Yankees Stumble Into All-Star Break

The Good

The biggest piece of good news from this weekend has to be the dominant performance of Shane Greene.  In his second major league start, Greene pitched 7.1 shutout innings, and recorded 9 strikeouts in the process against a team that has some solid hitters on it.  Of course, we've seen young pitchers look dominant before, only to have the league figure them out in due time.  The difference here is that Greene seems to have some versatility in his pitching.  In his first start, he seemed to be a sinkerballer who got a lot of ground outs.  Against Baltimore, his slider was recording regular strikeouts while still inducing the ground balls.  It'll be interesting to see if he can continue that trend.

Also good, Kuroda had a good start, going 7 strong innings and allowing 2 runs, while McCann has started hitting, and that can only be good news for this lackluster offense.

The Bad

The bad is that we lost the series against Baltimore, which would have been a great series to win going into the All-Star break. 

The Ugly

The ugly is that the biggest positive development on this team going into the All-Star break is the emergence of Shane Greene as a possible big league rotation contender.  After restocking the team over the off season we really haven't seen the results that our nearly half a billion dollars in commitments had inspired. 

Somehow the Yankees sit a mere 5 games out of first, so they remain in striking distance.  However, I really have no desire to see this team, as they now stand, in the postseason.  They look embarrassing, and against good teams, losing is a foregone conclusion.  This team lacks heart, and play whipped.  The Yankees need to use the second half to reinvent themselves.  Particularly the offense.  We are not hitting to the numbers on the baseball cards.  We have too many guys hitting under what we can normally expect from these guys.  It's really too late to salvage our rotation, so we're going to have to rely on our offense, which hasn't been showing up in the last few months.  If we can start hitting, maybe we can take advantage of our triple A rotation that has actually performed much better than we could have hoped for all things considered.

At Least There Were Some Homers

Johnson, Roberts and Gardner hit some long balls to put the Yankees on the charity board.  That's $6 more for the babies.

Brett Gardner 8hr = $16
Alfonso Soriano 6hr = $12
Kelly Johnson 6hr = $12
Carlos Beltran 9hr = $18
Dean Anna 1hr = $2
Brian McCann 9hr = $18
Yangervis Solarte 6hr = $12
Mark Teixeira 15hr = $30
John Ryan Murphy 1hr = $2
Jacoby Ellsubry 5hr = $10
Brian Roberts 5hr = $10
Derek Jeter 2hr = $4
Zoilo Almonte 1hr = $2
Zelous Wheeler 1hr = $2

Total 75hr = $150