9-4-13

Tuesday’s Game

Wells made a series of good base running plays That allowed him to score a run on a great double steal.  The first was by running hard out of the box on a bloop hit he allowed himself to be in a position to get to 2^nd on the bobbled ball.  He ran hard around first, then paused momentarily before he saw the kicked ball and then took off toward 2^nd and made it safely.  If he jogs out of the box he can’t do that or would try and be thrown out (the way Soriano did a few weeks ago).  Then on a ball his to 3^rd, he slightly shielded the fielder from getting a clean play on the ball resulting in an error.  He finally scored a run by timing his leave on the double steal perfectly! 

This game was a classic example of how important it is to work the count all game long and why I am always bringing up the guys who swing so early in the count consistently and help the pitcher as well swinging at balls.  ARod has been a classic example since he came back into the lineup as someone seeing a lot of pitches and making the pitcher work.  On Tuesday ARod saw 22 pitches by himself and as a comp Jeter and Cano each saw 11.  mark Reynolds who had a bad day at the plate at least saw 20 pitches.  This was critical because we were able to get Sale out of the game just in time to do damage on the bullpen.  I don’t think people realize the importance of this as getting to the weaker middle relief or just getting a really good starter out is a huge part of the game.  It is not a coincidence we put up 4 hits against only 2 outs when Sale was taken out of the 8^th inning (and scored 5 runs).  Rivera had good movement and control in closing the game out for his league record tying 9^th 40^th save season (tied with Hoffman who is the only player even in a discussion about the top closer ever).

Wednesday’s Game

I thought CC looked bad all game.  After 7 innings, we were up 6-1, I said to my brother CC is lucky he is facing a team not swinging the bats well because he couldn’t hit any spots, had very little command and his stuff was weak.  He was very lucky to only have allowed one run in 7 innings and Girardi made the mistake of even letting him start the 8^th.  Two righties were leading off the inning and he should have either let a righty out of the pen start against them or turned it right to Robertson at that point.  A manager needs to see what is really going on and CC’s over results were good, but he was anything but sharp as he had walked 4 batters, he was throwing 91 almost all night, his curve was loopy and none of his pitches were controlled well.  If Chicago didn’t swing at a ton of balls, CC would have been knocked out.  CC was at 100 pitches and should have been out of the game!  As it turned out, it was almost disastrous, because Robertson was bad allowing 4 straight batters to get on…but all was saved because of the Genius Maker…who not only saved the game but saved Girardi from a lot of 2^nd guessing…and thus earned his name The Genius Maker tonight with his first 4 out save since 2011.   This was a very tough save as well.  The batter he struck out to end the 8^th inning was one of the best pitches you will ever see.  3-2 count after throwing mostly inside and he paints the outer lower corner for a perfect strike.  It was so good that his cutter caught the back corner of the plate just barely skimming it from the OHD view.  Usually slightly off the plate they give that call so this was without question a strike as it was at the knee caps.  Vintage Mo!

BTW, I don’t give much hope Mo will return next year.  I think he wants to go out pitching well and the season was already a success for him so I think he goes out the best ever and doesn’t tarnish anything.

Tampa won and Oakland won so we didn’t pick up any ground, although because Oakland won, Texas is now tied with them and they are only a half game up on Tampa so it is possible one of them could be caught as well.  Boston scored 20 runs last night so hopefully they used up their runs…although it usually doesn’t work that way.

I have the wild card standing on the right side of this sheet.  I view our schedule like this:
Take 4 of 7 from Boston
Take 3 of 4 from Baltimore
Take 7 of 9 from Toronto (3- Batista is out), Houston (3) and SF (3)
Take 2 of 3 from Tampa (critical)
This gives us 16 wins and 7 losses in the remaining games and gives us 91 wins.  I think this gets us in.  of course it depends on what the others do, but if we do the above the only way we won't win is if Tampa plays really well outside of our games and both Texas and Oakland both need to play pretty well.  Again, if we do the above we have an excellent chance.  Then again, doing the above is clearly less likely than likely, but at least we have something to root for.  Based on how our pitching is going lately I am not confident we can do the above, however, other teams are not that strong either...