Hannah and I are headed to tomorrow's Yankee game, the finale of their series against the Baltimore Orioles and, in a larger sense, of the Yanks' long home-and-away series against their AL East rivals. The Yankees are in first place in their division, and they won last night, so tomorrow's game will see the Bombers either looking to take the rubber match or else going for the sweep. It should be an exciting game, especially since the Yankees have decided to rest their purported--but struggling--ace Masahiro Tanaka.
Who's going to pitch, and how are the Yankees going to handle Tanaka going forward? We have no idea, but we should start to see some of these answers tomorrow.
More importantly, at least for the purposes of this post, tomorrow has turned into an unexpected Rest Day. Indeed, since this has been the last week of my typical three-week training cycle, next week is a Rest Week. That meant that I needed to get both a swim and a run in this morning, and also that I didn't have to worry about overworking since I'm already headed into a scheduled rest cycle.
And yet, I am cautiously optimistic that the Yankees’ woes, which started with their disastrous West Coast road trip almost two weeks ago now, are coming to an end. Though the team is something like 4-14 over their previous eighteen starts, their run differential has remained positive throughout the skid, such that their predicted wins (P[wins]) score remained fully six games better than their real record over that same time period. To put this another way, the Yankees have never stopped hitting, and their starting pitching hasn’t slumped appreciably despite losing CC Sabathia to a hamstring injury during that fateful West Coast road trip. The Yanks’ bullpen has instead blown a bunch of close games late, but this isn’t necessarily a trend you expect to see continue over the long term.
