Bleacher Creature Feature

#54: 'Tween Series

7 October 2003

Lost in all the hullaballoo about The Collision between Damian Jackson and Johnny Damon (and if you ask me, Fox could've shown it at least 436 more times, and yes that was sarcasm) was the fact that, again, the A's managed to blow keeping the inning alive by Jermaine Dye stupidly trying to take second. It was not the first base-running blunder the A's made in the series, and it was these boneheaded running mistakes -- not any lack of character, or vague undefinable ability to get things done -- that kept the green-and-gold from making a trip to New York instead of packing their bags for home. Even with that, the A's came damn close to winning this series. The Red Sox won on late-inning heroics, A's blunders, and a lot of luck.

As for the rest of this week, I like the Yankees' chances for a lot of reasons. The most obvious is the pitching. The Yankees have five great-to-very-very-good pitchers at the top of their game. The Red Sox have one great pitcher at the top of his game, and a whole lot of question marks. John Burkett and Tim Wakefield do not strike terror in the hearts of ballplayers, and the Boston bullpen is so reliable that twice Grady Little needed to go to his #2 starter to bail them out. The A's were one long fly ball away from eliminating Pedro's lead in Game 5, and only two amazing two-strike pitches by Derek Lowe kept that from happening. To make matters worse for Boston, it looks like Byung-Hyun Kim won't even be on the ALCS roster. Supposedly, it's shoulder stiffness, but it looks to me more like stiffness of the middle finger combined with Little buying the hype about Kim's inability to survive the post-season. Frankly, I don't buy it, but if the Red Sox want to deny themselves one of their better bullpen arms, who am I to complain?

The best chance the Red Sox have of winning this week is to batter the Yankee starters as Anaheim did last year and force them out of the game early enough to force Joe Torre to go to the non-Mariano Rivera parts of his bullpen. If they don't, the Yanks have a huge advantage, in that their starters are not only really good, but also innings-munchers. The same cannot be said for any of the Red Sox starters, except Wakefield if he's on. And Little won't be able to bounce Lowe back and forth between the rotation and bullpen as easily again. (Of course, Torre won't be able to pull the Rivera-for-two-innings trick as often, either.)

These Red Sox are built along the same lines as the West-winning Texas Rangers and the Central-winning Cleveland Indians of the mid-to-late 1990s: heavy offense, not much depth in the pitching staff. The BoSox are better than either of those teams -- mostly by dint of the skinny Dominican guy -- but they're also ones that could quite easily be manhandled by the Yankee starters and Mo.

The other thing the Yankees have going for them is that we might, finally, for the first time all year, be seeing the Yankees at full strength. This is assuming that Nick Johnson and Jason Giambi are really pulling out of their slumps. The Yankees played most of the season without one or two of their most valuable pieces: Derek Jeter was out for a little over a month, Bernie Williams missed 40 games and was at half-mast after he came back, Mo was out for the early part of the year, Johnson was out for 60 games, and Giambi had an off year and hasn't been right since August. Now, though, they're all in place. Mo is back to his old self, Bernie's finally hitting, and Jeter has been lights out. Juan Rivera's also been hitting well, which means the only real hole in this lineup might be Aaron Boone.

(The Collision also gives the Yankees another advantage, since Damon's probably not going to be available for the first two games at Yankee Stadium, and I'm not sure that Jackson's going to be tremendously useful, either.)

Apparently, Torre is going with the same rotation he used in the LDS, which surprised me, but I'm grateful. I honestly thought he was going to pitch Roger Clemens in Game 2 to keep him from having to pitch in Fenway Park. After all, the last time he pitched Game 3 of an LDS against Pedro in Fenway four years ago, he had his head handed to him, and the Yankees suffered their only bad post-season loss that year. Then again, the 2003 version of Clemens is frankly a better pitcher than the 1999 version. But Torre wants everyone on the same rest, which works for me. And it sets up a possible Clemens/Pedro rematch for Game 7.

Having said all that, the Red Sox are a better team than the Twins. They're gonna make some noise. So I'm picking the Yankees in 6.

NEXT: ALCS Game 3

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