Yankees Update

Jeter Hits 2500th Hit

It's been a lackluster season in some ways for both the Yankees and Jeter, but Jeter did manage to make milestone by hitting his 2500th hit of his career. As usual, he gave his patented vanilla-flavoured-athlete-comment:

BALTIMORE (AP)—Derek Jeter is honored to be part of an exclusive club with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. For now, however, the New York Yankees shortstop is more interested in keeping his team in the playoff hunt.

Jeter got his 2,500th hit Friday night, joining Gehrig (2,721) and Ruth (2,518) as the only players to reach the mark with the Yankees.

“Anytime your name is with someone like Gehrig and Ruth, it’s pretty special,” Jeter said. “To be quite honest with you, I don’t even think about it much because we’re trying to win games here. That’s something you reflect on maybe when your career’s over.”

New York entered Saturday trailing Boston by six games in the AL wild-card race. Jeter is doing his best to keep the Yankees’ hopes alive—he was batting .486 over his last eight games to raise his average 15 points to .296.

Jeter is the 88th player in baseball history to have 2,500 hits. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, in the last 65 years only two players were younger than Jeter (34 years, 57 days) when they reached the 2,500-hit plateau—Hank Aaron and Robin Yount.

“When you think about Derek Jeter, he’s been consistent through his whole career,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “He stayed healthy, plays everyday, works very hard at what he does. There aren’t a lot of people who have 2,500 hits. Shows you what kind of player he is. Been a very good player for a long time and he’s got a ways to go, still.”

God, the boringness of the comments from Jeter have been just as relentless over the years. It's like he took the 'Bull Durham' dictum of "give boring interviews" to heart at some point in his infancy and stuck to it for 30+years. Just like clockwork, he knocks out a milestone hit and says essentially the same thing he did when he knocked out his 2000th.
Well, we still love you Jetes.

Carl Pavano Sighting

Amazingly, the season has come to this: the rotation consists of Moose, Pettite, Sir Sidney Ponson, Darrell Rasner, and now Carl Pavano. Wang, and Joba are sidelined with injuries, Phil Hughes too, but he was effectively demoted, just as IPK was; and Dan Giese who did so well is out with injury as well.

So, Carl Pavano it is is.

BALTIMORE (TICKER) —With the New York Yankees in desperate need of starting pitching, the team is turning to an unlikely source - Carl Pavano.

Pavano, who has not pitched in the major leagues since April 2007, was activated from the 60-day disabled list and returned to the Yankees’ injury-riddled rotation Saturday against the Baltimore Orioles.

New York’s Opening Day starter last season, Pavano underwent “Tommy John” surgery two starts into 2007. It was supposed to be a comeback season for Pavano, who missed the entire 2006 campaign with a variety of ailments, including two broken ribs suffered in an automobile accident.

But that comeback was put on hold indefinitely, as the 6-5 starter needed more than a year of rehab and recovery. In five rehab starts at Class A Charleston and Class AA Trenton since July, Pavano went 1-1 with a 3.31 ERA in 19 innings. In his most recent tune-up, he struck out six over six innings for Trenton, giving up a one run.

That was good enough for Yankees manager Joe Girardi, who is hurting for depth on his pitching staff. Ace Chien-Ming Wang has been out since mid-June with a torn tendon in his right foot, and second-year phenom Joba Chamberlain is sidelined with tendinitis in his rotator cuff.

Top prospect Phil Hughes, who has been nursing a fractured rib, was a candidate to start, but his recent rehab outings have not been promising.

That leaves it up to Pavano, who is 5-6 in 19 starts over the last three seasons.

Pavano signed his lucrative four-year, $39.95 million deal with the Yankees after a breakout 2004 season in which he went 18-8 for the Florida Marlins and finished sixth in the National League Cy Young Award voting.

He began his Yankees career in stellar fashion, throwing 6 1/3 strong innings to defeat the division-rival Boston Red Sox - who also had coveted him during the offseason but lost out in the bidding war for his services - in the second game of the 2005 season.

Since, it’s been all downhill for Pavano, who went 4-6 with a 4.77 ERA in 17 starts in 2005 and missed the last two months of the season with an injured right shoulder.

Thus in the 4 years, he's made half a season's worth of starts in which he's been just under league average. Had he done so for the other 3 and a half seasons worth of starts that got given to the assorted combo of Shawn Chacon, Aaron Small (who both did okay by the Yanks), Darrell Rasner, and whoever else that the waiver-wire scouring threw up, this might have been a sort of all right contract.

I know that earlier in the year I said if the Yankees ever needed to go so deep as to require Pavano to pitch at any point in the season, this season would be a disaster. Well, it is that disaster now.

Melky Cabrera
I jinxed the guy at the beginning of May. He did look very good at that point in time.
Since then, he's been nothing short of a disaster, so he finds himself in AAA Scranton Wilkes-Barre. In his place is Brett Gardner but it remains to be seen if he can do significantly better than Melky.

I think I pointed out the last time I delved into it, but his BABIP has been disappointing for this season - .264 is 36 points lower than his norm of about .300. If you put those 36 points back on to his line it would amount to an Ave of .278 and an OBP of .363; which is sort of what the Yankees were looking at on paper as the season started. His ISO is around .110 so his SLG would have been about .470, so he should've been about a .830 OPS player. Instead he turned in .633.

I'm not really willing to write the guy's future off, but this year sure was an unmitigated disaster for young Melky. Wouldn't you know it, he's killing the ball in AAA.

Play Off Odds
The erstwhile fellas at RLYW have a beautiful pie chart showing the Yankee's chances of making the playoffs. It's not encouraging:

You'd have to say they're toast.
I don't think I've felt this toasty in a long, long, long time. I'm kind of resigned to it in as much as there hasn't been a Yankee team with enough pitching since 2003. This year was going to be transitional, and a lot of things did go wrong.