April was a very straightforward month for the Yankees. There was still that lingering sensation that they had coasted through Spring Training and that too much was being taken for granted and assumed. May was to be wake up time but for now let’s look back at April and see what was going right….. and wrong.
The Yankees came out of Spring training with pretty much the roster you would have predicted if you’d have sat down with pencil and scrap paper and roughed it out before they began.
And there’s something worrying about that……
So we have surveyed the batters, now onto the pitchers…..
So the baseball season is over. The St Louis Cardinals who performed very well in the Series are the champions and probably deservedly so. It still sticks in my gut a little that the eventual winners only made the playoffs as the wild card but with the wildcard system likely to expand in 2013, me complaining about that is about as meaningful as a National League fan complaining about the Designated Hitter rule – so I shall make no more noise in that regard. The system allows for that possibility and it has happened. C’est la vie.
Whilst the Yankee bats were quiet in September, the pitching held its own but the makeshift starting rotation started to creak at the seams and the bullpen which had been such a nightmare in May / June continued to bail out starters who just couldn’t go as deep as they had earlier in the season…….
What to say about the Yankees in September? Well, the month was going well until they clinched the title, at which point – as he has done in previous seasons – Joe Girardi decided to avoid injuries by using the length and breadth of his extended roster. This produced a different line up every day and more defeats than wins. The team’s batting average hit a skid which it never pulled out of when the regular line-up was restored for the first round of the playoffs against Detroit in October. Whether this was due to Joe’s excessive tinkering we’ll never know……. but here’s how things looked by the end of September
Mariano Rivera finished? Well, so they were saying in the first half of August. But in reality the bullpen was probably the Yankees’ strongest asset in the dog-days of Summer as unlikely as that seemed just a couple of months ago….. Let’s see what the statistics reveal……
As August drew to a close, the Yankees were embroiled in a vital series with Boston at Fenway. It was the conclusion of a turbulent month which had seen Derek Jeter return to a higher level of form with the bat and suggestions that the Mariano Rivera era was coming to a close. Let’s see what the statistics reveal:
It needs to be observed that the Yankees’ bullpen – which at times been their great strength and other times their greatest weakness – didn’t come back from the All-star break doing quite as well as they had in the first half. Those ERAs that were 1.something became 2.something for the month of July but, overall, the team’s pitching held their own. Let’s see who did particularly well and particularly badly…….
July saw the Yankees stay close to the Red Sox and ready themselves for the big run in. It’s hard to believe that they are not going to be at least the wild card for the American League. Here are some of the reasons why:
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