close is what counts

As welcome a development as Wang's 7 inning-one er performance was, Sunday's win continued a rather disturbing trend. The Yankees win half their games by blow-out and lose all the close ones. They have scored no less than 9 runs, I believe, in each of their wins, but they have also lost every single close game they have been in. This goes to Joe Torre's vaunted clubhouse leadership. Even those of us who have given up on Torre as a field tactician have sometimes nurtured a belief in his motivational skills. But so far the 2006 Yankees have demonstrated an inability to grind out one run games on the road, which means they have been wasting good starts (by both Mussina and Johnson), something that is probably in limited supply. The greatest Yankee team in history (1998) attained that status by winning all the close ones, a practice that prepares you for the playoffs, where the situation itself makes things tight. A team that finds ways to lose regular season games they might win finds ways to lose playoff series they should win. The most infamous such series in Yankees history (2004 Red Sox) came about precisely because the Yankees could win the blow outs, but as soon as the series tightened the least bit (up 2 late innings game 4), they proved utterly incapable of closing the deal. It's never too early to start worrying about such things, and since Torre's only calling card as a big league manager these days is personnel maximization, he should be doing exactly that.

P.S. The Sox won 7-6 with two runs in the bottom of the ninth for their fourth 1 run win (against no 1 run losses) of the season. They're playing Yankee baseball and we're not.