Freddy Garcia could tell early on that it was going to be one of the longest short nights — or was it one of the shortest long nights? — of his career. First batter of the game, 2-and-2 count on Jacoby Ellsbury, and he broke off a pretty splitter, one he could see wasn’t just dipping off the table but diving toward the ground.
“A good pitch,” he would call it. “A very good pitch.”
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but Russell Martin, Garcia’s catcher, was in no position to describe it. Because by the time it reached a set of human hands, the baseball was about 15 rows behind the SONY sign in right field. It was 1-0, Sox. Before a substantial sum of the 48,450 at Yankee Stadium had settled in, it would be 4-0.
Bad night at the big yard for Garcia. Bad night in the big rivalry for the Yankees. The Red Sox beat them 6-4, the sixth win in seven games this year for them, fourth in a row at Yankee Stadium. Garcia was only around for five outs worth, by which time it was already 4-1, by which time you could already sense a buzz traveling around the ballpark.
From the jump this year, the Yankees have had one eye on the schedule in front of them and one eye on the back three-fifths of their rotation. Early last December, of course, the Yankees envisioned a rotation that would bedazzle even the most jaundiced eyes, a lyrical fivesome that would’ve rolled off the tongue: Sabathia/Lee/Burnett/Pettitte/Hughes . . .
But that was December.
This is June, and the Yankees are still in first place despite Garcia’s session of live batting practice last night, and they are there in large part because the replacements in that elaborate scheme — Garcia, Bartolo Colon, Ivan Nova — have played up, some to an almost otherworldly degree.
“It’s been a very pleasant surprise,” is the way manager Joe Girardi described things before the game, and regardless of what happened across the next 3½ hours the sentiment still applies. When Cliff Lee bailed, when Andy Pettitte retired, and when Phil Hughes’ arm started to betray him, the Yankees could have been in an unfixable fix.
Instead, they are in first place.
The question, of course, is how legitimate the arms really are. Garcia, Colon and Nova all pitched well on the West Coast swing that brought the Yankees six wins in nine games, their only losses coming at the hands of likely All-Stars Jared Weaver, Felix Hernandez, and Michael Pineda. The problem? The Mariners, A’s and Angels have three of the worst offenses in baseball. Was it a mirage?
We will know a lot more about that in the days to come. Derek Jeter’s pursuit of 3,000 hits might be the consuming narrative of the 10-game homestand that began yesterday, but the more relevant one may be this: with the Sox, Indians and Rangers in town, the Yankees will face offenses that approach their own.
Which is to say: offenses that will force their pitchers to pitch.
All of the pitchers.
“I know I have to be better than this,” Garcia said. “This isn’t acceptable to me or to the team. We all know that.”
His meltdown happened to come a day after two-fifths of the Yankees’ dream rotation were in the news. Pettitte played golf at Yogi Berra’s charity event in Montclair, N.J., then told Michael Kay on the radio: “I’m just telling you right now, I don’t think I will ever pitch again.”
Lee, meanwhile, righted himself against the Dodgers after surrendering 10 runs his last two starts. This time he scattered seven hits in seven innings and struck out 10, and afterward he said, “I felt like the deeper I got in the game, the better I got with my command.”
Hughes? He’s closing in on a rehab start, though it’s anyone’s guess what he’s going to look like once he starts facing angry bats again. December’s rotation belongs to the stars and the saloons now, a forever game of what what-if.
June’s rotation still has a few more questions. They have been camouflaged for most of the season. The Red Sox merely drew them out in the open last night. They will stay there awhile.