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October 30, 2009

Prospectus Hit and Run

A Night to Remember

by Jay Jaffe

My season came full circle on Thursday night. Back on April 3, I got my first look at the new Yankee Stadium via the park's unofficial opener, a Friday night exhibition against the Cubs for which I was in the right field bleachers. Having spent last fall detailing my mixed emotions regarding the old ballpark's passing, and the winter kvetching about the way me and my crew were being treated, it was with more ambivalence than excitement that I watched that game and beheld the billion-dollar boondoggle. "It feels as though the team put some idealized hybrid of Yankee Stadiums I and II on a steroid regimen, then stuck it in the middle of Times Square," I wrote, "Pure sensory overload-bright flashing lights with sound surrounding you from every angle, and a ginormous scoreboard video dominating the action on the field."

I spent this year's allotment of games in the uppermost part of the upper deck, about four rows away from Hoboken. The view wasn't optimal but the price-$20 a pop, less than a typical trip's expenditure on beer-was right, and gradually, my frosty reception for the park thawed enough for me to admit that yes, I could have a good time in this venue. Particularly with the stretch I've enjoyed for the last month, a run that someone in a less baseball-blessed city might be lucky to experience once in a lifetime: attendance at the September 27 game where the Yankees not only notched their 100th victory but clinched the AL East championship, attendance at Sunday night's ALCS clincher, and now this, my first World Series game since 2003. In a dozen seasons of roughly a dozen games a year at the ballparks in the Bronx, I've not had a run like this.

As fate would have it, our seats for Thursday night were once again in the bleachers, this time on the far section on the left field side. Despite Wednesday night's throttling of the Yankee offense by Cliff Lee, more than a hint of optimism was in the air. The previous night's rain had cleared, allowing the pregame entertainment, a performance of the new New York anthem, "Empire State of Mind," by Jay-Z with Alicia Keys, to proceed. "I'm the new Sinatra," he raps in the first verse, and when he does, you don't have to know anything about hip hop to understand why the song connected with the Yankees and their followers from the moment team captain Derek Jeter began using it as his at-bat music towards the end of the year. This is a grand celebration not just of the city but also of making it there.

The Yankee starter, A.J. Burnett, took the hill with his ability to do just that still in question after his uneven ALCS Game Five outing. One of the pregame factoids floating around the Twitosphere showed that at least in 2009, Burnett was most vulnerable during his first 25 pitches of the game, often getting taken deep:

Split        HR    AVG   OBP   SLG   OPS
Pitch 1-25    8   .263  .356  .441  .797
Pitch 26-50   5   .249  .330  .378  .709
Pitch 51-75   7   .232  .329  .400  .729
Pitch 76-100  5   .262  .319  .406  .725
Pitch 101+    0   .174  .371  .174  .545

Viewers with the memory of his last outing fresh in their heads don't need the data to recall that Burnett had dug the Yankees a 4-0 hole within his first 12 pitches. It would be different on this night. Taking inspiration from Lee's performance and his postgame words about trusting his stuff—Burnett's can stand with any pitcher in the AL's, but it's the ten-cent head that often sets him back—he came out firing, offering hints that on this night, the "Good A.J." would show up. He breezed through the first inning on 12 pitches, and though the Phillies touched him for a run via a ground rule double by Raul Ibanez and a single by Matt Stairs in the second, he got first-pitch strikes on the lineup's first eight hitters—the Phillies' plan clearly was to take and rake—and didn't go to a 1-0 count until Chase Utley's second at-bat in the third.