A green manager, Arroyo in Arizona , Chapman out for at least 2 months with a busted eye & the first game of the season lost to frikking St. Louis… I’m not optimistic this year… 
You might find a pretty heavy concentration of Red Sox fans in the Maritime provinces, and Windsor and Essex County have many dedicated Tiger fans, but yeah, in general, Canadians go Blue Jay.
You would think Vancouver would lean Mariners, but it’s heavily Blue Jay-oriented. The Jays enjoy a nationalist advantage, I guess.
Bottom 7; Houston 6, New York 0. Gonna take some catching up to make it a ballgame.
I wonder, this being his finale season, how much rope Derek Jeter will be given. Maybe he’ll have a good year. But given his age and injury history, what happens if the Yankees get to the All -Star break and Jeter is the worst defensive shortstop in baseball and is hitting .231? Do they have the guts to bench him?
What, are all West Coast games supposed to be played while the fans here are driving home?
Well, there went our chance to go undefeated!
:smack:
Anyway, cheer up! In my view, replacing Dusty was addition by subtraction, and so was unloading Arroyo in favor of the much younger, harder-throwing Tony Cingraini. Chapman is only on the 15 day DL, as is Mat Latos, and St Louis is considered by many to be the best team in MLB. And we only lost 1-0.
Take heart!
FoieGrasIsEvil I will try. Dusty might have had his issues, but I’m looking at where we were before he came on board. (Although, to be fair, we got some really good players right around that time.) To me, Price is an unknown quantity. And I just plain miss Bronson. Hopefully the game tomorrow will renew my optimism…
You nailed it…good players came along at the same time as Dusty. I think people sometimes overstate how influential managers are in baseball versus say, a head coach in the NFL.
And Bronson…I liked him for his endurance and durability (I don’t think he ever went on the DL while he was here), and he could eat innings, but because he simply just didn’t throw hard at all he needed to get batters chasing his junk out of the zone or he was getting lit up in the fifth innings of games. For Arroyo’s age, salary and his limited “stuff”, I think Cingraini is a better option at this point.
I do miss the cheesy JTM commercials with Chris Welsh, though.
Been sick all day, but I had the Tribe game to look forward to. On TV, too, so that I didn’t have to make it work with the computer or Playstation. I had my popcorn. I had my fruit punch. I was ready to go and see them win!
And then they have the first rain out in Oakland since 1999, according to the guys on the MLB Network.
Apparently, I kicked God’s puppy this morning.
The Yankees lost to the Astros 6-2, as CC Sabathia got pounded in the first two innings by the lightest hitting lineup in the league. After last year, I’ve gotten used to his fastball topping out at 89 mph, but, last night, his slider had very little movement and, early on, he was getting too much of the plate.
It will be interesting to see if CC can transition to being the next Jamie Moyer and at least perform as a middle of the rotation starter. He’s owed close to $100 mil over the next 4 years.
Unless Girardi alters his rotation, Sabathia is scheduled to face the Red Sox twice this month.
Most likely they’ll be out of serious contention by then anyway - too many other holes, too little pitching, too much probability of long-downtime injuries to their older players. So it won’t affect their decision-making about SS. This year is about celebrating the great 1990’s teams and Jeter in particular, not winning, and the only person who’s gonna bench Jeter is Jeter.
My Braves won last night, so they eliminated the prospect that they would go 162 games without scoring a run. They do look a little like last years Braves in that they appear to live and die by the homerun. Zero in the first game, so they lost in a shutout. Three last night, so they won.
In other good news, Uggla is crushing the ball, and, unless I missed it, he hasn’t struck out yet. Last season he was swinging and missing so much he was frightening small children.
Yeah, actually, I completely blanked on this rather pertinent fact. It’s really only a relevant question if the Yankees are in the middle of a fight for the playoffs, and if Jeter is as bad as he could be, it’s very difficult to imagine them keeping up with Boston and Tampa Bay given everything else that could go wrong in New York. So they can just run him out there and enjoy it for nostalgia’s sake. I don’t believe they have a top flight SS prospect he’d be holding back.
On the up side, it just might have done a little to help with our drought. Game, food? Food, game? 
Dodgers survived a squeaker against the Padres but lost Kershaw for a month due to a muscle strain in his back. Not a good way to start the season, but we’ve come back from worse.
Although I don’t think the Yankees will be able to stay in contention through September, they may have enough to stay close through the summer. Tanaka appears to be ahead of schedule in adjusting to mlb, and Nova, Kuroda and Pineda could put together good streaks, although I expect them to falter later in the season.
Jeter may be completely done, but if he has anything left, I trust he’ll be able to make the most of it. Expectations of a .300 average are absurd, but he miight be able to stay close to .270 for most of the year. IMO, the Yankees’ biggest concern is how Teixeira comes back from wrist surgery, since he’s their only shot at getting some kid of offense from an infield that could be a black hole. I noticed that Tex got two hits last night (soft liner to right, gb through the left side), but it was after I stopped watching.
Better now than in September, no?
Speaking of, the report continues to be that Matt Kemp will be activated for the home opener.
Still not much of a bullpen, though. That’ll kill Baltimore, too.
Yankees will at least have a decent to good closer in Robertson, even if it’s an inevitable drop off from his predecessor. After that I really can’t evaluate how good guys like Betances are going to be. And after seeing Joe Maddon, with the Rays, put together excellent bullpens with nothing but recycled crap to work with (Rodney, Wheeler, etc.) I’ve learned not to judge a bullpen at the beginning of the season.
Yeah, but Joe Maddon ain’t managing in New York.
The variance of bullpen performance makes one wonder if you can’t track this stuff in terms of who their manager and pitching coaches are. Some coaching staffs seem to be able to make bullpens out of, well, leftovers, and some can’t seem to put together a bullpen to save their own lives. Or jobs. Granted, one guy’s performance over 55 innings can go crazy variable, but the whole bullpen? My recollection what that Whitey Herzog could construct a reasonably effective bullpen if he was given six random fans out of Section 115. But that might just be me.
Happening right now. The Brewers and Braves both have no-hitters going after the bottom of the 6th. Against each other, if I wasn’t clear.