Bleacher Creature Feature

#42: Meet the Mets, Sweep the Mets

30 June 2003

The Yankees managed to accomplish three sweeps in one weekend: sweeping the two-stadium day-night double-header on Saturday, sweeping the weekend series, and sweeping the season series.

The game looked on the face of it like a pitcher's duel where each starter's performance was marred by one bad inning, but that is misleading. After giving up a three-run homer to Jeromy Burnitz in the first, Jeff Weaver -- miracle of miracles -- settled down. He only allowed two baserunners in the 6.1 innings after the homer -- and after Terri and the woman who sits behind us started shouting "Weaver sucks!" at the top of their lungs -- and one of those was wiped out in a double play. Part of that was a stretch of 14 straight batters retired in a row. Obviously, hearing two women in the bleachers shout that he sucks embarrassed him sufficiently to bear down. That's our story and we're sticking to it. Really.

In the end, Weaver only threw 94 pitches in his seven innings of work. Chris Hammond and Mariano Rivera then shut the Mets down in the eighth and ninth -- Hammond was actually the more impressive, striking out the side on ten pitches after giving up a leadoff single to Vance Wilson.

Al Leiter, on the other hand, had nothing. Besides three home runs in one inning to Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, and Jorge Posada, he gave up seven hits, six walks, and hit a batter, while only striking out three. That's the second day in a row when a pitcher who was supposed to be one of the Mets' bright spots -- the other being Glavine's meltdown Saturday night -- turned in a crappy performance, which is pretty much par for the Mets' course the last couple of years.

The Yankees never went down 1-2-3; the Mets only didn't go down 1-2-3 in the first, seventh, and eighth.

Conveniently, the Yanks' final game against the Mets was also their 81st. They stand at 51-30 at the halfway mark, riding a seven-game winning streak, and with a 3.5-game lead on the Red Sox. They've been on fire for the last couple of weeks, winning fifteen of their last seventeen, and they've been doing it without two of their most productive hitters in Bernie Williams and Nick Johnson, who should be back somewhere in the vicinity of the All-Star Break. Thanks to a bizarre quirk of scheduling, they have all 19 of their games against the 35-44 Baltimore Orioles in the second half (starting Monday night), which means approximately 25% of their remaining games are against one of the patsies of the division, and a team they have historically owned.

The Yankees are in a strong position, and they have two great hitters coming back soon. This is good, as they still have the sucking chest wound that is their middle relief, and Joe Torre insists on giving at-bats to out-tastic wonders like Raul Mondesi (who's back to hitting like Raul Mondesi again), Todd Zeile, and Enrique Wilson -- all of whom were in the lineup Sunday night, and went a combined 1-10 (and that one was a gift from the official scorer, who did not give an error on a bobbled play) with two walks, one of which was wiped out by a double play. Of the eight batters who came up in the five-run third, these three provided the outs. It's bad enough having these guys around, but to put them all in the lineup on the same day, and then compound it by batting Mondesi cleanup? As an eighth-place hitter, Mondesi is vaguely useful. As a cleanup hitter, he's a rally-killer.

As long as bizarro decisions like that keep getting made, the Yanks desperately need Matsui, Alfonso Soriano, and Derek Jeter to stay on track, Giambi and Posada to continue to be Giambi and Posada, and Bernie and Nicky to pick up where they left off.

Then there's the pitching. Brandon Claussen's magnificent outing against the Mets makes it harder to justify sending him back down to Columbus -- at the very least, they should be tempted to put him against a good team and see how he performs. One strong outing does not mean much in and of itself, but Claussen's domination of the Mets continues a trend from his performance with the Clippers, where Weaver's domination of the Mets is (so far) an aberration from an absymal season. Plus, which José Contreras will we get when he comes off the DL? What happens when Contrearas and Antonio Osuna are activated -- will the Yankees finally recognize that Sterling Hitchcock is a sunk cost and release him? Bad enough they lost Jason Anderson for ten days to make room for Claussen (the alternative was to designate the option-less Al Reyes for assignment and risk losing him -- and there is no greater commentary on the sad state of the Yankee bullpen than the fact that losing Reyes can be quantified as a risk), but the dead weight of Hitchcock and his trade-proof contract will continue to be an albatross on this team's neck unless they dump him.

July will be critical. The use of the pitching staff, the ability of the offense to score runs, if Nicky and Bernie come back -- and, most important of all, how the Yankees perform in the twelve games against the two teams breathing down their necks, the Red Sox and the Blue Jays, who do not look like they're going to go quietly into that good night. This is an opportunity for the Yanks to put the East away.

Or make a pennant race of it. We shall see.....

By the way, Burnitz's homer was literally three rows in front of us -- the closest a homer has come to our seats in the two years we've been in the bleachers (the previous record-holder being Matsui's opening-day grand slam). However, as it was hit by a Met, the gentleman who caught it wisely threw it back (though he agonized over the decision for a few minutes).

One thing I learned during the period between BCFs #40 and 41 was that Sheriff Tom has procreated! He is the proud father of an adorable baby, and I wanted to officially put my congrats to him in writing. (And I'm glad I was able to put that ex-coworker in touch with him -- that seems to have worked out nicely for Tom.)

Anybody who thinks that the intensity "wasn't there" this time for the subway series wasn't paying attention to the bleachers. Sections 37-41 were louder than ever, with Roger Cedeno being especially verbally pelted in right field, and you only see this level of glee when the Yanks beat the Red Sox. Hell, the only regular-season games with this level of crowd intensity are Boston games, and that rivalry has more history than the Mets do as a team...

And how can you say there's "no intensity" when you get the biggest crowd of the season for a Sunday night game?

How 'bout that Hideki Matsui? I'm thinking he's a leading candidate for AL Player of the Month for June, given his line for the month, going into Sunday's game:

That, to coin a phrase, doesn't suck.

The question of course is which is the real Godzilla, the one who hit all of three homers and had a sub-.700 OPS for April and May or the one with the 1.197 OPS in June, with twice as many homers? The spectre of small sample sizes rears its ugly head here, but that's all we have to go on right now. How-some-ever, I'm willing to bet in favor of June, and chalking up his weak beginning to adjusting to the new league.

Friday night, in a game with a score better suited to a contest between the Patriots and the Buccaneers than the Red Sox and the Marlins, Boston beat Florida 25-8. The game was ugly in many ways -- the Red Sox scored ten runs before the first out was recorded, Kevin Olsen was beaned by a line drive that resulted in a hospital trip, the benches cleared twice -- but that's not the thing that irritated me.

In a postgame interview, Jack McKeon had the cojones to complain because the Red Sox were continuing to make the effort to score runs late in the game. He accused the Sox of showing up the Marlins, and actually used the words, "Show some consideration for the other team."

What is this, little league? This is professional baseball. A baseball player's job is to do whatever is necessary within the rules to get runs for the team so they have the best chance of winning. Period. The only "consideration" that should be shown is to stay within the rules. Leaving aside the fact that the Red Sox bullpen is sufficiently dire this year that even a seventeen-run lead may not feel 100% safe, to actually ask that a group of people paid to play baseball not play their hardest is churlish at best and appalling at worst.

NEXT: "New York on Sunday"

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