Yanks In (More Than) A Sentence: Phillies 6, Yankees 1
1. Cliff Lee pitched as precise and unafraid a game as anyone did against the Yankees this season. That’s your recap right there.
2. Sabathia’s line looks fine - two runs in seven innings - even though he was less sharp than he was in his previous 2009 playoff outings. The dummyheads will focus on the two cupcakes to Utley, but Sabathia was behind in the count all game long and had only his grade-C fastball. Fatigue may finally be setting in.
3. Phil Hughes: 14 base runners allowed this post-season in under five innings of work. And not that this has any bearing on his performance or psyche or moral character, but he ducked the media after last night’s fender-bender of an outing. It doesn’t appear that the Mariano Rivera pep talks have had an impact.
4. Earlier this week, a Phillies fan complained to me how “everybody thinks we’re just going to roll over for the Yankees.” Did anybody on the planet actually entertain this possibility, other than the paranoid and the impossibly stupid? Relax, kids. You’re the champs until somebody takes you down. You can’t play the no-respect card while sitting on top of the mountain.
5. Yes, of course the Yankees should be terrified by the prospect of starting A.J. Burnett and his one-inning-of-terror proclivities in a game they’d kind of like to win.
6. I don’t know what else to write about this one. There were no misaligned batting orders, no strategic brain-farts, no overcaffeinated bullpen decisions, no out-wasting sacrifice bunts, no blown tires on the base paths and no missed calls or creative reinterpretation of the rule book by the umps. I pity the poor Daily News guys who have 18 pages to fill.
