CC RIDER: Led by ace CC Sabathia, who will start tonight in Baltimore after yesterday’s rainout in The Bronx, the Yankees’ pitching — starters and relievers — has propelled them to the AL East lead. (Paul J. Bereswill)
At 42, Darren Oliver is baseball’s second-oldest player, behind only 43-year-old Mariano Rivera. A 20-year big-leaguer, he has drifted in and out of the Yankees’ scope, with his many stops including the 1996 Rangers, the 2002 Red Sox, the 2006 Mets, the 2009 Angels, the 2010 Rangers and the current Blue Jays.
So yesterday, before the Yankees postponed their game with Toronto due to rain, I asked Oliver what to make of this 2013 season. The Blue Jays, the champions of last winter, reside in the American League East basement at 17-26 — 10 games behind the Yankees (27-16), who endured what felt like a brutal offseason.
Is there something truly magical about these Yankees? Is there a common thread all these years that goes beyond the mere numbers, which allows the team to buy low on Vernon Wells and see his stock skyrocket?
Oliver smiled and shook his head.
“People get too caught up in everything,” he said. “It’s always the pitching.”
Now that we’re more than 25 percent through this campaign, the numbers — after misleading us for a while — bear out the meat of Oliver’s belief.
The Yankees own a 3.53 team ERA, which ranked them second in the AL, behind only Texas (3.38), at the outset of action yesterday. Their starters are at 3.59 in 255 2/3 innings and their relievers 3.41 in 129 1/3 innings.
“We’ve been pitching great,” said CC Sabathia, who will now start tonight’s series opener in Baltimore. “It’s fun to watch. We knew that, coming into the year, for us to have a good year, it was going to depend on our pitching. So far we’ve been pretty good. So hopefully, we can keep that up.”
Their 184 runs scored, 4.28 per game, placed them eighth in the former category and 10th in the latter entering yesterday’s games. When Hal Steinbrenner calls his club “scrappy,” that’s a polite way of saying the Yankees’ pitchers have given the decimated lineup the coverage it has needed.
It took a while for the reality to match the perception. That’s because the 2013 Yankees’ first five games proved a pitching nightmare, as they were outscored by a collective 33-17 to Boston and Detroit, and they immediately followed that with a three-game offensive outburst, putting up 32 runs against the Tigers and Cleveland. So early in the season, your numbers and league rankings get skewed by such extremes.
Now, though, having scored four or fewer runs 28 times (65.1 percent of their games) and having allowed four or fewer runs 30 times (69.8 percent), the truth is out there. The Yankees knew, after losing so many established hitters to free agency or injury, their run production would decline precipitously from last year’s 4.96 runs per game. They counted on their pitching to be even better — they had a 3.85 team ERA in 2012 — even though their only major “additions” were re-signing Rivera and Andy Pettitte and hoping the aging duo stayed off the disabled list.
Pettitte, after recording a 3.83 ERA in eight starts, went on the DL Friday with a strained trapezius muscle. Rivera has a perfect 16 saves in 16 chances, leading the AL. The Yankees have been good enough and have received more than enough support up and down the pitching staff.
Consider the Blue Jays rolled into The Bronx on Friday having won four straight and seven of 10, finally seeming to get their act together. Then they scored a total of two runs in a pair of losses to the Yankees, in what turned into a reduced series sweep.
“[Hiroki] Kuroda was really good [Friday] night,” Toronto manager John Gibbons said yesterday. “And then [Saturday, David] Phelps did a nice job.”
And so the Blue Jays’ climb grew steeper and the Yankees advanced a couple of more yards.
The Yankees think their environment helps people such as Wells and Travis Hafner, established players on the apparent downside, thrive. Oliver, who has played for nine teams — three separate times with the Rangers — isn’t buying it. Wells, he said, “is a good player, anyway. He had some rough ones in Anaheim, but he was a good player before that. They just don’t hand out $100-million contracts to anybody.”
It’s a good discussion. Yet it wouldn’t be a very prominent one, not one amidst a first-place team, if not for Wells’ teammates on the mound.