Saturday, April 5, 2014

I watched game 5 and I thought Pineda looked pretty good.  His slider was clearly very good and his fastball was a consistent 93, but my hope is that fastball becomes a consistent 94+.  I liked that he is not walking many batters.

One item I wanted to discuss in the earlier games was when McCann got hit on a foul tip off his hand. I have had an issue about this for some time and after Cervelli went out last year (much after I already complained about a bunch of times) you would think the Yanks would be all over this?  Well McCann still was leaving his hand out in the open in that game.  However, since then he seems to be hiding it a lot more and that is a good thing.  It will not impact anything as you can take the hand out if you need to if a guy is running or even take chances in times like that, but with nobody on you surely can hide your bare hand...Hopefully we will see all the catchers do this.

In the 3rd inning there was a play at the plate and Cervelli was called out when the catcher was blocking home plate without the ball. As it turned out the umps reviewed the play and upheld the call.  Kay thinks it will be a big issue but I think it is the right thing that they are trying to do.  Of course, being an ex catcher I have a bias, but I never understood how a runner could just plow a catcher over even if the catcher was giving him the plate.  I once got hit by a linebacker running full speed and he came up with forearm to my lip and I literally went flying a good 5 feet (explains a lot).  They also were saying the catcher had to go get the ball and that is why he drifted to block the plate.  I do not agree with that at all, he didn't have to drift, he did what catchers always had done which was position himself to catch the ball and block the plate.  He could have just drifted over in front of the plate instead of drifting back and over to block the plate?  I have no idea how Kay harped on the wrong thing?  Of course, the other part that Singleton did mention was that I thought Cervelli was simply touching the plate before he was tagged and I don't know hwy Girardi didn't challenge that as he was safe.

the Yankees offense was just baffled by the knuckle baller today.  I skimmed a lot of the AB's so I do not have enough opinion on the hitting strategy today, but it clearly didn't work.  Without Tex the lineup is toothless.  They will need to win with pitching because their IF defense is not strong.  In fact, the first AB of the game Melky grounded a routine ball to Jeter who stayed back on the ball and then didn't have the arm strength to throw Melky out and bounced the throw and Melky just barely beat it out.  It was a terrible play by Jeter and I don't know how Melky got a hit when the fielder stayed back on the ball and then threw in the dirt even though it was picked.  It was an error and a play that should be made at least 90% of the time.

BTW, look at the previous blog regarding the first 4 games

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