The New York Yankees haven’t won a game started by an opposing left-handed pitcher in a month, not a good way for the defending World Series champions to prepare for the post-season.
In Major League Baseball’s year of the pitcher, the Yankees aren’t alone among teams who may have trouble finding offensive punch as the playoffs get under way today. The Yankees are the second-favorites to win the World Series behind the pitching-rich Philadelphia Phillies, according to Las Vegas oddsmakers.
Both the American and National leagues suffered power outages this season. NL pitchers’ earned run average of 3.98 and AL’s 4.10 ERA each were the lowest since 1992, according to Baseball-Reference.com. There was an average of 1.90 home runs hit per game, the lowest since 1993 (1.78). And pitchers threw five no-hitters, including two perfect games for the first time in one season since 1880.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The numbers are a result of efforts to fight steroid use by developing more power pitchers with strikeout capability, according to Ron Darling, an analyst for the New York Mets who is working for Turner Sports’ TBS to call post-season games. The steroids are now gone or heavily curbed by testing and the power arms remain, he said.
“We’re seeing that generation of pitcher now,” Darling, 50, said in an interview two days ago with Bloomberg Radio. “Whether it’s H20 with the Phillies — Halladay, Hamels, Oswalt — or Cliff Lee or C.C. Sabathia, we’ve just seen some of the best pitching we’ve seen in baseball in a long, long time.”
Fans at major-league ballparks this season saw a record average of 14.12 strikeouts per contest, topping the previous high set last year of 13.82.
PHOTO: EPA
“This year has more importance for more teams in pitching than years past of any playoff teams I can remember,” former Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz, a TBS analyst, said on a conference call with reporters. “There’s only a couple of balanced teams that can win with offense and not necessarily have to win with their pitching.”
The Phillies had baseball’s best record at 97-65 this season. They were led by 2003 Cy Young Award winner Roy Halladay, 2008 World Series Most Valuable Player Cole Hamels and three-time All-Star Roy Oswalt, and are a 9-5 favorite to win their second championship in three years, according to the Las Vegas Hilton Race and Sports Book.
Defending champs the Yankees are 3-1, followed by the Tampa Bay Rays at 7-2, and the Minnesota Twins and San Francisco Giants at 8-1. The Texas Rangers are listed at 10-1, the Atlanta Braves are 15-1 and the Cincinnati Reds are 18-1.
Halladay went 21-10 this season and is among the favorites to capture another Cy Young Award as his league’s best pitcher. He was to be on the mound yesterday as the Phillies hosted the Reds in Game 1 of their best-of-five division series.
Edinson Volquez, who went 4-3 with a 4.31 ERA during the regular season, will start for the Reds. They’re the only playoff team that doesn’t fully rely on their starting pitchers, Smoltz said.
“They seem to be more of the team that’s going to have to outscore the other team, use their whole array of pitching,” he said. “They don’t have front-line starters that seem to jump out at you, where the other teams seem to have that.”
Lee, who joined the Rangers from Seattle in July, and the Rays’ David Price will meet this afternoon in a battle of AL division winners. Lee, who led Philadelphia to a World Series appearance last season, went 12-9 with a 3.18 ERA as the Rangers claimed the AL West with a 90-72 record. Price went 19-6 with a 2.72 ERA as the Rays finished 96-66, beating the Yankees by one game in the AL East.
The Yankees (95-67), who went 0-9 against left-handed starters last month, will send Sabathia (21-7, 3.18 ERA) to the mound tonight in a division series opener at the Twins.
“Some teams just get into a little bit of a funk against left-handed pitchers,” Darling said.
“With Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter hitting from the right side and Mark Teixeira and Jorge Posada switch-hitting, he said, you would think that left-handers would be so vulnerable.”
The Twins will try to extend that slump when they send lefty Francisco Liriano to the mound. Liriano was 14-10 with a 3.62 ERA as the Twins won the AL Central at 94-68.
The Braves, who earned a wild card as the NL’s best second-place team, open their series tomorrow at San Francisco.
Both teams feature strong pitching and average hitting. The Giants, who will start two-time Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum in Game 1, had a 3.36 team ERA this season, the best in baseball. Atlanta was third with a 3.56 ERA, while the Braves were 13th in runs scored and the Giants 17th.
“It might be like soccer scoring,” Smoltz, 43, said of the Atlanta-San Francisco matchup.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier