Jun 12, 2007

My heart jumped into my throat

...when Tony Clark hit that liner (that I was sure would tie the game) that landed in Bobby Abreu's glove.

The turning point of the game (after Abreu's three-run shot of course - could he be any hotter?) was something fairly innocuous: Farnsworth's 3-2 pitch that Orlando Hudson swung threw. Arizona's Stephen Drew had already led off the inning with a double, and no one in the stadium thought Farns could throw three strikes, but he did somehow! And that's the biggest reason he got by with a fastball down the middle (and the fact that it was 97 mph).

Wang was just ok against a poor Arizona offense. His slider wasn't as sharp as it has been, but his changeup served to keep hitters off balance. Several nice defensive plays were made behind him - namely two by Cairo (who has to play 1b for every Wang start, at least until D-Mint returns) and a leaping grab by Jeter that saved a run.

This was a matchup of baseball's best groundball pitchers (Webb ranks first in groundball rate, Wang fourth) - and they produced 21 groundball outs between them but surprisingly Wang had more fly outs (10) than ground outs (9). This was the first chance I've had to see last year's NL Cy Young winner, but I wasn't that impressed. His fastball tops out at 90 mph, and he throws a good curve and great changeup. The Yanks pounced on him for three first inning runs but he shut them down after that. If he was in the AL East (and they were familiar with him), I'm confident they would have hit him even better.

Back to .500!
Seven and counting...


- Elsewhere, Joba Chamberlain dominated in his Double-A debut tonight: 5 ip, 3 h, 0 r, 9 k, 2 bb. Yeah, wow.

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