Replacement Level Yankees Weblog

Disclaimer: If you think this is the official website of the New York Yankees, you're an idiot. Go away.

Why Joe, why?
by SG

The Yankees won their fifth in a row last night, behind a solid outing by Mike Mussina and some homerun hitting by Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi, and Derek Jeter. This was a nice win against a solid team, but came at a possibly heavy price.

With a 5 run lead starting the 8th inning, Joe Torre went to Tom Gordon. In theory, with a 5 run lead and two innings, a pitcher with an ERA of 16.00 should be able to close it out, as allowing 4 runs in 2 innings would still end the game. However, Torre has never been willing to trust inexperienced relievers, and in this instance it may come back to bite the Yankees in the ass.

Tom Gordon has had a long, storied injury history. He's missed parts of several seasons with shoulder and elbow problems. However, Torre continously feels the need to use him in low leverage situations. He had him warming up in the ninth inning of a 10 run lead on Tuesday, then brought him into start the 8th last night. Gordon walked the first man, struck out the next two, then started twitching his arm. He was pulled, and Scott Proctor got the last 4 outs.

The official story was that Gordon "slept on his shoulder weird" the night before. If this was the case, should he even have been in there? Maybe Gordon didn't tell Torre about this, in which case some blame has to fall on him, but there really was no reason use him in that spot anyway. Proctor and Jason Anderson need to be tried in that spot. If they can't cut it, then you get rid of them and try someone like Colter Bean, Tim Redding, or Darrell May.

Gordon's supposed to get an MRI today, and hopefully it's nothing that a few days of rest won't fix. I would hope Torre would learn something from this, but if he didn't learn from last year when he wore Gordon out and made him ineffective in the playoffs, will he ever?

The Gordon situation sullied an otherwise wonderful game. Moose was solid, allowing 2 runs in 7 innings despite a shaky strike zone, moving to 9-5 on the season and lowering his ERA to 3.97.

Jason Giambi continues to show signs of life, when many wrote him off. I hate to say I told you so, but you know what? I told you so. One day I'm going to go back and pull back all the anti-Giambi comments from this blog and call you people out. All in fun, but this is good news for Yankee fans whether you hate Giambi or not. The Yankees have a big financial committment to Giambi and it is better for the team and for us as fans if he continues to hit. Giambi's 2-3 performance, aided by a HR that was knocked over the fence by Casey Blake, boosted his season stats to .274/.423/.452.

More Giambi stats:

He is now second in the league in OBP.

His EQA of .319 is higher than that of:
Hideki Matsui
Manny Ramirez
Melvin Mora
Jason Varitek
Derek Jeter
Trot Nixon
Mark Teixeira
Mike Young
Johnny Damon

His VORP of 20.3 is higher than that of:

Joe Mauer
Jorge Posada
Todd Helton
Lyle Overbay
Mike Cameron
Trot Nixon
Shawn Green
Shea Hillenbrand (All Star my ass)
Ivan Rodriguez
Garret Anderson
Mike Sweeney
Hank Blalock
Edgar Renteria
Eric Chavez
Paul Konerko
Carlos Beltran (Ha ha)

There's quite a few All Stars in that list.

Melky Cabrera debuted yesterday and fisted a single to the opposite field in his second AB. We didn't get to see his defense on display much, but as long as the Yankees are winning pressure should be fairly low on him.

There's a lot of rain headed to New York over the weekend, so I don't know what will happen with the remaining 3 games before the All Star Break. Hopefully they are able to get them in.

--posted at 8:18 AM by SG / |

Larry Mahnken and SG's
	Replacement Level Yankees Weblog
"Hey, it's free!"