Bronx, N.Y., August 17, 2010 — If you agree that during Tuesday night’s pivotal game in Yankee Stadium, CC Sabathia’s in-game stats over seven innings of nine strike outs, 114 pitches, and an era and of 2.86 were good, consider this: The era for the last 113 pitches was 1.43.

Yankee fans who had suffered through 17 scoreless innings before the team managed one score in Monday’s ninth inning on a bases loaded walk were on edge from the beginning of the duel vs. the Tigers once one-time Yankee prospect Austin Jackson homered on CC’s first pitch. With fellow ace Justin Verlander going for Detroit, the fear going in was that the home team would not score at all, and here they were down 1-0 less than a minute in.

But if Sabathia’s first-pitch gofer ball to Jackson represented a bit of a wobble in his game, Verlander’s 35-pitch, two-run first seemed to denote a total collapse. The hard throwing righty was having all kinds of trouble with the strike zone as he walked three of the first six to face him and missed the zone with first pitches five of seven times. Getting a rare start at leadoff, Brett Gardner lofted a single to left, and Derek Jeter and Robbie Cano walked around a long fly ball, with Cano getting a free pass despite being down 0-2 in the count. Verlander proceeded to fall behind Nick Swisher 3-1 only to have the Yankee right fielder lash a hard two-run single over short on a get-me-over fastball.

Verlander escaped further damage on a 1-2-3 dp after one more walk, but the rejuvenated Curtis Granderson drilled Justin’s fourth pitch of the second inning deep to right for a 3-1 lead. And it was then that the much-anticipated pitchers’ duel settled in. Ramiro Pena followed with a single, but Verlander toughened, allowing just one more hit before leaving a still 3-1 game after the fifth inning having thrown 114 pitches, the same number CC would fire over seven. Verlander would retire 12 of 15 and strike out five. But he had a problem. The CC ship had been righted well before his.

Sabathia’s first inning troubles actually extended beyond the first pitch to Jackson, as Ramon Santiago and Johnny Damon followed with tracers to right center and left center, respectively, but Granderson ran them both down, routinely snatching the first, while making a full-body dive to snare ex-Yankee Damon’s extra base hit bid. Jorge Posada never stood behind the plate with four fingers in the air as CC walked Miguel Cabrera on four straight throws, but the free pass to Detroit’s biggest threat sure felt intentional. But when Sabathia snagged an 0-2 Jhonny Peralta liner to the box to close the first inning, all but one of his struggles for the evening were done too. The Yankee ace struck out two, then one, one again, and three over the next four frames, with the only glitch coming in the fourth when he issued two walks and threw 24 pitches. Peralta lofted a deep fly to center during the messy inning, but once Sabathia recovered from 3-0 to Brandon Inge to strike him out to end that inning, his quality start was virtually assured, as was his 16th win if the Yankee pen could perform as they have over the last few weeks.

Following the three-strike-out fifth, Damon did beat CC to the bag for an infield single in the sixth and Cabrera hit one deep to the wrong part of the park. And Inge extracted a little revenge with a homer to left in the seventh, but Yankee fans shaken to their core (again) by their vanishing offense over the last few days could breathe easy that at least their ace stood strong. Sabathia’s 71/43 strikes/balls ratio was very good even if the pitch count was elevated early; he threw 17 of 28 first-pitch strikes, and he used 11 Tigers swings and misses to notch the nine Ks, seven of them swinging. But the best thing, perhaps, about the way this mountain of a man goes about his business is that it is not just a brute strength proposition. Following a home run, two long line drives and three strike outs, he was savvy enough to record early ground ball outs on a 6-4-3 once catcher Melvin Laird singled in the third. By the time Inge reached him for the second tally in the seventh, CC had five ground ball outs, but he had enough left in the tank to close the Tigers out with his final two strike outs, finishing it by whiffing Jackson for the third time following his early-game bomb.

With Verlander gone the Yanks reached the Tigers’ bullpen for a Gardner double and then a Jeter rbi single in the sixth before the Inge home run, so Detroit never really got close. And a solo home run by Cano in the seventh followed by a Ramiro Pena sac fly created the 6-2 final score. David Robinson, fooling us all by not wearing the stirrups we are accustomed to seeing on him as he warmed in the pen, pitched the eighth and Mariano Rivera the ninth, with each allowing a harmless single.

Worthy of note is that the Yankees honored blind Yankee fan Jane Lang in the second day of Hope Week. She has attended hundreds of Yankee games the last few years by walking to and commuting via mass transit, a NJ Transit train and a midtown subway, and a band of Yankees accompanied her on that trek today. In addition to the Granderson heroics in center field Mark Teixeira at first had a couple of fine tries, but both came up short. In the sixth, he stopped a Damon hot shot and tossed to CC at first, but Damon beat the throw, and in the ninth his long dash and dive for Ryan Raburn’s pop foul had Mark crashing into the photographer’s box feet first, but the ball came loose. The running game worked well, with both Gardner and Jeter stealing bases. Nothing shocking there, of course, but Jorge Posada stole his second base in the last few weeks, for a highlight of much greater note.

I toyed with titles for this game report, originally leaning toward “Wizard of the Bronx” in honor of CC’s outing and that this is the 71st anniversary of the Wizard of Oz opening at Loew’s Capitol Theater in New York in 1939. “Better Than Best” was inspired by the news that it was on this day in 1962 that the Beatles replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. But Yankee ace CC Sabathia achieved a nice number today, and took over the AL lead in wins while doing so. Hoping that the first word in this phrase is as true for CC as it is for us fans, nothing beats,

Sweet Sixteen

BTW,TYW
YANKEE BASEBALL!!!