Bleacher Creature Feature

#16: The Barrytown Trilogy

9 June 2002

I'm, of course, talking about Nick Johnson.

Yeah, okay, I'm being silly, but lost amidst the Barry Bonds hugger-mugger is the fact that the Yankees were in yesterday's game until the ninth and won today's game solely due to the contributions of one Nicholas Johnson. True, his 315-foot homer wasn't as impressive as the one Bonds crushed into the upper-deck, but it counted for the same number of runs, and Johnson had a lot more success against the Giants' closer (a two-run double to deep center field that put the Yankees on top off Robb Nen on a 1-2 pitch) than Bonds did against the Yanks' (Mariano Rivera struck him out swinging).

Johnson's still adjusting to the bigs. Most of his stats improved in May over April -- except his OBP, which went down (in part because he was hit by a pitch a ridiculous six times in April). His game is improving, Joe Torre's been letting him play first base once or twice a week (something I expected would happen -- Torre's not one to let Jason Giambi's ego get in the way of what's good for the team, and Johnson's a better fielder than Giambi), and -- while he may not be the rookie of the year -- he's shaping into someone who will be an important part of the team for another ten years or so.

I'm not a huge fan of interleague play. I think it was a neat idea that pretty much only has novelty value for about a year outside of New York, Chicago, and the state of California. And the number of interleague games, especially with the unbalanced schedule, is way too high. It's not so much an issue of whether or not seeing the Yanks' annual "subway series" or seeing them play the Giants for the first time in 40 years is interesting -- that's a given. It's the Tigers/Phillies, Marlins/Twins, Expos/White Sox matchups that just don't have much by way of compelling drama.

But this weekend was still a great deal of fun. All three games were tough, hard-fought by both sides, and could have gone either way. A bad bounce here, a hit instead of a groundout there, and the Yanks could've swept -- or been swept.

The guys next to us were bitching about the fact that they didn't really pitch to Bonds much. He was intentionally walked three times -- the final time, Karsay tried pitching to him, fell behind 3-1, and then they decided to walk him. Still, I can't argue with the decision, especially since a toe injury had Jeff Kent out of the lineup and so Benito Santiago was batting fourth. I don't even know why Santiago's on a major-league roster, much less batting cleanup for a team that's in contention. (Then again, the Red Sox have Carlos Baerga batting fifth.) In any case, Santiago followed each intentional walk with an out, two of them inning enders (one of them a game-ender), so the strategy paid off. They probably would have pitched to him had he not come up in run-scoring situations in a one- or two-run game: runner on second, one out in the fifth with the Giants having just taken a 2-1 lead; runner on second, two outs in the seventh, same score; runner on first, two outs in the ninth, with the Yanks up 4-2.

The problem, ultimately, is that there's no good way to pitch to someone like Bonds right now. He's as good a hitter as have ever existed in the history of baseball. The way he's going, he may well be the second-best player ever. (He won't pass Babe Ruth, IMO, simply by dint of the fact that Ruth -- besides all his prodigious accomplishments as a hitter -- was also one of the dominant pitchers of the 1910s.)

We had another first-gamer in our area -- an adorable little girl who was at her first game with her parents and grandmother, and got a much better result than last week's first-gamer. Terri took a picture of the whole family for them with their disposable camera. It was cool.

On yesterday's Fox broadcast, Tim McCarver had a great line when Bonds came up to face Rivera: to wit, that both these players had never faced anyone this good in their careers.

This almost made up for the idiotic thing he said earlier.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I actually usually like McCarver. He can be a bit goofy, and pairing him up with Bobby Murcer (the world's most incompetent announcer) on Channel 5's Yankee broadcasts the last couple of years was actively painful, but the man knows baseball, even if he knows how much he knows it a little too often. One of my favorite McCarver moments was when he all but predicted Jim Leyritz's home run in Game 3 of the 1996 World Series when he saw that Mark Wohlers was depending on his breaking stuff rather than his fastball. "You can't get beat on your second-best pitch," he was saying, and that if he left one hanging, Leyritz was going to cream it. Two pitches later, Wohlers hung one and Leyritz creamed it. That was, most agree, the turning point of the Series for the Yanks.

In any case, on Saturday, McCarver said that Jason Giambi's high OBP actually hurt the team because he was so slow he "clogs up the bases."

Buh?

If he hits a single or a double, he's clogging up the bases just as much and still adding to his OBP. For that matter, hitting a home run adds to his OBP. What I think he was specifically deriding was Giambi's high walk count, since that's what his critique was relevant to -- but it's Giambi's good pitch selection that allows him to be the hitter he is. He sees a lot of pitches, he doesn't take a lot of bad ones, so he can wait on a good one to cream into the upper deck.

Or he'll draw a walk. Or he'll strike out. I know which of the two I would prefer.

NEXT: Mail Call

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