Thursday, July 21, 2005 |
The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Angels 6, Yankees 5
And yes, Chronicler, I'll take you up on your offer. :-)
So the Angels got one of their miraculous whuppings off against the Yanks. The going against Johnson didn't go so well, and in fact was hindered by a miscalled ground rule double that occurred only because of a jackass Yankee fan in the front row who swatted the ball back onto the field. The umpires called it a ground rule double, with the Yankee fan duly escorted from the park. Providing the usual exemplary behavior, said fan swapped high fives with the other ill-mannered cretins wearing the interlocked NY in the stands.
So, yeah, that Vlad dinger was extra sweet. I feel a little bad for it to happen off Tom Gordon, a good man on an obnoxious team constructed, as Jay Jaffe put it, "with all the grace of a congressional spending bill". Johnson's a good pitcher now, but wait until late September, when the weather starts cooling down again and his knee and back and whatever else start to freeze up. And let us not forget the inattention to detail that continues to dog the Yankee bullpen: when guys like Scott Proctor (5.54 ERA) and Buddy Groom (5.11 ERA) get the ball in close and tight games, late innings relief becomes the kind of adventure Joe Torre would just as soon avoid.
It turned out that Randy Johnson tweaked his back on one of his last pitches. While he claims to be fine, I personally have no objections to him nursing an injury through his next start or two. Let's see how he does Wednesday agains the Twinkies. Maybe he's fine... and maybe he's 41.
I got through the late innings of this game in the car, which would have been okay, except for the fact that I got stuck in a 20-minute wait on the 405 as an accident shut down all but two lanes of the freeway. It's one thing to be stuck in traffic, and it's one thing for Frankie to make the save "interesting"... but it's a vein-buster to have to deal with both at once.
Update: Our next door neighbor works at the stadium as an Aramark employee, and just got back from the park. Helen was outside taking out the trash and bumped into her, and how was the game? "Those Yankee fans are really obnoxious! And they're all drunk!" Guess she hadn't been to enough games before. "Yeah, they hired extra police." Surprised? I wasn't...
Update 7/22: Interesting graf from ESPN:
Torre was on the verge of summoning Gordon [in a game against the Rangers that the Yankees would ultimately lose 2-1], but has been reluctant to lean on the right-hander. One club official hinted that Gordon's shoulder "is getting close" to DL-type fatigue, which has forced Torre to expose his bullpen's soft underbelly -- Franklin, Scott Proctor and Buddy Groom -- more than he'd like to. In fact, Franklin was demoted to Triple-A Columbus Wednesday. Left-hander Alex Graman was called up to take his place.Recap
: 7/23/2005 01:49:00 PMNewer› ‹Older
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