BRONX CHEER Yankees’ new battery needs to provide jolt
Upside to awful opener is that it was just one game
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Joe Torre sat on a trunk in the visiting clubhouse prior to a 1998 exhibition game against the Padres in San Diego.
After winning the World Series in 1996, Torre’s Yankees got bounced in the ALDS by the Indians in 1997 and George Steinbrenner was antsy.
“George asked me if any team went 162-0,’’ said Torre, who understood a slow start by his club would turn the heat up on everybody in pinstripes.
The Yankees opened the season by losing three straight and four out of the first five. The glow of 1996 was gone.
Move to Sunday’s hard-to-look-at 7-3 loss the Rays handed Joe Girardi’s club at Tropicana Field. It was one of 162 games the Yankees will play this season and even the biggest self-loathing Yankees fan isn’t ready to give up on a season nine innings in.
The optimists can point to the ’98 Yankees winning eight straight after losing four of their first five, 14-of-15 and 21-of-24 on the way to 114 regular-season wins and a World Series title.
Yet, the elite talent level on that team which had Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Tino Martinez, Andy Pettitte, David Wells, David Cone and Mariano Rivera can’t be matched with the current collection of raw youth and veterans, some of whom are fading.
“That was terrible,’’ general manager Brian Cashman said Monday of Sunday’s debacle that was witnessed by Hal Steinbrenner, who watched staff ace Masahiro Tanaka get spanked for seven runs and eight hits (two homers) in 2 2/3 innings. “We didn’t hit, we didn’t pitch. No bueno.’’
With their first 15 games against the Rays, Orioles, Cardinals and White Sox, the Yankees have a chance to avoid a disastrous start to a season that began with Girardi, all the coaches, Cashman and key front-office lieutenants on the final legs of their contracts.
The rotation houses the most unrest on the Yankees’ roster, but other precincts didn’t perform well Sunday either. Gary Sanchez, Greg Bird and Aaron Judge, a trio of youngsters being heavily counted on to produce lineup muscle, went a combined 1-for-13 overall, 1-for-5 with runners in scoring position and 1-for-7 with men on base.
Pregame butterflies may have morphed into nerves for Sanchez and Bird, who made their first Opening Day roster along with Judge, who delivered an RBI double in the second inning and went 1-for-4. Bird’s miscue in which a ground ball went in and out of his mitt could have been the product of the new turf at Tropicana Field that plays faster than the old rug.
Jacoby Ellsbury, who is one of a handful of veterans Girardi is counting on to take some of the pressure off the kids, went 0-for-3 while hitting fifth.
“Everyone needs to do their own job,’’ Brett Gardner said. “You can’t win if you have two or three guys in the lineup. I have to do my job and be better than I was last year. Jacoby, Chase [Headley] and Starlin [Castro]. It’s up to everybody, collectively as a group.’’
A flawed group that can’t afford to play as poorly as it did Sunday too many times in the opening month of a season when Didi Gregorius isn’t around to help.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — CC Sabathia is entering the final year of his contract and has expressed a desire to keep pitching beyond this season — and with the Yankees.
For that to happen, he’ll have to bounce back from a rough spring training and, more importantly, show he can work with Gary Sanchez behind the plate.
For all of Sanchez’s accolades a year ago following his August call-up to The Bronx, the one thing he didn’t do was become part of Sabathia’s late-season resurgence.
Sanchez caught Sabathia only once, on Aug. 6, just days after he was promoted from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
Sabathia gave up three runs and two homers in 5 2/3 innings to the Indians and didn’t throw to Sanchez the rest of the season.
The lefty finished the year on a solid eight-game run in which he had a 2.37 ERA. Brian McCann caught each game, with Sanchez serving as the designated hitter.
The Yankees addressed that this spring. Sanchez caught three of Sabathia’s four major league exhibition starts, and the duo had mixed results. In 11 ¹/3 innings, Sabathia gave up five runs. In his only game pitching to Austin Romine, he coughed up six runs in just two-thirds of an inning.
Now that McCann is in Houston and Sanchez is entrenched as the everyday catcher — Romine doesn’t have a track record with Sa- bathia — it’s clear Sanchez and Sabathia will have to get on the same page.
That figures to start Tuesday against the Rays.
“If he comes the same way as he has the past couple weeks, we’re gonna have a good result,” Sanchez said through a translator.
Sabathia had a 5.51 ERA last spring and finished 2016 with his lowest ERA (3.91) since 2012, when he was an All-Star. There were stretches of dominance, such as a seven-start streak from May 4-June 16
when Sabathia went 4-2 with a 0.82 ERA.
But there were also five consecutive starts last season in which he coughed up at least five runs, which shows the danger of the Yankees having him as the No. 2 starter — in front of other question marks in Michael Pineda, Luis Severino and one of Jordan Montgomery, Chad Green or Luis Cessa.
He’ll wear the same knee brace that has aided him in the past, and pitching coach Larry Rothschild said he’d seen enough from Sabathia to believe he can at least match what he did a year ago.
“The arm strength is similar to last year,’’ Rothschild said. “The movement on his twoseam fastball has been good. His changeup has been good. The cutter and backdoor slider have been a little inconsistent, but in the spring, those are usually the pitches that will come last. I think he can pitch the way he did for the large part of last year again.”