Bleacher Creature Feature

#8: Rainy Monday Musings

22 April 2002

---Clemens showed yesterday why he's Roger Clemens and other people, well, aren't. He didn't look so hot on the face of it. He kept getting behind in the count and kept missing with pitches -- much less in command than he was two weeks ago against the Deviled Eggs. And yet, look at his line:

7.2 IP, 3 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 3 BB, 8 K, 107 PT

Take out the eighth inning, and the line looks like this:

7 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 3 BB, 8 K, 88 PT

Pretty damn good for someone who didn't appear to have his best stuff, huh?

---Everyone's talking about Alfonso Soriano, so I'll only add that I saw him exactly one year ago in a game against Boston in which he looked dreadful, pretty much swinging at anything that would move, and making me wish they'd trade him and call up D'Angelo Jiminez instead.

Well, it's a year later, Soriano is getting more selective (though he's not there yet -- he's only walked twice; on the other hand, at this time last year, he hadn't walked at all) and he's hitting a ton: .395/.404/.663. I doubt he's going to keep up this monster pace all year, but if he can keep the OBP in the high .300s and the SLG around .600 or so, he will be a force to be reckoned with. The way he's hitting, I suspect that keeping the OBP that high will be difficult, but the SLG may even be higher....

---That game we were at one year ago was against Boston, and it was Ted Lilly's pitching debut, against Tomo Okha. Lilly pitched magnificently, though he didn't get the win (the Yanks won that one on a David Justice homer in the bottom of the ninth). Lilly is now Andy Pettitte's sub until Andy's off the DL. Here's his pitching line for Saturday's no-decision against the Jays:

6.2 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 1 BB, 9 K, 94 PT

And this guy can't even crack the rotation.....

---Lost in the Soriano/Clemens hugger-mugger was Mike Stanton's unbelievable performance. He threw all of thirteen pitches in his 1.2 innings of work, and the first six were strikes, nailing Carlos Delgado to end the eighth and Chris Woodward to start the ninth. After that, he got Darrin Fletcher on a weak groundout to first and ended the game by inducing Vernon Wells to ground a 1-1 pitch to Derek Jeter.

---Many were predicting Toronto to be a potential factor in the AL East race, but that ain't gonna happen with this pitching. Chris Carpenter only pitched three innings, and they were brutal; Buck Martinez then went through five more pitchers before the day was done.

The first inning was as ugly as one can imagine. First Soriano hit the second pitch he saw over the left-centerfield wall for an early 1-0 lead, then Carpenter took all of thirteen pitches to load the bases -- but for one strike to Jeter, it would've been three straight four-pitch walks to Bernie Williams, Jeter, and Jason Giambi. Then, after Jorge Posada knocked another run in with a double-play grounder, Robin Ventura also walked on four pitches, and Carpenter went to 3-1 on Rondell White before Rondell hit into a fielder's choice to end it.

The combined line for Toronto:

8 IP, 10 H, 9 R, 9 ER, 12 BB, 4 K, 190 PT

---Also missed in the post-mortems of this game were all the blown opportunities on the part of the Yankees. Yeah, they won by seven runs, but this could've been much more of a laugher. After all, when the opposing pitcher walks four guys in one inning on seventeen pitches, you should be able to squeeze more than one run out of it.

Second inning, Jeter's up with first and second and one out, and he strikes out, then Giambi flies out to center.

Seventh inning, Posada leads off with a double, Ventura walks, and White moves the runners over on a ground out. With left-hander Pedro Borbon pitching, Shane Spencer pinch hits for John VanderWal, and is intentionally walked. Bases loaded, one out -- and the Yankees don't score. Nick Johnson and Soriano both fly out (Johnson's flyout was too shallow to score the not-very-fleet-of-foot Posada).

In total, the Yankees left twelve on base.

---Bernie Williams had a single, two walks, a sacrifice fly, two runs scored, and two RBI. Since coming back to the lineup on Friday (when he's been batting second, interestingly enough), he is 4-10 with three walks, one homer, three runs scored, and five RBI. He's raised his BA 37 points, his OBP 28 points, and his SLG 83 points.

I'm thinking those cortisone shots worked....

---Giambi is showing the selectivity for which he is known. He worked a walk in the first, got a 3-2 count before flying out to deep center in the second, worked a 2-2 count (plus three two-strike fouls) before flying out to deep center again in the fifth, and belted a 2-2 pitch into the right-field stands for his fourth home run in the eighth. The only poor at-bat came when he weakly fouled out to third on an 0-1 pitch to end the sixth.

---Pretty much all of the Jays' offense against Clemens came from Shannon Stewart and Felipe Lopez. Stewart had the lone hit through the first seven, a single to lead off the third, he was robbed of another single by a spectacular play by Soriano in the sixth, and then got an RBI double to chase Clemens to the showers in the eighth. Lopez walked in the third and lead off the eighth with a double.

---Two guys came into the bleachers at the fifth inning. We hadn't seen them before, and one bitched at the other, "We came all the way down here to watch four innings?" Apparently, the tickets became available at the last minute. In addition, these two were not informed until after arrival that beer is not sold in the bleachers. They proceeded to complain at great length on this particular subject.

Needless to say, nobody really sympathized with them.....

---During the Jays' batting practice, Carlos Delgado was shagging flies in right field, and there was a good-natured competition going on among the people along the right field foul territory wall, the right field fair territory wall, and the right-field bleachers as to who would get the balls he'd catch. He tended to favor the box seaters -- probably because he knew that his teammate Raul Mondesi would be verbally abused, as all opposing right-fielders are, by the Bleacher Creatures, and indeed he was. A wolf-like howl of "Ra-u-u-u-u-u-u-ul" was the most popular chant, though plenty of other epithets with the maturity one would expect from third-graders were hurled as well, as is customary.

NEXT: Just Say No to YES

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