can pick your poison, and the Blue Jays did. Hentgen walked four Yankees in the second, resulting in three runs driven in by the inning’s three singles, another on a Miguel Cairo sac fly, and one more scoring on a wild pitch while Alex Rodriguez took four straight off the plate with the sacks filled. Only two of the singles scored, while three of the walks did.

But Javy Vazquez was not sharp, and he let the Jays right back in the game with two third-inning runs, on two hits, a hit by pitch, and a walk. Hentgen took the mound in the bottom of the third throwing strikes, but Toronto’s Plan B didn’t work either. Tony Clark, Bernie Williams, and Miguel Cairo singles plated a sixth run, and sent Hentgen to the showers. When File came on and tried to throw his first pitch high and hard past Gary Sheffield, Shef turned on it and blasted a three-run jack to left. The Yanks had a 9-2 lead, and the game was pretty much over.

Many of the 53,000-plus in attendance stuck around until Javy left after six, enjoying a couple of rousing full-Stadium waves while they waited. It wasn’t quite the gorgeous cool night many anticipated, but it would do. There were foul balls aplenty, and the Tier boxes just to the foul side of the pole in right received three, with two of them off Jorge Posada’s booming bat. The Yankee catcher had to settle for two singles, two rbi, and a walk, but the fans in Tier section 31 know better. The Scoreboard delighted one and all by resurrecting an edited version of the old “el duque Dance” clips featured in 1998, showing The Duke lifting his leg high, shifting his feet, squirming on the bench and tossing his glove with ball embedded to Tino Martinez for an out.

To negotiate his six frames, it took Vazquez 110 tosses, 71 of them strikes. He threw 19 of 30 first pitches in the zone. He only got 14 swinging strikes from the Jays, only whiffed four batters, and only two of them went down swinging, all very un-Vazquez-like. But Felix Heredia and Paul Quantrill, garnering three and five outs, respectively, on either side of an ineffective Padilla, were superb. Quantrill got an out for every four pitches he threw, Heredia’s number was 4.3 pitches. A valid comparison shows that Javy threw six pitches per out, and Hentgen more than eight. The game featured very professional work from the Yankee pen.

It was disturbing that Derek Jeter’s wrist injury was too severe for him to play, and that Torre sat Jason Giambi, who continues to struggle. Vazquez’s less than stellar outing while the rest of the rotation remains unsettled caused a bit of concern, but the out-of-town Scoreboard kept us up-to-date with what Miguel Tejada was doing to Pedro Martinez’s Wednesday night, and on balance the fans were OK with it.

Most promising for Yankee fans was the continued ferocity and success of Gary Sheffield’s relentless swing, the fact that the deeper wall in left in the Stadium affects him not at all, and that opposing pitchers continue to attest to this by hitting him with so many pitches. With a tip of my Yankee cap to Miguel Cairo’s 3-for-5 and the aforementioned blasts jumping off Jorge’s bat, I would give second (position player) star of the night to the struggling Bernie Williams. He stroked two rbi singles, the first opening the scoring where a 4-6-3 would have cost us the five-run second. The third-inning shot was hit harder, and he almost squeezed a third hit past Orlando Hudson at second in the sixth. But even more encouraging was the major-league play he made on defense in preventing Reed Johnson’s sixth-inning liner from splitting the gap.

Thirty-five years ago this day, Neil Armstrong took “one great step” as he came in contact with the moon’s surface. This night we had no view of the moon in the semi-overcast skies, but Gary Sheffield’s majestic three-run blast in the third inning got us all looking skyward at least.

BTW,TYW

YANKEE BASEBALL!!!