The Better Team Won

First and foremost, congratulations go out to the Texas Rangers and their fans. It’s a great story, a team that was in bankruptcy in mid season emerges like a phoenix to earn a berth to the World Series. One could argue the ALCS was won when Seattle GM Jack Zduriencik decided to take the Yankee offer for Cliff Lee and shop it around, settling on a deal with Texas instead of the Yanks. At the time that deal struck me as overkill by the Yanks, and I was 100% dead wrong. Given the way the Yankees played, even if they had Lee they still might have lost this series. Lee only pitched one game and the Yanks still were still blown out in their other 3 losses, with one of the two Yankee wins requiring an almost miraculous comeback. The Yankee lineup didn’t hit (except Cano) their starters didn’t pitch well (except Pettitte) and their bullpen was a complete disaster (except Mo). You can’t win a series with one player in each facet of the game doing his job well. We can first and second guess all of Girardi’s decisions until the cows come home, but if Joe McCarthy was managing this team with Casey Stengel as his bench coach, it wouldn’t have mattered. The better team won.

You can compare the two rosters position by position and think the Yanks fielded the better squad, but I would disagree. The Texas pitching staff was tied for 3rd in the AL in team ERA (Yanks #7) bolstered by the 2nd best bullpen in the league. Mark Teixeira was nursing two injuries (thumb/foot) even before he pulled the hamstring that mercifully ended his ALCS. Tex may be a top player when healthy, but his cumulative injuries rendered him a .220/.346/.349 (.694 OPS) hitter for the month of September. Jorge Posada batted .230/.339/.444 in the 2nd half, despite a much reduced workload behind the dish. Alex had the worst season of his career since he was a 21 year old in Seattle. Derek Jeter’s OPS was a measly .710 this year, the worst showing of his career by a whopping 61 points. The names are there, but the production wasn’t. It turns out the team that played in September wasn’t just a playoff bound team in some mundane slump, but was a banged up squad showing it’s age. Check out these stats from ESPN:

•  Phil Hughes had a series to forget, losing both of his starts while giving up 11 earned runs and seven doubles. He is third Yankees starter to lose twice in an LCS, joining Denny Neagle (2000) and Mike Mussina (2003). His 11 earned runs allowed are tied for the second-most in a single LCS, and his seven two-baggers allowed are the third-most in a single LCS.

•  Alex Rodriguez struck out to end the game. He is the third Yankee to get punched out to end a postseason series, joining Jorge Posada in the 2007 ALDS and Willie Randolph in the 1980 ALCS.

•  The Yankees had just three hits in the loss. That set a franchise record for fewest hits by the Yankees in a game in which they were eliminated from the postseason. In Game 8 of the 1921 World Series the Yankees had four hits in their 1-0 loss.

•  New York allowed 38 runs in this series, the second-most allowed by the team in a single postseason series. The only time they allowed more was in 2004 when they gave up 41 during their seven-game loss to the Red Sox.

I actually had a perverse sense of relief when Kerry Wood loaded the bases in the 7th inning last night, because it relieved me of my one final second guess, that Wood should have been brought in after Hughes was pulled in the 5th. Not that he could have pitched worse than Robertson did, which is almost impossible given that D-Rob came in and gave up a HR and double, but it was facing some of the same batters and it made me think that no matter which way Girardi went, it wouldn’t have mattered. With the Yankees scoring one measly run, on a blown call by an umpire no less, it’s tough to argue they would have come back from 4-1 rather than 6-1.

Texas out pitched the Yanks, outhit the Yanks, and out hustled the Yanks on the base paths. This loss would be far more painful if I had some area of regret. But I honestly don’t think that there was an in game move, blown call by an umpire or managerial decision that tipped the scales of this series. The Yanks got a good old fashioned Texas butt-whipping, and on balance much of the credit goes to them and how they played. And much like the 2008 Rays,  they look like a team that’s here to stay. Yankee GM Brian Cashman has a lot of work to do this off season, but that’s for another day. Today is for Rangers fans to celebrate, and Yankee fans to lick their wounds.