Baseball Notes

I was joking with Ryan about how this year the baseball tables have turned. Instead of the Yankees and Red Sox snatching up the marquee players at the non-waiver trade-deadline, the biggest "buyers" were the perennial sellers Kansas City Royals and Toronto Blue Jays.

Well, the Blue Jays aren't traditional sellers like the Royals and A's have been, seeing as how Toronto is a mega-market and the communication giant Rogers owns the team, but they do own the longest post-season drought in the majors. But it's not like they're the Cubbies; The last time the Jays were in the playoffs they were winning their second consecutive World Series (Joe Carter's walk-off game 7 homer?).

This season the best team in the American League are the Royals, last year's pennant-winning squad, and they got considerably better at the deadline. The Jays had one of the best offenses in the AL before going out and getting the best shortstop in the game in Troy Tulowitzki, but their pitching was still questionable...until they signed probably the best pitcher available in David Price. That signing may just amount to a rental, but this team has since won 6 of 7 and has pulled even in the race for one of the two wild card spots.

Now that there are two wild card positions, the calculus of deciding between being a buyer or a seller at the deadline has become even more confusing. It appears that one of the two wild card spots will be taken by whichever AL West team doesn't win the division (Astros or Angels), as both of those clubs are playing well.

The Yankees, my Yankees, were going to be the subject of a post back in March, a post that was going to eulogize what I thought would be a down year. Turns out that the AL East is quite mediocre, and the Yanks have a nice cushion in first place. My dad gave me a list of things necessary to go well for them to be playoff contenders, an idea I thought was so out of touch with reality that I wouldn't even dare mention it.

Turns out that I was the one out of touch with reality. This I knew, and the initial research for my March Yankee post had more of a "Who are these guys?" angle, which slowly lead to a eulogy. I didn't know any better. I did recognize that I was out of touch, mostly because of lack of time to read about sports in general combined with no cable and no baseball on regular broadcast television anymore. (Wasn't Saturday afternoon Fox's baseball broadcast? All I ever find on Fox on Saturday afternoon is "I Love Lucy", which is a fantastic show, but the episodes all seem to be from the end of the series after they move to Westchester, and those just don't hold the same appeal for me...)

So, my dad's list seems pretty good now:
1) A-Rod has to produce somewhat...capital CHECK;
2) McCann shakes off the early dust and produces all year like the end of last year...check;
3) Teixeira remembers he's a baseball player and not a garbageman (my paraphrasing)...capital CHECK;
4) They need just enough starting pitching, and Tanaka can't go down to a-blown-elbow-Tommy-John-surgery-inducing incident...check
5) They maintain their bullpen dominance, second last year to only the Royals...check.

There may have been more on the list, but those were the main points I remember. Both A-Rod and Teixeira are playing like it's 2009; McCann has played well all year; even Jacoby Ellsbury came back and is playing well. Even (weird-shape-headed) Brett Gardner made the All-Star game. The bullpen has been great; Tanaka managed to not snap that elbow (probably shouldn't even mention this for superstitions sake), but "Ol' Pine Tar" Pineda got hurt, which made it likely that the Yanks would go get a pitcher.

So...he got hurt a little late in the trade-market game, and the player the Tigers wanted for David Price is a young Dominican phenom, so the Yankees just decided to hold onto the kid, let the Jays waste a major prospect on Price, and insert this phenom into their rotation like he was a prize from a trade.

Luis Severino is his name and he pitched his first game yesterday. It was a pretty good showing for a first major league appearance: he pitched five solid innings against the Red Sox, no walks, 7 strikeouts, gave up a huge welcome-to-the-show solo homer to David Ortiz, and took the loss because the Red Sox pitcher was a knuckler who was on his game. The final was 2-1, the homer being the lone earned-run Severino gave up.

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I didn't really mean to ramble about baseball for this long; I just wanted a newer post to show up to supplant the "We like Roy!" post. I have a few other ideas of stuff to work on, and I need to hurry it up as summer winds down.