Like it's not enough to run the darn thing -
What an amazing feat of creativity and imagination. Check out the earlier and later updates as well.
I am about to become a dad. I am [mumbles inaudibly] years old. I just downloaded this for my phone. I regret nothing.
if I live until 100, I should be able to run a marathon in just under 17 hours -
Good to know.
Gotta love these. Don’t click if you haven’t finished season 4. Via the great and Midnight Run-worshipping Sepinwall.
1. What a strange series.
2. On one hand, the Tigers won it. They pitched well enough, hit well enough and fielded the ball cleanly. That last part hasn’t received enough attention: The Tigers are a dirt-rotten team defensively, yet they handled just about every single play cleanly.
3. On the other, the Yankees lost it. In the wake of any shameful, disappointing, opposite-of-heroic, character-deficit-revealing Yankee loss comes an extended exercise in goat-identification, but it can be boiled down thusly: The Yankees didn’t hit like they usually do. That’s on everyone except Posada, Gardner and Cano.
3b. Of course, if you throw Delmon Young enough pitches within spitting distance of home plate that he smacks three home runs, you’ve executed less than optimally.
4. Hell, the series was close enough that it may have hinged on Jim Leyland’s cockamamie hunches that paid off: specifically, batting no-OBP-no-SLG-no-nuthin guys ahead of Cabrera in the lineup (especially Kelly and Santiago in the two-hole). It made no sense then. It makes no sense now, nor will it tomorrow or the next day. But it worked.
5. My Joe Girardi impression: Do something! Do nothing! Do something! Do nothing! Do nothingsomething! Chomp gum aggressively! Eerily accurate, no?
6. One of the most important components of Girardi’s job next season will be ego-stomping. Jeter has to bat last and A-Rod has to bat no higher than sixth. If Girardi can’t bring himself to upset the status quo, find somebody who will.
7. It’s all A-Rod’s fault. Everything. He should’ve scored on the Posada single in the 4th. He should’ve hit home runs in the 7th and 9th innings, and probably in Games 2 and 3 as well. He should’ve given Joe Girardi noogies until he flipped Jeter and Gardner in the batting order. He should’ve printed out Russell Martin’s post-April stats and distributed them to every member of the Yankee coaching staff. He should’ve performed an emergency elbow-dectomy on Nova in the dugout.
7a. Remember how long it took for the Giambi contract to expire? The next six years are going to be a delight.
8. Two more Game Fives tonight. Baseball remains awesome.
1. A.J. Burnett earned 10 True Yankee points last night, which catapults him ahead of Kevin Brown and Jaret Wright and into the Hideki Irabu/Denny Neagle pantheon. Huzzah!
2. Other awards/demerits: Jeter gets 5 True Yankee points for his run-scoring double and the commonplace play up the middle that he made look difficult. Granderson gets 12 True Yankee points for the two catches and his own double. A-Rod loses 35 True Yankee points for failing to consider the effect his breakup with Cameron Diaz would have on the team’s emotional equilibrium.
3. The game was a pitcher’s duel for seven innings. Think about that for a second. Burnett and Porcello in a pitcher’s duel, dueling as they pitched. It doesn’t compute.
4. From my inning-by-inning Burnett notes: “very, very lucky,” “pretty quiet,” “please do not give back the lead,” “so much for the no-hitter,” “double play = double YAY!!!!” and “house money now.” With any other pitcher, a solo HR in the fourth inning of a playoff game wouldn’t be cause for concern. With Burnett, it’s reason enough to fire up the bullpen and deploy a strike team of therapists and accident reconstructionists.
5. Good work by Girardi yanking him when he did. Maybe Burnett could’ve finished the sixth inning. I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.
6. Granderson’s first-inning catch saved the game; Burnett would’ve retreated into a fetal curl on the mound had Kelly’s liner gone for an inside-the-park grand slam, which appeared to be its destiny. But he increased the degree of difficulty tenfold by misreading it off the bat.
7. The Tigers gave the Yankees lots of help: Starting Wilson Betemit, gifting Burnett a bunt out during the S.O.S. first inning, letting the Yankee switch-hitters turn around against Coke, etc. They had the one-game cushion, so these offenses against reason are slightly more justifiable. Slightly.
