Not looking so good in pinstripes
Short series, small snapshot, but the Yankees don't inspire great confidence about being the AL East winner after losing two out of three to the Red Sox.
The reasons are plentiful. After Chien-Ming Wang's two-hitter Friday night, the Yankees' pitching didn't wow. This is no surprise. Phil Hughes, the youngest pitcher in the majors (21), whom the Yankees are hanging their hat on as a possible No. 1 starter down the road, has far to go. He was awful last night in an 8-5 loss to the Red Sox, lasting only two innings and helping to hand the Sox a 7-1 advantage after three innings, one they never relinquished.
Veteran Mike Mussina pitched well for five innings Saturday before imploding after a poor managerial decision by Joe Girardi in the sixth let him face Manny Ramírez, who hit a two-run double. It seems the most you can rely on from Mussina is five or six good innings. That will lead to lots of bullpen work for the Yankees, which never ends well.
The Yankees are banged up, with shortstop Derek Jeter, catcher Jorge Posada, and now backup catcher Jose Molina (hamstring) down. And lastly, Girardi is coming under close scrutiny after making the decision to pitch to Ramírez Saturday.
The 6-7 Yanks, who have yet to score more than six runs in a game so far (the longest they have gone without doing so in a game since 1990), limp into Tampa Bay tonight for a two-game series. Their starting rotation is up and down, and if they can't get the game to Joba Chamberlain and Mariano Rivera, it's not going to be an easy road.
"It's early, 13 games into the season, so we need to get our guys out there healthy again," said the Yanks' Johnny Damon. "We need Derek and Jorge to be healthy so we can start outing things together."
Hughes lasted only three innings and allowed six hits and three earned runs in his previous start, a 5-2 loss to the Royals April 8. Last night he allowed six hits and six earned runs as he dropped to 0-2 with an ERA of 9.00. When critics asked at the start of the season where the Yankees' innings were going to come from, this is what they were thinking of.
Girardi remains optimistic that Hughes will turn it around.
"I actually believe he threw a little better than he did in Kansas City," Girardi said. "So I don't think it had anything to do with the surroundings."
Girardi said Hughes will stay in the rotation and he also added, "I believe in all of my players."
Maybe a little too much.
Girardi will be under microscope because he's replacing a legend - Joe Torre.
The former manager's decisions were rarely criticized, but Saturday all of New York felt the same way - Ramírez should have been walked with first base open after he'd hit a ball off the top of the Volvo sign in his previous at-bat against Mussina. The Moose talked the new manager into letting him pitch to Ramírez. The results were devastating.
There's no doubt that what the veteran Mussina told Girardi after he went out to visit the 251-game winner made up his mind on whether to pitch to Ramirez. It was a case of the pitcher's opinion outweighing everything, including the manager's gut feeling about the situation. Girardi said he's slept better than he did Saturday night, but before yesterday's game he calmly addressed the results of the decision head-on.
"I'm not going to second-guess what I did," he said. "It was based on the information I had at the time. I thought it was the best decision at the time. I think you can look back at any decision you make in your life and hindsight is 20-20. There's a lot of things I can look back at in my life and say if I had done this, this wouldn't have happened."
Just a few days before, Toronto manager John Gibbons had made the decision to walk Ramírez with a base open in the third inning of a game. In that case, the right decision was made and the Blue Jays won.
"I figured when the day was over, it would be second-guessed," said Girardi, who was Manager of the Year in 2006 with Florida but then was fired because he couldn't see eye-to-eye with Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria. "There are decisions you make every day, depending on how they work out. At the time of the game, I knew it would happen [being second-guessed]. As a manager it's gonna happen a lot."
Girardi said he was second-guessed in Florida, but there wasn't as much pressure there. He wasn't managing in the AL East, where every move, every at-bat matters. The Marlins were a young team with a young staff. If a situation arose where there was a Ramírez-caliber hitter up, normally Girardi would just pitch to him.
"The most critical person I have to worry about is myself," he said. "How it affects me is what I worry about."
Asked whether he goes into a game thinking there's one player he's not going to let beat him, he said, "Sometimes you do, but not all the time. But there are certain situations you go into certain ballparks where I'm not going to let this guy beat me. But not always. I didn't have that thought [Saturday] because David Ortiz can beat you, Kevin Youkilis can beat you, there's a lot of guys on this club that can beat you."
Not a bad answer. But Ramírez is right there with Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez as the greatest righthanded hitters in the game.
Nobody in the East has their act together quite yet. The Orioles, tied atop the division with Toronto and who started strong but have slipped a bit lately, are proof of that. The Blue Jays got B.J. Ryan back yesterday and should be tough. The Yanks, Red Sox, and Rays are feeling their way through the early going.
But in New York, don't expect patience. Right now, the offense isn't producing as needed with the pitching a bit subpar. Injuries are creeping in to an older lineup.
It doesn't feel good. And right now, it doesn't look good for the men in pinstripes.
Nick Cafardo can be reached at cafardo@globe.com.
