(Minnesota vs Yankees tropes checklist: 1) Minnesota scores first, check. 2) Yankees come back and score more, check. 3) Yankee bullpen is better than the Twins bullpen, check. 4) Umpires do something stupid, check.)
Since all the important tropes are checked and this is in every way the exact kind of Twins-Yankees game that gets played in the postseason, let’s talk about these things three: Andy Pettitte, Curtis Granderson, Lance Berkman.
Andy Pettitte: Seven innings, five hit, two run ball. Easily his best pitching performance since returning from the DL and a vintage Pettitte postseason start. Not perfect, but filled with double plays, gettings-of-clutch-outs, makings-of-pitches and nerves (and stares) of steel.
Okay, seriously: Pettitte looked fantastic. Any qualms about whether he or Hughes should have started game two seem to have been fully set aside, because now if Minnesota wins games three and four (possible, though, it would seem unlikely), the Yankees can rest assured that their vaunted postseason lefthander is healthy and ready to take the mound game five.
The Hudson home run was a bad pitch, but almost everything else worked flawlessly, especially after the second inning when he escaped a jam giving up just one run.
Curtis Granderson: Look, I know giving hitting coaches lifetime contracts is ill-advised, but in this case I’d be willing to make an exception.
Since his mid-August Long-ian retreat, Granderson has been on fire and shows no signs of abating now. He came up with one of, if not the biggest hits of the game last night, and tonight hit the double that eventually scored the Yankees’ first run.
The only blemish was a bunt that may not have needed to be made in tonight’s game, as he otherwise went three-for-four, and is now batting .500/.500/.875 in the postseason. Yeah, two games is a small sample size and ultimately insignificant, but he has been phenomenal in the first two games.
Lance Berkman: The Big Puma, in his first postseason game in pinstripes, hit a home run that gave the Yankees their first lead tonight and then the RBI double that gave them their second and final lead.
Want to know what’s crazy about how deep the Yankees’ line up is this postseason? Berkman, a formal All-Star, and the offensive hero of tonight’s game, was hitting eighth.
Eighth.
Oh, and while we’re on the theme of Cashman’s 2010 acquisitions striking gold tonight, how utterly dominant was Kerry Wood in the eighth inning?
Yikes!
Now the Yankees head back home, up two-games-to-none, and can potentially clinch a spot in the LCS on Saturday.
Only one team has ever come back from losing the first two LDS games at home to win the series. You may remember–it was the 2001 Yankees that did it.
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14 Responses to The Game in Which Cashman Looks like a Genius and Oh Andy Pettitte
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It’s only the first series but Cashman has to really be smiling right now, he caught a bunch of flak during the middle of the year for the trade of Granderson (all unwarranted and all came way too soon) and some in the media questioned the Kerry Wood deal and now he gets to sit back and see all his acquisitions including Tex and CC doing great in the post season.
Well this win takes a lot of pressure off Hughes if he was ever going to win his first start in his first game of October baseball he’s been set up perfectly for it, I don’t expect him to actually win because this is the exact reason I picked Yanks in 4. Hughes is going to be nervous because anyone would be and I believe he will pitch OK but I think will in the end lose and grow from it for his next start but if he does pull it off I wouldn’t be really shocked with the stuff he has and the situation he is in because basically all pressure is off starting at home with 2-0 series lead.
I agree, Chris. If Hughes does pitch the game of his life, so far, on Saturday, the Yankees will then have their 3-man postseason rotation–2010 edition.
But, I think because of this year’s schedule, the need for a fourth starter will rear its head sometime (maybe two times? three?) in the ALCS or WS.
If Burnett will only use his timeout session to relax, and use thoughtful, cold, focused, experience, instead of anger, to motivate himself, maybe good AJ will reappear, even if it is a game saving long relief role.
We may need him to beat a Texas team with 5 potential Lefthanders (Lee, CJ, Lee, CJ, Lee), in a 7 game series, and against the Phillie big 3 pitchers. The young Giant rotatation is scary and could be a surprise, too. (anyone remember the 1966 World Series?).
The Phillies look like the invincible favorite, right now, on the heels of the no-hitter, but cracks may emerge .Or the rebound theory can come into play. Remember, the Dodgers actually won the series where Don Larson pitched his perfect game gem. Teams have a way of bouncing back from being no-hitted to win the next game.
It’s shaping up to be a interesting postseason.
Full of potential for a talented, focused, veteran team that went thru a long suffering period, together, and emerged intact, and playing together.
I said it during the game and I will say it now the called ball on Berkman before the double was a strike but the previously called 2nd strike was clearly a ball on the outside corner and you could argue that at least 4 other pitchers missed by a good margin and were called strikes against Yankee hitting so as far as I am concerned it all evens out.
