It News: Pitching Woes Catch Up to Yankees

Pitching Woes Catch Up to Yankees

By TYLER KEPNER
Published: September 12, 2012
BOSTON

Yes, Curtis Granderson acknowledged late Wednesday night, he does check the scoreboard. The only reason, though, is because he is playing center field at Fenway Park this week and can hear the out-of-town digits sliding into their squares in the Green Monster.

“I get a chance to look at all of them,” Granderson said. “If there’s nothing going on, I can hear when they put the different numbers in.”

Granderson hung a few numbers of his own on the Yankees-Red Sox linescore behind left field. He homered twice to help the Yankees to a 5-4 victory, preserving their first-place tie with the Baltimore Orioles, who beat the Tampa Bay Rays at Camden Yards.

When his eyes were on the action, Granderson watched an impressive performance by Yankees starter David Phelps. After Jarrod Saltalamacchia tripled to Granderson’s center-field neighborhood, leading off the fifth, Phelps kept him stranded with a strikeout, a pop out and another strikeout.

“That’s big,” Granderson said. “We all believe in him, but it’s one thing to go out there and do it yourself and know that you can get out of jams, and he was able to do that tonight.”

Phelps, 25, was no higher than eighth on the depth chart of starters in spring training. The Yankees started the season with C. C. Sabathia, Hiroki Kuroda, Phil Hughes, Ivan Nova and Freddy Garcia. Michael Pineda was out for the year with shoulder trouble, and Andy Pettitte was working himself into shape after coming out of retirement in March.

Now, Phelps is starting pivotal games for a team that had a 6.33 starters’ earned run average in September before Wednesday. He is trying to avoid becoming the Yankees’ version of poor Kyle Weiland, the overmatched rookie who started three games for Boston, all losses, as the Red Sox fell apart last September.

Phelps had failed to last five innings in his first two starts this month, walking eight in eight and two-thirds innings. But he made it through five and two-thirds Wednesday, allowing a run, five hits and only one walk.

“He threw strikes,” Derek Jeter said. “He did exactly what we needed him to do.”

Jeter was happier discussing Phelps than he was the pain in his left ankle, which caused him to leave in the eighth. He said he would play Thursday, and to Jeter, that’s all that matters.

Jeter has always drawn clear lines of distinction between injured and hurt. An injured player cannot play, period. A player who is hurt can still play, because everybody is hurt. And if a player is playing, there can be no excuses.

“You either play or you don’t,” Jeter said. “I’m playing, so it’s not an issue.”

The Yankees, who are missing Mark Teixeira, simply cannot shake injuries. They overcame the loss of closer Mariano Rivera in May — it helped to have an $11 million setup man, Rafael Soriano, as a replacement — but losing Pettitte in June knocked the Yankees from their rhythm.

The Yankees won the day Pettitte fractured a bone just above his ankle, on June 27, improving to 46-28. From that point on, they are 34-34 — and, of course, they have lost 10 games in the standings since July 18.

The depth the Yankees seemed to have in spring training, when Pettitte joined what looked like a deep stable of starters, is long gone. Larry Rothschild, the pitching coach, had a feeling the Yankees would need every starter they could find.

“You always feel that way,” Rothschild said. “The more the better. Once you’ve been through enough seasons, you know you’ll take as many as you can get. The attrition is so great.”

The attrition started early for the Yankees, with Pineda’s injury. Garcia has a 5.93 earned run average as a starter, and Nova is replacing him Saturday. Nova has a 7.28 E.R.A. in eight starts since the All-Star break.

“He’s had struggles,” Manager Joe Girardi said. “We’ve had struggles getting some depth, some length out of our starters.”

Stability in the rotation has lifted Cincinnati, Washington and San Francisco to the widest division leads in the majors. The Reds and the Giants have used the same five starters for all but one game apiece this season. Until they shut down Stephen Strasburg, the Nationals had used the same five for all but six games.

There are simply too few quality arms to go around. If a team has five starters effective and healthy enough to keep pitching all season long, chances are that team will succeed. The more starters a team uses, the more problems it tends to have.

To the Yankees’ frustration, the Orioles are an exception. Baltimore has just one pitcher, Wei-Yin Chen, with more than 20 starts. Only one other team in the majors has endured such volatility — the Minnesota Twins, who were buried long ago. Yet the Orioles just won’t go away.

The Orioles have defied logic this long, and the Yankees cannot count on them to disappear. Even if they do, the well-armed Tampa Bay Rays are lurking.

“I think that we’re going to able to pull this thing together and win this thing,” Pettitte said. “I think we’ve got too much talent not to.”

That much is irrefutable: the Yankees are not the hottest team in the race, but they are the most decorated. They will trust in their track record, and we will learn in the coming weeks how much that really counts.