Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Lucky Number Seven

Well it looks like Sabathia is fully past his early season woes and is ready to be the ace the Yanks need him to be the rest of the season. Another start where he goes seven and gives up fewer than two runs spells his third consecutive victory in the month of May. The continued revival of Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez meant that Sabathia got all the run support he needed and the Yankees walk away with their seventh consecutive victory.

This was supposed to be the strength of the Yankees coming into the season. The rotation was going to keep the Yankees in every game and give the offense time to explode. That's exactly what happened last night.

There isn't much to say about the offense. Mark Teixeira has gone crazy since A-Rod took the weight of the offense off of his back and all the role players are contributing at a level that is probably a little over their heads.

A-Rod is jacking out home runs and that's nice to see, but he isn't fully back yet. He is still pulling everything and you can definitely see that on a few swings where he rolls over a soft grounder to the left side or a lazy fly to center when he would normally shoot that ball into the right-center field gap.

Tonight they look to Phil Hughes. In all likelihood this is Hughes final start before he heads back to Scranton to make room for Chien-Ming Wang. His return is inevitable, but it would do good for Hughes' confidence to give the Yankees pause when filling out the paperwork. He faces an O's offense that demolished him in Baltimore the last time they met.

Hopefully the kid has watched some tape and taken a lesson or two into today.

3 comments:

Dennis said...

No doubt Sabathia and Texiera have moved past their slow starts, but what about Burnett? I have not forgotten our bet.

Peter said...

I forgot how many games does he need to win?

I think A.J. has been A.J. though. Flashes here and there. He'll go on a tear at some point again. Last start he pitched we enough to win last start and the one before he pitched well but went up against Halladay and Girardi left him in too long because the bullpen was depleted.

He still has time. I'll keep saying that till August.

Dennis said...

I bet you a quarter that Pavano would win more games than Burnett.