Keidel: Yankees Can Make Statement With Strong Showing At Fenway
By Jason Keidel
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Once a month or so, Mother Nature takes a giant eraser to the baseball calendar, tossing a wet blanket over the Northeast, from Boston to Flushing, giving fans a few empty hours to think.
Number geeks assure us that all games are equal. They offer the sterile certainty that a baseball game in April and August are of identical import. Yet we treat games in late summer with apocalyptic fervor. If all games are indeed the same, why do we drool, burp, clap and shriek at our televisions on Sept. 20, while we don't even know the standings on April 20?
Every year we get an ephemeral, yet incurable, case of Pennant Fever. Wrapped in the flag of our favorite club, we abuse our remote in the name of our pastime. Forget the fact that the phrase is misleading, if not a misnomer. The phrase is a relic, a nod to nostalgia, more romance than reality. No team has actually won a league pennant in September since 1968.
So does this week's series between the Yankees and Red Sox at Fenway Park really count as a couple games, after Tuesday's opener was rained out? Or are the Yankees already in the business of making statements? Boston (11-8) expected to be well above .500 from whistle to gun. But few thought New York (11-7) would even be slightly ahead. Not before the season. And certainly not after their wretched 1-4 start.
So it says here this early-season spat matters. Even in April. Even with 19 games to play against their eternal tormentors. It matters, even if more to the Yankees than the Red Sox or the rest of baseball. It's about confidence, the sense that the Yanks can with better clubs until their legion of hot prospects mature into full-blown, full-grown Bombers.
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The Yankees have taken a page out of Boston's book. It's a book that was first authored by their former boss, Theo Epstein, who has morphed into the unquestioned king of the sport, the architect nonpareil, leading two franchises strapped with biblical World Series droughts to their backs into the utopia of world championships. And to do it with the Cubs and Red Sox just makes it doubly, exponentially, if not infinitely more incredible.
Epstein has the Cubs not only as World Series champs, but still loaded for bear (sorry!). And he did it by cultivating the best farm system in the sport. Just look across the field and find young studs are growing like grass around the diamond.
Now it's the Yankees with the best farm system in the sport, according to exhaustive research by Bleacher Report. Keep in mind their batting and pitching stats don't include a slew of prospects who are lighting up the minors and have yet to join the big-league club. Like Gleyber Torres, who just won MVP of the Arizona Fall League, shortly after his 20th birthday. Like top pitching prospect Justus Sheffield. Like fellow pitching prospect James Kaprielian, who was dazzling scouts before Tommy John surgery just sidelined him. Like Clint Frazier and Blake Rutherford and Chance Adams.
These Yanks may be hitting a bit better than projected. They're fifth in Major League Baseball in average runs scored (5.11), fifth in homers per game (1.44), fifth in walks per game (4.0) and seventh in hits per game (8.83).
But it's the pitching that has this fan baffled. They are second in the entire sport in ERA (3.23), first in strikeouts to walks (3.53) second in walks per nine innings (2.71), fourth in strikeouts per nine innings (9.58) and fifth in hits allowed per nine innings (7.50).
It's their dearth of decent pitching -- or so we thought -- that would keep the Yanks from contending in 2017, with a keen eye on 2018, when their army of young guns would be more focused on the Bronx than Trenton or Scranton.
George Will often says that every MLB team will win 60 games and lose 60 games. So it's what they do in between the separates the champs from chumps. Maybe Mr. Will was onto more than he intended. Maybe the difference between the team that wins 90 and loses 90 is not as much talent as temerity.
April games indeed matter. And if the Yanks are into making statements, they can start Wednesday at Fenway.
Please follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
