The Genius Maker #42

So far we are 6-2 in this stretch of games where I want to win 11 of 16 (at the least).

We are now just finished with the 3rd inning of the year (or a 1/3 through the year so I will give an update on that tomorrow.

It is a shame that Burnett didn’t have good command over his fastball as his curve was dynamite today. It was one of those many games with Burnett, who has a great fastball and a great curveball, where he makes too many mistakes and doesn’t pitch as well as you hope. For the year Burnett is about where you would like him to be (6-3 with an ERA of 3.72), but when you see the “stuff,” you want more. Last game I saw a lot of sink to his fastball, actually as much as I have ever seen, but last night he didn’t have the sink and centered far too many fastballs. Like I said, his curve was outstanding and almost all if not all damage was done on his fastball.

I thought Cecil pitched extremely well for Toronto. He had great movement on all his pitches and mixed them up well. They were not able to lay off the many balls that he threw and that was their undoing (as well as poor hitting with men on base). But, give him credit; this was better pitching and not poor hitting.

A couple of other notes:

Some people have asked me about the lineup and whether Swisher should bat 2nd or Granderson (against righties). Not to cop out, but I don’t think it makes a big difference. My main concern is splitting up the righty/lefties, especially when you are dealing with Granderson who can be neutralized with a specialist. I think in general the key move we want to make sure in our lineup is that when the opposing manager wants to bring in a lefty to face Granderson, he only faces one batter or we make him pay with righties. In other words, having Jeter in front with Tex and ARod behind is a good think for protection and I would have Cervelli bat 9th if I were going to do that because both Jeter and Cervelli hit lefties much better (which BTW, was the reason I would have played Cervelli last night and rested him against a righty because Cervelli has an OPS of .914 against a lefty and .649 against a righty)

On a positive note Mitre has done pretty well for us only allowing a base runner per 9 innings and an OPS of only .582 against (.186 batting average); this has gone unnoticed.

I know Miranda was sent down for Posada, I thought this was an interesting stats; Miranda has an OPS of .955 at Yankee stadium and a .204 OPS on the road.

As for the question about the Detroit “perfect game, “ I don’t think it should be overturned, but it could be added into the record books with an asterisk stating the it was not a perfect game, but it could have been. Of course, this leads us to the instant replay dilemma. My take is IR has been bad in football and without getting into a very long discussion on it, my feeling is based on football being such a game of momentum with a clock that IR disrupts the flow of the game and doesn’t address the most important calls of the game which are the subjective calls such as interference, holding, etc…In baseball, I think IR would work better because you don’t have a clock and a play could be reviewed very quickly if needed. Of course, the ump behind home plate has more impact on the game than all the other umpires combined on the bases 9as they are usually pretty good), but I do see IR having a place in baseball and it should be done with a 5th umpire sitting by a monitor and either correcting calls or using a challenge method. One day we may even go to the “questec” strike zone.