Baltimore pitching has really helped the slugging % go up for the Yankees. Last night had a lot of poor pitches that were taken advantage of.
Some notes about the 7-5 victory!
- The Yankees have hit 25 HR's in the 6 games at Camden Yards this year. Think about that.
- The Yankees have hit at least 3 HR's in 6 consecutive games at Camden Yards; that is a record by any team at any ball park in history
- Torres has 10 HR's and Sanchez has 9 against the O's, only once have teammates had 10 HR's each off of a common opponent in the same year. The only ones to do it are some guys you may have heard of; Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
- While on Torres, the cool thing was that he hit a fastball away, he hit breaking balls out to CF and pulled homers as well. Now he needs to tighten up his defense a little bit as he has been a little shaky.
- The Yankees were winning 6-1 when an overthrow went into RF. Frazier picked up the ball in shallow RF down the line and with just a decent throw the Baltimore runner would have been thrown out at home. Two things: 1) What was Baltimore doing sending that guy down 6-1? 2) Frazier made a poor throw, way off line. His accuracy of throwing has not been good.
- DJ Lemahieu played 3rd base and continued his excellent defense there. He made a nice play on a ball down the line where he snagged a ball almost behind him and then got the force at 2nd. Later he dived to his left to make another play. Combined with his .833 OPS and all of our injuries, he has been a great pickup. I am nit picking here, but his .833 OPS is a little low for a guy with a .329 batting avg; he hasn't hit for much power (10 doubles and 4 HR's) and has only walked 12 times. Contrasting, Luke Voit has an OPS of .858 with a batting avg of .259 because he has walked 28 times and has only 6 doubles, but 11 HR's in similar AB's. This is why I use OPS as it gives a very good indication of total offensive value. There are areas that it doesn't take into account such as SB's/CS, speed in taking the extra base and even total pitches taken which can wear out an opposing pitcher, but it is far better than batting avg or even OBP by itself.
- CC didn't pitch as bad as his stat line showed. His change was excellent early on and then he lost the touch of the pitch and started to get hit. One of the big hits off of him was a slider very low in the strike zone that the hitter deposited on a nice swing...hard to get too mad when a pitch is clearly a ball and a guy hits a HR on it.
- Speaking of balls, the ump was awful yesterday. Very inconsistent and made some terrible calls that impacted AB's on both sides a lot. In general, I thought we got the short end of the stick more than the O's did.
- Gardner played CF and charged hard on a single up the middle and made an excellent throw home to nail a runner. Live, well my live, DVR'd, I thought Sanchez might have blocked the plate and the Orioles challenged but the call was upheld. It was close, but the ball beat him so I think they correctly upheld the call.
- Chapman did not look good in getting the save. His control of his fastball was very poor and his velocity started out at 96, 95 and even 93. Then he was about 96 and 97 but with a lot of balls. Sanchez finally started to call for a few sliders and that was good because Chapman threw 21 pitches, 17 fastballs and 4 slider. The 4 sliders were all strikes and he threw 8 fastballs for strikes and 9 for balls. He did finish throwing 100 MPH so maybe he just needs to warm up more. He has the stuff to struggle and still get the job done, but he can be shaky. He is 13 of 14 in save situations.
Let's hope we can sweep this afternoon!
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