For the second night in a row, the Yankees took the Blue Jays into extra innings.
This time, though, things turned out better for the Bronx Bombers:
With no end to a 3-for-38 slump in sight, Melky Cabrera, the Yankees’ center fielder, was not holding up well.
“I was a little bit worried,” he said yesterday through an interpreter. “The manager trusts me so much, and I felt like I had been letting him down.”
He can stop his worrying. Cabrera was the star on an interminable afternoon of baseball yesterday at Yankee Stadium. He had three hits, drove in five runs, including the winning run in the 10th, and turned in a defensive gem that might have saved the game. Those were the highlights in the Yankees’ 12-11 victory against the Toronto Blue Jays, which took five hours to play.
Cabrera’s clutch play, at the plate and in the field, overshadowed a rough day by the Yankees’ bullpen, which struggled mightily after starter Phil Hughes left after five innings with his team trailing, 3-2. It also kept the Yankees two and a half games behind first-place Boston in the American League East. The Red Sox beat the Devil Rays, 8-6, last night.
That win guaranteed Boston a playoff bearth.
So, the question for this week is, should the Yankees try to make a run for the AL East, or should they play it safe given the fact that the wild-card spot is all but wrapped up.
Peter Abraham makes an excellent point:
I’m sure there are Yankee fans out there who will demand a fight to the finish to try and win the division. But based on how he used his bullpen today, Joe Torre is going to make sure guys like Luis Vizcaino get the proper rest rather than blow them out in pursuit of a secondary goal. A desperate manager would have used the Viz in the eighth inning today.
Make the playoffs, that is what counts. Once the tournament starts, nobody cares who won the division. Over these next eight games, the goal has to be to get Chien-Ming Wang, Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, Roger Clemens, Mariano Rivera, Joba Chamberlain and Vizcaino as prepared as they can be.
When a playoff bearth is now all but guaranteed, and winning the wild-card means a first round chance at a team you’ve gone 6-0 against this season, blowing out your pitching staff to try to catch the Red Sox not only wouldn’t make sense, it would be bad managing.
Not to say that I wouldn’t welcome the chance to overtake Boston on, say, the last day of the season.
