LEVELING OUT

Now that the Yanks are blowing neither hot nor cold, but playing more or less 500 ball against the best teams, we can see what was actually at stake in their long run back into contention. Was it simply a matter of beating up on weak teams? Clearly not, as they won series against the D-Backs, the Angels, the Tigers (3-1) and swept the Indians. They also won their last series against Boston. Cashman says it is just a matter of the performance levelin g out with their talent. This is how good the Yankees are, he says. Well, if this is what the Yankees are, there remains a big problem that has been neither solved nor dispelled during the run. The pundits who held the Yanks' winning ways to be an augur of October baseball liked to say, they were not just winning, they were destroying teams. I would say they can only win by destroying teams. What made the hot streak exactly that was that their offense was firing so completely that they were able to blow team out on a regular basis. And as everyone from Torre and Jeter on down pointed out, that sort of raking just couldn't continue. The reasonable hope has been that when things cool down, they won't go back to the flat passive offense of the first two months. The uinexorcised specter, however, is not the iunability to score 5 runs instead of 2, but the inability to win with 5 runs instead of 8. Whent the yanks get 4-6 runs they tend to be involved in 1 run decisions, or what amounts to the same thing, extra inning affairs. And they lose these games with positively brutal regularity. Part of the reason they lose these games, which they've done twice on this road trip (while winning none) are the old bugaboos, bad situational hitting and missed chances for small ball production. In my last post, I noted how this cost them game 1 in Anaheim. But the is a second reason as well.

Even now that the Yankees' bullpen is vastly improved it still suffers a curious weakness. The Yankees have no middle relievers to speak of. In last night's game, the bullpen perforemed marvellously well after another bad outing from Clemens (whose contract missed his real worth by one decimal point). Ramirez gave up nothing, Joba gave up nothing, Farnsworth gave up nothing Vizcaino gave up nothing, Rivera gave up nothing. and in the end Torre had to bring in Henn, just like in LA, which is the baseball equivalent of putting up the white flag. How does this happen? Because while the other hurlers may pitch in the middle innings, they are still short relievers. Not one of them goes more than an inning at a time in a close game. Nor should they necessarily. Vizcaino and Farnsworth are almost never as effective in the second inning of work (not that F...face is all that effective in the first), Ramirez and Joda would get burned out iof they had to throw 2-3 innings at a time. And that day has long since passed for Mo. It is the absence of any middle relievers that creates the weird situation that the Yankees carry a ton of relievers, several of whom are either great (Mo, Joba), very good (Vizcaino), or good (Ramirez), and yet perpetually seem to have no bullpen depth. Look at Boston, a bullpen ranked the best in the AL. They have 2 great relievers, two good reliever (Snyder, Del Carmen), oanokay reliever (Lopez), a Farnsworth level reliever (Timlin) and a Henn level reliever (Gagme). The difference is that Snyder will give you 3 innings, Delcarmen will give you 2-3,Okajima will give you 2, Lopez will give you 2. The Yankees bullpen can no longer be said to be burned out by overuse; after all F...doesn't get used all that much, Joba and Ramirez are new, Mo hasn't gotten all that much work this year, Vizcaino's work load is way down of late. But they still play out like an overworked bullpen because they are all short men, with the exception of he (Joba) who must be preserved. It will be interesting to see if the Yankees actually make use of the expanded roster as a key element in their playoff run. Do they add Kennedy, Stephen Wright, even Karstens and Igawa as relievers, making up in sheer numbers what they clearly lack in durability. I know this. Barring another ungodly offensive explosion, they need to start winning some, I would say the bulk, of their one run/walk-off/extra inning games if they want to avoid the double disgrace of not only snapping the division title string but missing the playoffs altogether.