Bronx, N.Y., August 30, 2010 — There have been a few things that have happened on August 30 over the years that have taken some time. But it’s hard to imagine any of them dragged on longer than the first inning of the A’s/Yankees game in the Stadium Monday night. The German siege of Leningrad in 1941 started this day, and must have taken longer, even if that seemed hard to believe as Trevor Cahill struggled to record even a second out in the bottom half. Given a trusty time machine, I can believe that the aged Casey Stengel may have retired on this day in 1965 because he saw this inning coming. Who knows? Maybe Cleopatra, who surrendered herself to the asp’s bite this day 2,040 years ago, got wind she’d be sitting in the moat as Cahill’s 2-0 fastball to Jorge Posada missed for a 3-0 count.

I know it’s the stretch run, and any Yankee victory now when the games count so much has to be a thing of beauty, but this was a hard game to like. And that’s not easy to say, when you consider the kind of offensive show the middle of the Yankee lineup put together. Batters three through seven in Joe Girardi’s lineup not only accounted for three home runs, they scored 10 times and knocked in 10 runs in the Yankee 11-5 victory. Mark Teixeira, Robbie Cano, and Nick Swisher collected nine hits, seven runs, and seven rbi’s from the three-four-five spots.

It didn’t start out that pretty, however. Righty Dustin Moseley didn’t appear to have much that was likely to fool the bats of even the offense-challenged A’s. Fifteen pitches in, featuring 88-mph heat, he loaded the bases on two singles and a walk. A sac fly put him down a run, and a called third strike had him a pitch from escaping down 1-0, but he couldn’t come up with that pitch before allowing an eight-pitch walk to Mark Ellis, and then a two-run single off the bat of left fielder Jeff Larish. Moseley finally escaped when Rajai Davis bounced out to a hustling Teixeira, but it took him 22 minutes to navigate one of the lower-scoring lineups in the league.

Oakland looked to be in good shape behind staff ace Cahill, but that wasn’t to be. A leadoff walk got him into immediate trouble, and singles by Swisher and Cano one out later had the Yanks on the board. Had veteran second sacker Mark Ellis been able to corral Cano’s hot shot things could have been different, but the ball caromed off his glove, and Derek Jeter scored the first Yankee run. Swisher worked the count to 3-2, as he so often does, then drilled a hard liner to dead center for a double that tied the score at 3-3. The ensuing 3-0 count to Posada pushed the inning past 40 minutes, and even though one pitch later Jorge’s soft liner to short left became a double play to short that closed the frame, the two starting pitchers had surrendered six hits, three walks and six runs between them.

The game normalized somewhat, with Cahill retiring five straight, and Moseley three. And a strike-’em-out, throw-’em-out dp got Dustin through the third despite a leadoff Kurt Suzuki single. Cahill got two quick outs in the third himself, but back-to-back home runs to the short seats in right by Teixeira and Cano got him into trouble he would not escape. Larish closed the score to 5-4 with a bomb off Mosely in the top of the fourth, but singles by Posada and Ramiro Pena delivered the only Yankee run that wasn’t driven in by the middle of the order. A Teixeira double and Cano single leading off the fifth drove Cahill from the mound, but the Yanks were far from done. A Swisher double, Posada hit by pitch and Marcus Thames bomb to left off young righty Henry Rodriguez gave the home team a five-run frame, an 11-4 lead, and virtually the win.

Moseley, however, did not benefit from the big inning, because he did not survive the top half. Girardi removed Dustin once he allowed back-to-back walks in the top of the fifth, bringing in Javy Vazquez to replace him. With the Yankee big lead on the one hand, and an effective Vazquez on the other, the game finally picked up some momentum, amazingly ending with an 11-5 Yankee win that ran just nine minutes over three hours. Moseley used 78 pitches to strike out four and coax six grounders early; Vazquez topped him in both categories, with seven groundouts and six whiffs. Javy actually had a string of 346 straight games coming in where he had struck out at least one batter since 2000, and he continued the streak this night. The game stretched him out real well, he allowed just three baserunners and one run, and collected the win for his trouble.

Before the interminable first inning the Yankees hosted the young players from the Kaiserslautern Military Community all-stars, children of Yankee servicemen in Europe who appeared in the recently concluded Little League World Series as region champions. All the players enjoyed the moment of their lives as they took the field for the National Anthem side by side with the Yankee starting nine. If they made it through the seeming everlasting first inning, they got to see a big Yankee win as well. The struggling at the plate Derek Jeter made a terrific play to peg out Kevin Kouzmanoff on a ball into the shortstop hole to close the top of the fifth, then the Yankees crushed the A’s with their five-run attack.

And finally in a column where we’ve hosted Cleopatra, Casey Stengel and the WW II German army, we also celebrate what would have been the 213th birthday of Gothic novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Although married to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary made a name for herself with the novel Frankenstein, a tale about “the monster,” Dr. Frankenstein’s deadly creation. The Yankees have a phenomenon not unlike that themselves in “Monster” Marcus Thames, who has been running roughshod over both lefthanded and righthanded American League pitching with a streak of home runs over the last two weeks.

He couldn’t have picked a better time.

BTW,TYW
YANKEE BASEBALL!!!