Once Lyle Overbay became yesterday’s lucky contest winner — “Get released by another team, join the Yankees and become a Bronx hero!” — the Yankees edged the Blue Jays once again, 3-2 at Yankee Stadium, to lift their overall record to 15-9 and mark in one-run games to 4-0.
Ah, the one-run games. A good showing in these nail-biters reflects your team’s strong character, right, resurgent Yankee Vernon Wells?
“I think it shows that we have a closer that’s pretty good,” Wells said.
Well, yes. That, too.
The Yankees’ fantastic April — “fantastic” meaning “remote from reality,” as per the Internet — has a base of authenticity. The guys who were supposed to be here, in other words, are backing up the guys who are here only as emergency replacements and playing out of their minds.
“We had the offensive explosion really in Cleveland, but we’ve scored enough runs to win games,” manager Joe Girardi said. “There have been some guys who got off to slow starts, in a sense. [Ivan] Nova, [Phil] Hughesie. But all in all, they’ve put it together as a group.”
The closer Wells mentioned, Mariano Rivera, threw a perfect ninth inning to pick up his ninth save in nine chances. Yes, there’s about a 75 percent chance that Rivera is actually a cyborg created by the late George Steinbrenner, but still, didn’t we think he’d have a little hiccup upon his return from last year’s traumatic right knee injury?
“He’s a little bit like Jete and Andy,” said Girardi, of course referring to Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte. “There’s not much that they can do that’s going to surprise you.”
Hughes, matching up against a reigning Cy Young Award winner for the second time in two starts, held his own against former Met R.A. Dickey, just as he did five days prior against Tampa Bay’s David Price. Hughes still has zero victories on the season, but that speaks more for the statistic than for his pitching. The right-hander allowed two runs and seven hits in six innings, walking one (intentionally) and striking out nine, lowering his ERA from 5.14 to 4.67.
Boone Logan preceded Overbay’s two-run, go-ahead, seventh-inning homer off Dickey with a scoreless top of the framer, thereby getting credit for the win, and David Robertson contributed a perfect eighth. In all, the Yankees’ team ERA is 3.79. That tied them with Tampa Bay for eighth in the American League going into Detroit’s night game against Atlanta, which shows just how pitcher-friendly baseball has been this month. With the Yankees’ 112 runs scored placing them fourth in the league (again, prior to Detroit’s game), however, their satisfactory pitching has created the margin of error the Yankees have needed.
Besides, statistics get skewed this early in the year, and as Girardi mentioned, the Yankees’ two-game, 25-run outburst makes the team’s offense look better than it actually has been. Similarly, the Yankees’ pitchers gave up 33 runs in the first five games of the season and 64 in the 19 games since then.
“If they do give up early runs, they’re able to just keep that team there and not allow them to add on runs,” Wells said of his pitching teammates. “Those add-on runs can become key at the end of the game. You don’t start realizing it until you come into games like this.”
During spring training, Hughes said, there was much chatter among the team’s leadership about the reduced expectations from the outside. The message was, Hughes explained: “Don’t let this stuff get to us. We know we have guys who can fill in and do the job. It starts with pitching.
“If we pitch the way we know our rotation can, and our bullpen obviously, then we’re going to have a good chance to win every day regardless of, ‘We’re not leading the league in home runs’ or whatever it is.”
Actually, the Yankees are leading the league with 35 home runs. They’re getting the pitching, too, though.
Last year’s Orioles, fueled by unlikely performances and a great bullpen, put together a remarkable, 29-9 record in one-run games. For sure, they built up confidence with each win, just as these Yankees seem to be doing; they trailed the Blue Jays in all four games of this series and came out on top each time.
Still, one-run wins are near-losses, one-run losses near-wins. The Yankees simply can’t count on guys like Overbay and Brennan Boesch (who also homered off Dickey) to keep bailing them out until the injured regulars return; the ’12 Orioles’ formula is too difficult to replicate.
The Yankees’ pitchers, though, will need to keep delivering in order to turn this fantastic month into a fantastic season.