The Futility Infielder

More bullets, because time isn't on my side today:

• The weather last night at Yankee Stadium looked awful, conditions hardly befitting the swing game of a playoff series. Play was never delayed, but the field looked to be fairly waterlogged. Players were slipping, players had a very difficult time holding onto the ball, the mound required in-game attention from the grounds crew, and it all made for some ugly baseball. When Francisco Rodriguez, to use a notable example, slipped on the mound in the ninth, it could have changed the series and, God forbid, his career with only slightly worse luck.

Both starting pitchers suffered, but the 42-year-old with the bad back and the degenerative knee didn't look comfortable. I actually missed the top of the first, when Garret Anderson smacked a three-run homer, because I was frantically trying to finish the TiVo'd Red Sox-White Sox game on ESPN2, but BP's injury expert, Will Carroll, noted on-list that Randy Johnson was having trouble trying to loosen his back. His pitches were up in the zone, though that appeared to be as much game plan as physically-induced result. Either way, he got slapped around by the Angels, giving up nine hits and five runs over three innings.

I had to cringe when the Yankee Stadium crowd booed Johnson upon his being taken out. No, he hasn't had a stellar year, but given his performance down the stretch, particularly the two big wins over the Red Sox in September, the Yanks wouldn't even be playing in October. It was a horseshit reaction from what's normally a classy group of fans, and even siting at home warm and dry, I was embarrassed to be a Yankee fan. Horseshit.

It didn't help Johnson's cause that the Yanks had 104 years of age wading around in that wet outfield; Hideki Matsui, Bernie Williams and Gary Sheffield aren't the most nimble of cats in the best of circumstances, and the team is paying the price for lousy design under the worst conditions. The Angels lashed out 19 hits last night, their batting average on balls in play was .472 (17 out of 36). Part of that was hittable pitching, but the defense did them no favors.

• Aaron Small did a great job in his first two innings relieving Johnson, beginning with a Houdini-like escape from a bases-loaded, no-out jam in the fourth with a rare strikeout and then a double-play; Joe Torre later compared it to Mike Mussina's rare relief effort in Game Seven of the 2003 ALCS. The Yanks appeared to draw some energy off of that escape, putting four runs on the board in the bottom of the inning to cut the lead to 5-4 and then another two in the next inning.

But the chariot Small rode to his 10-0 record turned into a pumpkin in the sixth. Small gave up a run on a Juan Rivera double and a Darin Erstad single. He was one pitch away from escaping with the score tied 6-6 when Adam Kennedy's blooper fell between Williams and Robinson Cano. It was a lucky break for the Angels that probably couldn't have been defended by any team under the best of conditions, but the wet field certainly didn't help, and at the very least it cost the Yanks an extra base when Ertad took third.

With runners on first and third, next came Chone Figgins, 0-for-11 on the series. Naturally, he blooped a ball into right-center, and Williams and Sheffield converged like a pair of rest-home occupants paddling canoes as they cut the ball off to prevent the speedster from turning it into a double. That gave the Angels the lead, 7-6, and ended what had been an uplifiting performance from Small on a sour note.

Despite his 10-0, 3.20 ERA record on the year, Small's peripherals don't say he's that good, of course. Internally, one of BP's fertile minds introduced a new ERA estimator the other day, one that uses K, BB, and groundball-flyball ratios. Small comes up at 5.01 there; his low HR rate (0.47 per nine innings) is what allowed him to beat that considerably.

• The Yankee relief corps(e) just got worse after Small. Tanyon Sturtze needed just one pitch to escape the sixth, but Tom Gordon was lost, yielding a Vlad Guerrero single, plunking Bengie Molina (who had hit his third homer in as many games in the third) on the elbow, and then another single to Anderson, who broke out with four hits on the night, including the homer and a triple off of Johnson.

The point of no return happened on Gordon's watch, another bad break for the Yanks. Sheffield's throw home on Anderson's single had allowed Jose Molina, who pinch-ran for his brother, to take third when it hit Guerrero as he slid home and bounce away from Jorge Posada. Juan Rivera then hit a grounder to Alex Rodriguez at third base. A-Rod's body was in line to throw to first, but when Cano darted over to cover second, he threw there to try for the force.

The slight delay on A-Rod's proved damaging. Replays were in doubt as to whether Cano's foot was touching the bag when he received the throw, but this was a classic "neighborhood play" of the type that generally protect second basemen from having to endure takeout slides and surgery to repair torn ACLs. Universally despised ump Cowboy Joe West, a belligerent sack of shit on even his most friendly days (and also the man who made the ruling on A-Rod's sissy slap last ALCS), called him safe. Joe Torre came out of the dugout to argue to no avail, and the bases were loaded with no outs.

As if that weren't a scary enough proposition, Torre then called Al Leiter's number. To his credit, Leiter tackled the situation about as well as possible, striking out Erstad to begin things. But with the lefty still on the mound to face Steve Finley, the Angels recognized a mismatch. Angels skipper Mike Scioscia put on a squeeze play, with the slothlike Molina advancing down the third base line like a wandering buffalo. Leiter's back was to the runner, and he delivered the pitch home, where Finley dropped down a bunt, and another run was chalked to make the score 9-6. "You can do it all the time with a lefthanded pitcher on the mound. A lefthanded pitcher can never see the guy break from third base," noted Joe Morgan in one of his more insightful comments of the night.