8. Promising signs for the Yankees, beyond the banana-kaboom 8th inning: the high fastball that Hughes pumped past Cabrera, Posada’s OBP goodness, A-Rod’s fielding. Bad signs for the Yankees: Teixeira and Swisher swinging left-handed, Jeter’s bunt, Gardner’s bunt attempt, bunt bunt bunt bunt bunt bunt bunt.
9. It’s been waaaaay too clean a series so far. My prediction for Thursday night includes two punted grounders and a wayward throw or three. They’ll all get blamed on nerves, naturally.
10. Other games: Cards fans must be getting sick and effin’ tired of Tony La Russa outmaneuvering himself. He let Garcia hit in a situation that begged for a pinch-hitter and then intentionally walked Ruiz ahead of an obvious pinch-hit situation. There’s your ball game… Ron Roenicke got in on the hoTTT issue-intentional-walk-ahead-of-three-run-homer action, too. These guys must attend the same off-season seminars… Their season might not have ended in a confettigasm, but kudos to the Tampa Bay Rays for sticking around as long as they did. That’s one well-run team, Fuld fixation notwithstanding.
1. If you’d told me before the game that Sabathia would walk six batters (one intentionally) in five-plus innings and that I’d be yelling at the TV and other inanimate objects in my living room for Girardi to yank him, I would not have expected the Yankees to head into the ninth inning down only a single run.
2. Girardi still screwed up massively by sending Sabathia out there for the sixth. When we’re writing the 2011 season obituaries tomorrow morning, it will be noted that Rivera, Robertson and Soriano should all be well-rested heading into spring training.
3. Nice job by Soriano in the sixth. Slightly less than nice job by Soriano in the seventh. Here’s the Delmon Young scouting report: “He will swing at the first pitch, no matter where it is. Do not throw it anywhere near the strike zone. Throw it at the mascot. Throw it into the dugout or into the stands. Do not throw it over the plate. Just don’t.” But gee, Soriano met with the media after the game, so expect many a paean to his “accountability.”
4. Obviously I viewed the game through lenses of a certain tint, so to speak, but it sure looked like there was a Verlander strike zone (vast, warm, inviting) and a Sabathia strike zone (floating, subatomic). Reasonable minds may disagree.
4a. To be fair, Valverde’s best pitch of the night, the 1-2 change-up (I think it was a change) to Jeter, was somehow called a ball. And Sabathia couldn’t slip a fastball past Brandon Inge or Ramon Santiago, so it ain’t on the umps.
5. Kelly’s bunt that started off the bottom of the sixth provided ample evidence that CC’s ample torso prevents him from completing tasks that require ample athleticism. Whether or not he was a multisport star in high school, he’s grossly overweight now. Why are we ignoring the possibility that conditioning has something to do with his late-season swoon? Somehow, we’ve chosen to blame it on the disturbance in his routine (six-man rotation, last start skipped, etc.). If A-Rod looked like that, the New York Post would Photoshop the outline of a girdle onto his uniform.
6. Valverde didn’t blow a save this season. That doesn’t mean he’s been anything remotely approaching dominant; 34 walks in 72 innings is unacceptable. But he sure untucks a shirt like a champ.
7. Is Phil Hughes still alive? How about Jesus Montero?
8. Justin Verlander’s 10-pitch, strike-out-the-side bottom of the fifth was one of the most dominant innings I’ve ever seen thrown. That said, the Yankees nicked him. In particular, Posada, A-Rod and Brett Gardner each had some smart, patient at-bats. Verlander was very, very good. He wasn’t godly.
9. A coping tip for Yankee fans: Don’t waste your time worrying about Burnett. Just hope that if he comes up huge - say, 4 runs in 5 innings - Girardi doesn’t try to milk a few extra outs from him. And hope that the hitters put up 12 runs or so. They’ve done it before.
1. After a season enduring the derrrrr-look-at-me-manage-my-bullpen-and-call-team-meetings-and-smile-reassuringly-derrrrrrrrr antics of Fredi Gonzalez and Jim Tracy, I’d arrived at the conclusion that Joe Girardi is capable enough at what he does for a living. “The devil you know,” etc. But he was back in overstrung-schizo mode yesterday afternoon, simultaneously overmanaging (pinch-hitting Chavez for Gardner, which undermined the cause offensively *and* defensively) and undermanaging (trotting out the B-team relievers instead of the rested Soriano/Robertson combo). I prefer the steady, measured regular-season Girardi to the superstrung, binder-chomping postseason Girardi by a wide margin. Somebody needs to slip a Lorazapam into his pre-game apple sauce.
2. Contrast that with the way Leyland managed. He got Benoit in the game early, wasn’t shy with defensive substitutions, etc. Only one guy seemed to comprehend the gravity of the situation.
3. Shades of 2006, when the Yankees muffed Game 2 and never recovered? Nah. Different players, different vibe. Detroit didn’t have any Cabrera- or Verlander-level talent in 2006. Well, they had Verlander, but it was a lower-grade, non-weaponized Verlander. You know what I mean.
4. The Yankees had Scherzer on the ropes in the first and seventh and didn’t take advantage. There’s your ballgame, really. I only advocate sacrifice bunts in situations involving hostages, famine or Brandon Crawford, but it’d sure be keen for the Yankees to remember how to advance runners one base at a time.
5. Jeter chucks away an out and whiffs twice in the middle of rallies, and A-Rod is the one who gets booed? Obviously A-Rod isn’t all that tough to pitch to right now - inside fastballs are his kryptonite Waterloo Achilles’ heel - but I wish he’d embrace his inner asshole in moments like this. “Yeah, of course it pisses me off when the idiot contingent of the fan base makes me the default fall guy for every Yankee failure. By the way, nice work by the fans, scurrying to the concourses when it started to rain and not bothering to return.” Open mouth, insert zing! Etc.
6. That bottom of the ninth was all kinds of crazy. When Inge didn’t claim the Granderson pop-up as his own, I was convinced that Aura, Destiny and Mystique had abandoned their poles at Scores and were about to make their first Yankee Stadium playoff appearance since the blind-ump Twins game in 2009. Alas, it was not to be.
7. A working theory: Jose Valverde takes 179 seconds between pitches because he’s mentally planning his post-save celebratory tango. Those step-kick-step-jazz-hands! combos don’t choreograph themselves, you know.
8. A.J. Burnett is scheduled to start tomorrow. Ergo, it might not be a bad idea for the Yankees to win today.
9. Other games: It’s time to anoint the Brewers as the greatest team since the last great team, which I can’t remember because I only remember what I saw yesterday. Playoff overreactions are fun!… Along those lines, Cliff Lee sucks brontosaurus eggs and Kirk Gibson has lost his team and the Cardinal bullpen is bulletproof… Gus/Mike/Tyrus have the money and the resources, but Walt/Jesse have the chemistry, literally and figuratively. I’m predicting an upset.
1. I didn’t see this one live, as I was out at what the kids used to call “a rock ‘n roll show.” For future reference, they do not serve beer at the United Palace Theatre. Getting to hear Suit Of Lights, Town Cryer and Watch Your Step/Secondary Modern was nonetheless a treat.
2. So I turbo-watched the game via DVR just now, which means it’s a doubleheader Sunday for me. Baseball!
3. Outside of the weather-motivated stop/start, that was in every way a typical game for the 2011 Yankees. The pitching was solid but mostly kinda there. The defense made a few plays (great relay by Jeter and tag by Martin). The offense went into grind-down mode and, inevitably, exploded. If I may coin a phrase, the Yankees play pressure offense.
3a. Doug Fister, for all his impressive tallness, threw a few too many strikes.
4. No second-guessing on Leyland’s decision to use Al “Al the Al” Alburquerque against Cano in the sixth inning. It’s not like lefties have had better luck against Cano this year and, besides, Al the Al has a solid track record of keeping the ball in the park.
5. Assuming that the Tigers act rationally and pitch around Cano, it’s gonna fall on A-Rod to make them pay. It always comes down to A-Rod. He exerts narrative gravitational pull over everything in the Yankee universe.
6. Jorge Posada running the bases = Bono talking about politics.
7. Gene Lamont has sure let himself go. His uniform fits him like a weatherproof cover fits an outdoor grill.
8. Other games: Didn’t catch any of Brewers/D-backs, as I was out purchasing items of non-trivial import… I have no idea why La Russa didn’t bring in a lefty to face Ryan Howard. As far as decision-making goes, that’s as much of a slam dunk as tacos over kale… That one Napoli at-bat might’ve turned around the Texas/Tampa series. Mike Napoli is a great friggin’ hitter; I’m genuinely curious as to what blinded the Angels and Jays to this beyond-obvious fact.
I am too old to find things like this as funny as I do.
Liked Scott’s one, too. Lotsa great Mo-related stuff out there today, for obvious reasons.
[video]
Hurricane Irene: the desperate aftermath.