The Girl Who Loved Andy Pettitte

Yeah, so losing the first game of the series against Boston means they’ll probably get swept and certainly not win 2 out of 3 which means the Yankees effectively out of things. It’s time to wait for it next year, hopefully some moves will be made in the offseason that shape this team up.

To all you crazy people who were at the Stadium with me last night, none of those moves involve getting rid of Alex Rodriguez.

I don’t even really know how Billy Traber and Chris Britton got back into the bullpen, but at least the Yankees have some mop-up men who are not afraid to allow runs, right?

Ponson is so bad and it’s finally really caught up to him, I don’t think he’ll be having any BABIP induced “good” outings again. Let’s bring up Victor Zambrano so fans get to witness a different kind of awful and make Ponson the mop-up man who will never pitch. Seeing Billy Traber pitch just makes me very angry and I shouldn’t have to deal with that.

1. Damaso Marte - I thought he would be good for the club, as I thought he was a good pitcher. I watched him in Pittsburgh and saw himnot suck but I now realize that is the “NL Central effect”. I miss Farnsworth so much.
2. Bobby Abreu - Bobby, what happened? Your defense has gone from “meh” to “insanely terrible” and your walk rate is down the tubes because you suddenly can’t lay off sliders at your ankles. Get off my team.
3. Sidney Ponson - Stop putting together decentish outings so I can hate you properly. I know it’s a function of BABIP and will soon die!
4. Derek Jeter - The Yankees should institute a rule that whenever there is a runner on first and Jeter is coming up, the runner should try to steal. It doesn’t matter if it’s Jose Molina, at least then it’s amusing instead of another aggravating double play.
5. Darrell Rasner - Ok, I don’t really hate you because you don’t have much and I know you’re doing your best. That doesn’t make your starts any easier to watch.

“We don’t think it’s anything serious,” Girardi said. “I’m not really concerned that he’s going to be shut down for a while, but there’s a chance that he’s going miss a start, and we might have to be a little bit creative.”

Oh my God he is going to be out forever.

This season is going to make like 90% of Yankees fans kill themselves, I swear.

Derek Jeter SS
Bobby Abreu RF
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Jorge Posada DH
Richie Sexson 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Melky Cabrera CF
Jose Molina C
Brett Gardner LF

Tonight’s outlook: Lots of beer.

Via ESPN:

The New York Yankees have reached a tentative agreement with Richie Sexson, who was released by the Seattle Mariners a week ago.

Sexson fits in New York because the Yankees needed a right-handed slugger to match up against left-handed pitching — and Sexson had a .344 average against lefties this year.

Assuming the deal is completed, he’ll be in the lineup Saturday against Oakland.

The Yankees will only have to pay Sexson the prorated minimum of $390,000 from his $14 million salary with the Mariners. Seattle is eating the remainder of the nearly $6 million Sexson is owed for the season.

Sexson was batting .218 with just 30 RBIs in 74 games when the Mariners cut him loose, on July 10. He hit a career-worst .205 with 21 homers and 100 strikeouts in 2007.

In trying to justify this as “not a totally insane move” to myself, I looked up his splits and they are actually extremely ridiculous:

…but I can’t convince myself he is anything but useless, and I don’t really think he is going to help out much because as soon as he gets here he will be affected by the horrible case of nohititis (it’s an itis because it’s painful to watch) the rest of the team has against all pitching. Plus, I don’t really have any faith in him being able to keep up those numbers because here are his splits from 2007:

I guess Justin Christian is getting sent down (not that he is very useful) to make room for him, or maybe they’ve finally decided that Chad Moeller seriously does not have a roster spot?

What this means, though is that the Yankees are pretty much punting the rest of the season because while I know this is a “doesn’t cost anything!” low-risk move (well except for maybe the risk to Richie Sexson’s life) it is not a very good one. I mean, I could be wrong but probably not.

From Chad Jennings’ SWB Yankees Blog:

Eric Milton was added to the Triple-A roster late Monday night and immediately placed on the disabled list. All of it was retroactive to Saturday.

There are now like a billion starting pitchers on the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre roster, including Russ Ohlendorf who they have got doing starting work until he gets into a groove and stops sucking. That means it’s very likely that the Sidney Ponson Experiment is at a close (it wasn’t a total failure, but it also wasn’t very pretty) and that someone from AAA will probably be joining the roster soon. The most likely candidates are:

• Kei Igawa - I don’t see how he could be better than Ponson, but I also don’t know if he could be worse. Actually, that’s a lie I know he could because I sat through all nine innings of this game and somehow didn’t throw myself off the tier at Yankee Stadium. I know he kills AAA hitters for the most part, but high fastballs don’t work in MLB.
• Jeff Karstens - Pitches about as ugly as he looks but the organization is in love with him. Also generally eats AAA hitters for lunch and is not so successful with MLB.
• Dan McCutchen - Probably the most interesting candidate, I haven’t seen him personally though. It seems like it would likely be a bad idea to rush him up to MLB instead of letting him spend some more time in AAA and having him join the team next year. Primarily a groundball pitcher but his gb:fb ratio hasn’t been that great in AAA which is not really a good sign.
• Ian Kennedy - Hey, remember him? Probably not coming back up to MLB this year (like Phil Hughes) as the organization has pretty much admitted he was rushed. But you never know because desperation makes people do strange things.
• Eric Milton - I don’t even know what to say except “Please, no”. I know his lifetime stats are slightly better than Ponson’s (average rather than below average!), but he is coming off TJ surgery and who knows if that will make him even worse than he was the last two years in Cincinnati.

I recognize that Milton is an emergency option and a flyer case very similar to Ponson, but at least watching Ponson pitch is special kind of comedy as opposed to just painful. I know the team expected Alan Horne to be ready, but I am starting to think the right move would have been to just trade him last year when his value was rather high. He’s 25 and oft-injured and I don’t think he is going to stick as a starter, but at the same time he has control issues that make him somewhat troubling as a reliever.

I don’t really have the words in me to explain my frustration and anger at this game, so make due with a picture.

I really want to love Robinson Cano, and I go through periods where he is at the top of my favorite players on the team. The problem is there is Good Cano and Bad Cano. And Bad Cano is very, very bad and has at bats like this:

It is so supremely frustrating to see a guy with the talent Cano has do things like this.