After the Yanks went meekly in the seventh (Bernie Williams and Tino Martinez lasted a combined seven pitches, flailing at at hitters' counts), Torre left Leiter in to start the eighth, and he began things by yielding a triple to Figgins that was aided by some butchery by Hideki Matusi, who failed to recognize that the ball would bounce off of the left-center wall and then pegged the speedster as he slid into third. Orlando Caberra flied to center, and once again, the Angels didn't test Bernie Williams' weak arm, but one intentional walk and a Scott Proctor (ugh) appearance later, it became academic with a pair of singles on Proctor's first three pitches that ran the score to 11-6. Overcoming one five-run deficit is within the Yankee offense's capabilities, particularly given lousy starting pitching and soft middle relief but overcoming a second one against a dominant Angels bullpen wasn't going to happen.

• For all of the praise heaped on Cano's clutch hitting in the series -- he drove in the tying run in the fifth -- his fatal flaw was revealed in the bottom of the sixth. With the bases loaded and two outs, he swung Scot Shields' first pitch, lofting a harmless fly ball right to Anderson to end the inning.

Of the 342 players who totaled at least 200 major league plate appearances on the season, Cano saw the fewest pitches of any of them, just 3.05 per PA; the next closest was Pablo Ozuna at 3.16. For all of the good things a .297 batting average and a .458 slugging percentage portend for a 22-year old, the lack of any patience whatsoever (just 15 unintenional walks in 551 PAs) will severely limit his value as he develops.

• Now down 2-1, the Yanks are in trouble. With all due praise to Shawn Chacon for the job he did since coming over from Colorado , he's another put-in-play pitcher, with just 40 strikeouts in 79 innings pitched for the Yanks. Playing on what's likely going to be another waterlogged field -- even given the word of Saturday's postponement just as I was finishing this, he needs better defensive support than the Yanks got last night. That he generates a lot of popups (a 0.90 G/F ratio on the year) will help his cause, but the Yanks would do well to put Bubba Crosby out in centerfield, play Giambi at first base, and DH Williams, who's 4-for-10 on the series. With lefty Jarrod Washburn going for the Angels, that may be academic, especially given Williams' lifetime 5-for-16 with four doubles against him, but it's a point worth making nonetheless.

In any event, it's an uphill climb for the Yanks, who now need to win a game in New York, fly 3000 miles and win another one in Anaheim, only to fly to Chicago to begin the LCS in a very jet-lagged state against a team that will be well-rested thanks to yesterday's clinching.

I'd put the Yanks' chances of pulling it off at about one in three at best. In their favor, Game Five starter Mussina -- never the best traveler, if you'll recall from the Japan debacle that began last year -- has remained on the West Coast and would be well-rested.

• Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead! I expended a lot of energy rooting against the Red Sox yesterday afternoon, so much so that I was rather blasé watching the Yanks lose. El Duque's three innings of stellar relief -- including an escape from a bases-loaded, no out situation in the sixth with Boston trailing by one, only lengthened his legend as an October hero. Particularly impressive was his striking out David Ortiz in the seventh; at that point the fork looked to be in the Red Sox.

The powerful Boston lineup hit just three homers on the series, all of them yesterday, all of them solo shots off of their two biggest bats, Manny Ramirez and Ortiz. Limiting the damage those two caused was one real reason the White Sox pulled through.

Another was the fine sacrifice bunt the team pulled off in the top of the ninth. Now, as a stathead, of course I normally disdain the sac bunt, and I dislike the extent to which the White Sox, a team that hit 199 homers on the year, has been characterized as a small ball squad. But the difference between a 4-3 lead and a 5-3 one at that point was huge (according to BP data whiz James Click, the extra run cut the Red Sox chances by about 40 percent, from a 10 percent chance of winning to less than six percent). After A.J. Pierzynski's leadoff double, the Sox used two successive bunts to bring him home, the latter on a bold squeeze play. Mike Timlin's Hail Mary pitch glanced off of Jason Varitek's glove, and to the fork already sticking out of the Red Sox collective ass was added a very sharp knife, turned 90 degrees by Ozzie Guillen.

For all of the pleasure I took in watching the Red Sox elimination, I sincerely take my hat off to the team, and not just to throw it into the air with glee. World Championships are very difficult things to come by, as Red Sox Nation has been reminded all too recently after last year's triumph. The Sox-Yanks battles over the past three years in particular -- encompassing the John Henry/Theo Epstein regime -- have been heavyweight bouts of incredible intensity, a storied chapter in baseball history (one that even gave me the opportunity to write a couple of chapters of my own to add to the narrative). But it's been perhaps a bit too much for all of us to remain sane through. The bombast needs a break, the fans and media on both sides need a welcome dose of perspective. As good as the storyline might have been for another ALCS rematch, I look forward to seeing what comes of a new storyline, and that's whether or not -- or make that weather or not -- it includes the Yankees.

• If I disappear from writing in this space sometime in the next few days, it's because I'm preparing the ALCS preview for Baseball Prospectus. That's a plum assignment I look forward to tackling, but the turnaround may preclude me from writing about the Yanks here in a timely manner..

• Baseball fans in NYC of both Yanks and Sox colors, come on out to Coliseum Books (11 West 42nd St. at 6 PM) to hear Steve Goldman, Cliff Corcoran, Ben Murphy and myself discussing Mind Game. You won't be missing any action on the TV, that's for sure.