How quickly did the Yankees score last night? I went from the car to the store in the middle of the first inning to buy an AM/FM radio. And when I got back to the car five minutes later, the Yanks had already scored four runs and were about to score a fifth!
I listened to some of the game on the radio at the gym, so I missed “seeing” the Yankee bats get completely shut down by R.A. Dickey after that first inning. But I did hear something interesting on the Sterling-Waldman broadcast: an interview with Felix Lopez!
Lopez, you may remember, is a senior vice president of the Yankees – and the husband of George Steinbrenner’s daughter, Jessica. And it sounded to me like the Yank front office was sending him out for a trial run as a family spokesman. Which brings up a whole lot of questions.
Like, where are Hank and Hal Steinbrenner these days? The two of them – and their very different personalites – remind me of feuding brothers Heat Miser and Snow Miser. (And now that you’ve got that song in your head, click here for the video.) Too bad Mother Nature can’t mediate in real life. But I digress.
Anyhow, Lopez told John Sterling that the Yankees were going to fix everything that is wrong with the new Stadium. Sterling, of course, said he didn’t think anything was wrong with the Cathedral! But Lopez was armed with zero specifics on what the front office was going to do. Nor was he the most eloquent spokesman – he kept on using words like “obviously” like some people say “you know.” However, the advantage Lopez does have over Lonn Trost and Randy Levine was that listening to him didn’t make your skin crawl. And when Lopez said that the team was going to listen to the fans, I kind of believed him!
So, are the Yankees 1) conceding that the new Stadium has problems, and 2) conceding that Trost and Levine aren’t very good faces for the franchise? It’s all very curious. Wonder what will happen next.
As for the game itself, Mark Teixeira sent two “Tex messages,” as John Sterling calls them, last night. That second one was a tremendous shot. It’s exciting to see what he can do when he’s “on.”
Is the reason that the first baseman is “on the Mark” because Alex Rodriguez is back in the lineup? Sure looks like it. According to the YES broadcast, in 25 games without A-Rod, Teixeira hit .198, with 5 homers and 15 RBIs. In the 10 games since, he’s hit .342, with 5 homers and 13 RBI. And the Yanks went from a 13-15 record without Alex, to a 8-2 record with him. Hmmm, who would think putting a three-time MVP back in the lineup would actually make it better?
And Phil Coke got his first save, after a few fits and starts. I thought it was cute that it was fellow rookies Ramiro Pena and Francisco Cervelli who went to the mound to calm him down when he had a case of the jitters!
What do you think? Leave us a comment!
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