Bronx, N.Y., June 19, 2010 — Already stressed at being down 1-0 in the first, I was feeling pretty good about the Yankee start. With a team struggling offensively as mightily as the Yanks are, it seemed crucial that they get that run back as soon as possible, so when Mets starter Hisanori Takahashi missed with his first three pitches to leadoff hitter Derek Jeter in the bottom of the first, opportunity was knocking. Derek took one right down the middle, but pitch number five seemed clearly both low and outside. When veteran home plate ump Mike Reilly called it a strike, my early plan, and my night it turned out, was doomed.
I was right of course, though given the few times the home team actually mounted a threat as the game went on, it was hardly certain a leadoff walk would have resulted in a score. It was not hard to be miffed at Reilly several times later in this game, and the 1-0 deficit was thanks to his safe call on David Wright’s slide to the plate a half inning earlier. Nick Swisher’s throw got there first, but we in the new Yankee Stadium grandstand are often as at the mercy to umpires’ calls as players are. He looked out to me, it seemed doubtful that he touched the plate at all (he still may not have) and I know (don’t we all?) that umpires miss these calls sometimes. But he said it was 1-0, and so it was.
Yankee pitcher Javy Vazquez was simply great. Following the first-inning tally, Jeff Francoeur reached him for a two-out single in the second, and the next 11 Mets batters went down. Starting to tire in the sixth, he surrendered a couple of walks, then one in the seventh, but none of the last 18 Mets batters to face him got a hit. Mixing a low nineties fast ball with a mid-eighties change of pace and a bit slower curve, he held the visitors right where they were, waiting for the Yankee offense to give him a chance to win the game.
And aye, there was the rub, both for Javier and a host of fans like myself. As the righty silently went about his work, we did quite the opposite, bellowing, screaming, pleading with and beseeching the now-three-games-dormant offense to do something. The grandstand’s pretty far removed, but I have to believe Javy knows how hard we pulled for him. But it was not to be. Mark Teixeira got a hold of a Takahashi fastball with two down in the first, but he picked the wrong part of the ballpark and center fielder Angel Pagan ran it down. In retrospect it’s hard to believe that aside from Takahashi’s six-pitch fourth, the first was the only inning in which no home team baserunners reached.
Nothing came of two-out singles in the second and third, nor Jorge Posada’s leadoff walk in the fifth. The “Bombers” actually loaded the bases in the sixth, the third time in 27 innings the team has managed two hits in an inning, but Posada bounced out to third. It will seem ungracious, and perhaps it is, not to give Takahashi more credit for what befell the team yet again, but following dominating performances against the Yanks by Jamie Moyer and Kyle Kendrick, a pony league pitcher might have shut the Yanks down one begins to think, the explosion against Doc Halladay on Tuesday notwithstanding.
Every team deals with the good and bad nights of umpires, the team is certainly flat, and it’s not likely they’ll start scoring (and winning) again until they start hitting. And picking on Reilly as a fan of the World Champions may be as ungracious as underestimating Takahashi’s outing, but the veteran home plate umpire and crew chief’s performance would affect this game yet again. It was only a minor annoyance (to me, Jorge looked genuinely steamed) when he [briefly] punched out Posada on what was only strike two in the fifth. He made good on the call, but seemed unapologetic about the mistake (after all, there were almost 50,000 witnesses, not counting broadcast outlets) when doing so.
But following the sixth-inning failure the Yanks threatened right away in the seventh, when Francisco Cervelli took the first pitch from righty Elmer Dessens, in for Takahashi, and doubled past third. Phillies Manager Charlie Manuel appeared to outthink Joe Girardi in Thursday’s loss when he had a player swing away against a Yankee wheel play for an rbi single. But Mets manager Jerry Manuel looked unprepared when Girardi summoned lefty-hitting outfielder Curtis Granderson to pinch hit for young Chad Huffman in this key spot. As a lefty jumped up in the Mets pen, Manuel did the expected, sending out his pitching coach to talk to Dessens to play for time. But once the visit ended and then Manuel emerged for the second visit that ended Dessens’s outing by rulebook, Reilly lingered behind the plate while Manuel strolled slowly to the mound and lefty Pedro Feliciano got six or seven more pitches in the pen than he should have.
Manuel’s move, though belated, was the right one, and Feliciano struck Granderson out. Brett Gardner moved Cisco to third with a bouncer to first, but Jeter hit right back to the box and the opportunity to tie, and get the deserving Vazquez off the hook, was done. On Thursday Andy Pettitte threw 108 pitches over seven innings, allowed two earned runs and took the loss. This time it was Vazquez, who threw the same amount of pitches (the scoreboard had 109), gave up three hits and just the one run through seven. It was Vazquez’s 400th career appearance (his 397th start) and probably the least earned of his 145 losses (against 148 wins).
Following Thursday’s pattern, the bullpen took a close game and made it worse, with Chan-Ho Park allowing two runs in the eighth and Boone Logan one in the ninth. And this time like the 6-3 loss to the Phils on Wednesday, the Yanks unexpectedly actually brought the tying run up in the bottom of the ninth. Granderson and Cervelli singles against Raul Valdes got it started, and Gardner worked a dandy 12-pitch walk off Francisco Rodriguez, but it was not to be. Jeter failed again, striking out on three pitches, and Swisher fouled out past third, just as he had done at the critical moment in the sixth in last night’s game, for a 4-0 loss this time. But although the belated rally failed to tally even one run (they’ve scored four runs over three games) at least it got me back rooting for, and writing about, baseball rather than Mike Reilly’s bad night behind the plate.
Back on this day in 1916, a Yankee team yet to reap any of its 27 championships scored in every inning but the eighth in blasting the Indians 19-3. But the following year, Yankee hurler Ray Fisher allowed a first-inning run in the Polo Grounds to the Browns and lost 1-0 because his team failed to score in any inning, just as happened tonight. Last night Andy Pettitte’s one good moment was when he moved ahead of Ron Guidry’s career Yankee strike out mark on the same day Gator struck out 18 back in 1978. Well, this night marked an anniversary from the 1977 team, but not a good one, as it was the day that Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson almost came to blows in the dugout on national TV when Billy removed his right fielder for nonchalant play in a loss to the Red Sox.
This day also marks the anniversary of what would have been the 198th birthday of Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov. In Oblomov, his most famous book, his dysfunctional title character is so hopeless that while quibbling about what to do on the day on which the story opens he spends the first 150 pages lying in bed.
Sounds painfully like the recent offense of a certain baseball team.
YANKEE BASEBALL!!!