This week’s Pop Quiz question comes to us from Gary Mintz of South Huntington:
In a 2014 episode of “The Goldbergs,” Murray (Jeff Garlin) teaches his sons the birds and the bees by using 1980s baseball players’ names for body parts. Name the five players mentioned.
For sure, Masahiro Tanaka has surpassed expectations this season, but let’s not forget that last winter, helped by revised rules to the posting system, he generated a bidding war that was unprecedented for a Japanese player.
I recently encountered an official from a team that went aggressively after Tanaka, only to fall short to the Yankees.
“Did you think he’d be this good?” I asked.
“Yes,” the official responded, without blinking.
So if we’re going to discuss the most shocking contributor to this Yankees season, we might just have to place Chase Whitley above Tanaka.
It cost the Yankees $20 million (paid to the Rakuten Golden Eagles) just to sign Tanaka before they actually agreed to contract terms. Last winter, at the Rule 5 draft, any of the other 29 teams could have taken Whitley for $50,000; the Yankees didn’t protect him on their 40-man roster. All 29 passed.
And now Whitley, mostly a reliever in the minor leagues, owns a 3-0 record and 2.56 ERA in seven major league starts after beating the Blue Jays Wednesday night. He owns a very healthy 6.5 strikeout-to-walk ratio, and his FIP (a metric on the ERA scale that removes fielding from the equation) is 2.71. So it’s not like his results are illusory; he’s been about as good as he seems.
How is this happening? I wondered, good-naturedly, whether Whitley is the Kenny Bania of the Yankees’ pitching staff. Whether, pitching behind Tanaka in the Yankees’ starting rotation, like Bania riding on Seinfeld’s coattails, he is a time-slot hit.
Clubs often discuss the idea of planning their rotation to mix up looks; Tanaka started the fourth game of the season partly because the Yankees didn’t want to place him right after second-game starter Hiroki Kuroda, whose repertoire is similar to that of his fellow Japanese right-hander. So is it possible hitters are so plugged into trying to beat Tanaka one night that their timing is off the next night when Whitley shows up?
“It’s hard to say,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said after Wednesday’s game. “[People say] you pitch behind [R.A.] Dickey [and you benefit], but you can’t say that that always holds up, either.”
I spoke with a scout from a third team before the game, and he agreed a pitcher can benefit from facing an opponent the day after the opponent’s batters have encountered someone as dominant as Tanaka. There can be a hangover effect, the scout thought.
Whitley himself thinks there’s something to the idea, though he approached it from a different perspective. Of his seven starts, six have come in the same series (and therefore against the same opponent) as Tanaka; he opened the series in St. Louis against the Cardinals on May 26, and he pitched decently then, too.
“To watch him allows me to watch what he’ll do in certain situations,” Whitley said of Tanaka. “My changeup is nowhere near his split. It’s on a whole other level. But it goes down. My pitch goes down. It’s kind of fun to watch how he attacks a guy with two strikes, in whatever situation.”
Whereas Jerry held contempt for Bania and tried to sabotage his hit status, there’s every indication that Tanaka and the Yankees are happy for Whitley to benefit, however slightly, from his time slot. And to be clear, Whitley obviously deserves the bulk of the credit for his performance. Gibbons mentioned how impressed he was with Whitley’s slider.
So we can say the Yankees have two of the biggest pitching surprises in baseball — one in the high-rent district and one in the low-rent.
This American League East continues to be most baseball’s most fascinating division. Consider that if the Rays wind up in last place, which sure seems like a good bet, the AL East will have seen four different clubs finish last over four years’ time: Baltimore in 2011, Boston in 2012, Toronto in 2013 and now Tampa Bay. No other division has been as cutthroat.
The Blue Jays remain atop the division, but Gibbons was disturbed Wednesday night as his team lost again to the Yankees even while throwing ace Mark Buehrle against the rookie Whitley. Toronto now has lost eight of 11 games, and in New York, dating back to 2012, the Jays have lost 14 straight.
The roster has been dramatically revamped since 2012; Gibbons wasn’t even managing them at that point. Gibbons is concerned, though, about the meaning of his team’s Big Apple struggles.
“Maybe we don’t like the bright lights of Broadway,” he said. “That’s all I can figure. It’s a mystery.”
It’s not like the Yankees have blown away the Blue Jays in these two games. Tuesday was all about Tanaka, and Wednesday’s contest was close until Brian McCann’s unlikely bases-clearing triple gave the Yankees breathing room in the seventh.
Yet the Blue Jays look and feel like a vulnerable team right now. And while the Yankees are only 15-16 at home this year, they nevertheless seem to hold a homefield advantage over the team directly in front of them in the standings.
Your Pop Quiz answer is: Mike Schmidt, Wade Boggs, Orel Hershiser, Steve Carlton and Bo Jackson.
If you have a tidbit that correlates baseball with popular culture, please send it to me at kdavidoff@nypost.com.