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Sorry To Rain On Your Parade
The Kansas City Royals officially opened their newly-renovated stadium this afternoon, and in grand Royals tradition, they promptly christened it with a deflating loss. Yes, these are your father's Royals, folks, and Andy Pettitte was brilliant in his first outing of the season. (To be fair, the Royals have only sucked for about 24 years, but who's counting.)
If you look back through the archives, you'll see that I was fairly upset with Andy Pettitte over the Winter. I thought it was a joke that he turned down the $10M, 1-year offer the Yanks extended. My point of view on the situation changed greatly when it turned out he only screwed himself by playing hard ball. Games like today make me very, very glad the Yanks brought him back.
It's great to get a win, but I'm a little disappointed in the offense for only managing 7 hits against Sidney Ponson and Kyle Farnsworth, but the key to this game was the length Pettitte gave them. After CC Sabathia, Chien-Ming Wang and A.J. Burnett could only give the Yanks a combined 13.1 innings, it was imperative that a Yankee starter would give them some length. Andy Pettitte provided that today.
The story of the game, and really the season to this point, has been Robinson Cano. The Yankee second baseman went 2 for 3 today, to bring his average up to .571 and he added another walk to his impressive early-season total of 4. I say impressive, because it took him 21 games to tally 4 walks last season. He also he totaled fewer than 4 walks for the entire months of June, July and September in 2008. If this newfound patience is here to stay, we're going to see great things from Cano this season, and the Yanks are going to need them.
On the bad side of the ledger is the quickly deteriorating batspeed of cleanup hitter Hideki Matsui. Matsui has just one hit in 14 at bats so far, and with Mark Teixeira starting to heat up in the three hole, it's going to be imperative for the Yanks to have a solid bat behind him until A-Rod gets healthy. If Matsui can't get the job done, Joey G. is going to have to go in another direction.
A win is a win, is a win, though. So let's relish the Yanks' first day at .500, hope they can climb above tomorrow and stay there the rest of the way.
Player of The Game: Andy Pettitte
Team Record: 2-2
Up Next: CC Sabathia vs. Horacio Ramirez
I'm not going to worry about Matsui just yet. I think he still has some life left in his bat.
No need to worry yet, just something to keep an eye on.
CANO!
I think the best part of the game (not counting Pettitte) was having Swisher out there in RF, hopefully he's there to stay.
Yeah, he's sick w/ the glove huh? :)