Totally agree.
But, the announcers were anti-Yankee and trying to find a simple game theme that would give the non-Yankee crowd a little dose of feel better satisfaction.
Might they say that the Yankees out pitched, out hit, out fielded, and totally out played the Twins?
BTY–River Ave Blues posted a chart that proved this was so. The home plate ump was calling
the outside strike (to LH batters), and not calling the inside corner strike all night-consistently. But, the chart shows that the Twins benefitted much more from this than the Yankees.
Even Berkman stated this in his postgame interview on TBS. (He is an articulate fellow.)
It seems odd that so many people focused on one bordline pitch being called a ball when Mariano freakin Rivera had the same pitch called a ball twice in the same game.
The TBS bunch were really awful-they made Joe Buck sound like the old Costa (before he became a hack) and Kubek pairing for NBC’s ‘second team’. (I always prayed for rain for the games Scully and Joe ‘he wants it to happen here-he doesn’t want it to go to 3-2′ Garagiola were doing.)
A few of us predicted Berkman would be a difference maker in postseason. Nice to see it come true.
I think even more gratifying is Granderson being such a force.
I think winning Saturday is still important. Extra days off and I’ll never forget 2004.
The TBS announcers were so totally anti-Yankee it almost seemed like they were the Twins home announcers.
Only grudging and rare comments on the defending champions,a team full of future HOF-ers ,a supurb veteran team going about their business with class and focus, etc.
But what do you expect from Ron Darling (ex-Met), and John Smoltz (ex-Brave who was twice denied a ring by the Yankees, and whose career was effectively ended while being blasted by the Yankees while he was in a Red Sox uniform.)
All of their focus was on what the Twins need to do to win. I wish there was a way to change the audio to a different set of radio announcers.
do you have MLB on your computer? If you do go to the audio ,mute your tv. you will have to listen to sterling, thats what i do with muttcliff and saunders..
Thanks
If the Yankees are winning sometimes I can tolerate it. Let it just drip off my fur.
Until the inevitable time the ESPN guys somehow work the year before 2005 into the conversation. (really now, I start to laugh when they do this–at the absolute absurbity of it.)
I’ve come to be at peace with the fact that since the Yankees have won so often, and have dashed the baseball dreams of so many people and cities, that there are a lot of Yankee haters in the universe, to balance the the masses of Yankee fans.
Now, if only the Rays can come back a little bit to make Cliff Lee pitch another game against them (and thus, not be able to start the first game in the ALCS, against us).
But, Ahhh—the Rays seem fried to me. All the young guys are just too tight. Did you all see all of the fingernail chewing, beard and hair pawing, and the totally lost faces in the Rays dugout?
Priceless.
I believe that from last postseaon thru the present, that Andy is pitching the best that he ever has (scratch those 3 recovering from injury starts).
He has gotten better with age.
He used to give up a lot of hits, and be pummeled occasionly–even in his 20 win seasons. The time he spent in Houston seems to have helped (matured) him, too.
Can he do this postseason what he did last postseason–all the way thru? Is this too much to expect from this outstanding man? He just keeps on amazing me.
No they didnt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_World_Series
You are right. An old man should be more careful of what he posts early in the morning.
The Dodgers won in 1955. Stupid mistake on my part.
But teams often do come right back after a no hitter during the regular season.
It will be interesting to see what the Reds do tonight. Oswalt owned them in total domination for years, until, this year, when the Reds beat him before he went to the Phillies.
Very interesting postseason so far.
You know what I think is so wrong about only focusing on the strike call to Berkman as a bad call? IT takes away from the veteran mind of Lance Berkman who has always been one of the best at working the count, taking walks and learning umpires strike zones to exploit them and he gets completely hung out to dry on this one.
I heard one broadcaster talking about how he got frozen and the reason he took that pitch is because it was setup so well on the outside corners before hand and when he finally threw inside his knees locked up. Really? Because it didn’t look that way to me in fact to me it looked like Berkman never had a thought about swinging and it looked like he knew he was going to get the ball call because lefties had been getting it all night. That is a great play by a veteran hitter exposing an umps strike zone and taking advantage of the situation especially after he had just had a strike taken away on a pitch previous that was a bad call… Don’t look now fellows but I think Berkman was playing BASEBALL haha.
Nice insight,Chris. The way I saw it, I thought he got away with a pitch, but after the arguments, the umpire would surely try to call the next pitch a strike, so he would swing at anything close. Man, that was great recognition that enabled him to hit a sinker that dropped a foot below his knees!