DETROIT — How fitting that, with Alex Rodriguez on the shelf, this exciting game last night came down to the Yankees’ new lightning rod.
And just as the pessimists would script it, Curtis Granderson skied a pop fly that Prince Fielder caught, securing the Tigers’ 6-5 victory over the Yankees at Comerica Park and giving the Yankees 12 losses in 18 games.
“Game of inches, as they say,” an upbeat Granderson said.
Yeah, the Yankees’ new leadoff hitter isn’t doing much to endear himself to Yankee Universe. His 0-for-5 last night featured two strikeouts and the last out, which extinguished a ninth-inning rally against Detroit closer Jose Valverde.
In this five-game stretch as the Yankees’ leadoff hitter, covering 23 plate appearances, Granderson is hitting .100 (2-for-20) with three walks and six strikeouts. His only two hits are singles.
“I don’t see a big thing,” Joe Girardi said. “He’s not making solid contact. That seems to be the difference.”
“I’m just missing balls,” Granderson said. “Balls I should be hitting, I’m just not hitting them.”
It’s those complete misses that seem to be driving Yankees’ fans particularly batty.
“Obviously, you don’t want a guy to strike out two or three times a game,” Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long said. “You would like to keep that manageable and under control.” But Long also said, “You take the good with the bad. The guy’s [tied for] second in baseball in home runs.”
The stigma once attached to strikeouts is as dead as Ty Cobb. Nowadays, when teams prioritize on-base percentage, teams will accept their players striking out as long as going deep into counts also produces a nice serving of bases on balls.
In that regard, Granderson is experiencing his worst season as a Yankee. He now has 135 strikeouts against 58 walks, a ratio of 2.33 strikeouts per walk. Last year, that ratio stood at 1.99, and it was 2.19 in 2010.
You can thank the rest of the American League East for giving the Yankees, now 63-46, room for error that they apparently need. They led the Orioles by 4 1/2 games, while the Rays lurked at six games behind.
Consider that, a year ago at this point in the schedule, the Yankees were four games better at 67-42 — and yet they trailed the Red Sox (68-41) by a game. Two years ago, the 2010 Yankees held a 68-41 record and led the pesky Rays (67-43) by just a game and a half.
These didn’t rank as crises at the time, because settling for the wild card seemed perfectly acceptable. Now, however, under the new playoff structure — with two wild cards facing off in one do-or-die game while the division champions chillax— winning the AL East has taken on far greater importance.
You can blame Granderson only to an extent. The Yankees averaged 4.81 runs per game with A-Rod on the active roster, through his break of a bone in his left hand on July 24, and 4.85 since the active home run leader went on the disabled list. The pitchers have been the greater culprit, with last night’s starter Phil Hughes displaying a standard symptom — an inability to put hitters away with two strikes — and fading out after 102 pitches and just 4 1/3 innings.
With top pitchers CC Sabathia and Hiroki Kuroda going tonight and tomorrow afternoon, respectively, we’ll see if the Yankees can stop this bleeding. Yet the most focus will continue to be on Granderson, especially as long as the Yankees keep trying to use him as their leadoff hitter against right-handed starters.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m hitting first, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth,” Granderson said. “If you’re not hitting, you’re not hitting.”
And if you’re on center stage while the Yankees aren’t winning, then you’re going to get more than your share of the blame.