Yankees Find Winning Formula and Shut Down the Angels in Game 1

Alex Rodriguez ran over Los Angeles Angels catcher Jeff Mathis while trying to score in the 5th inning. He was tagged out.

By TYLER KEPNER
Published: October 16, 2009

The American League Championship Series arrived at Yankee Stadium on Friday with the icy blast of mid-winter and the blazing heat of C. C. Sabathia. The go-go Los Angeles Angels might as well have worn snowshoes. They hardly used their spikes.

There were no base-running high jinks by the Angels, no first-to-third dashes, no daring leads, no stolen bases. Sabathia kept them stuck in their tracks for eight innings of a 4-1 Yankees victory, allowing four hits and striking out seven with a walk. He has done precisely what the Yankees wanted when they made him the centerpiece to their off-season, winning the opening game of the division series and now of the A.L.C.S.

The Yankees looked more like the Angels than the Angels did. They challenged outfielders on the bases, played flawless defense and collected timely hits. There were no home runs on a wind-whipped night, just resourceful hitting and the knack for capitalizing on mistakes by the Angels.

The Angels earned a chance at the World Series partly because they made just 85 errors in the regular season, a franchise low. But they made three in Game 1, leading to two unearned runs off starter John Lackey.

Sabathia matched his reputation in the first inning, and the Angels upended theirs. Sabathia makes a living pounding the strike zone, and that is what he did. But the Angels, who have a reputation for not making mistakes, cost themselves on defense.

Most pitchers try to attack the zone, but few have the stuff to do it as confidently as Sabathia. He came out pitching fearlessly to the Angels, with 12 strikes out of 15 pitches in the first. Each of the first three hitters faced an 0-2 count, and Bobby Abreu struck out looking on a slider.

The Angels helped the Yankees in the bottom of the inning. Derek Jeter won an eight-pitch duel with Lackey, smacking a leadoff single to right, and then Lackey sawed Johnny Damon’s bat. But Damon got enough of the ball to flick it down the left field line, taking second when Juan Rivera’s throw sailed to the middle of the infield for an error.

With runners at second and third, Alex Rodriguez drove in Jeter with a one-out sacrifice fly to center. Lackey would have been out of the inning a batter later, but Hideki Matsui’s pop up landed just past the infield dirt, between shortstop Erick Aybar and third baseman Chone Figgins.

It seemed as if nobody called for it, and in any case, Aybar wore a ski mask that covered his ears. He and Figgins looked at each other a moment before the ball thudded to earth, and it must have been a miserable helpless feeling: there was nothing to do but pick it up as Damon scored the second run.

Lackey seethed as he watched the play, letting loose what seemed to be a roar of frustration. It was hard to blame him: a 2-0 hole was a lot on a frigid night with Sabathia on his game.

He struck out Kendry Morales on a changeup in the second inning, and got Figgins and Abreu looking on 94 mile-an-hour four-seamers in the third. In just three innings, against a contact-hitting team, Sabathia had registered strikeouts with his changeup, slider and fastball.

The weather helped Sabathia in the fourth, but only momentarily. With one out, Vladimir Guerrero reached down and punished a slider to left center. Off the bat, it had the trajectory and the sound of a home run, but the flags above left field told a different story. They blew straight in, and the wind knocked the ball to the warning track.

Guerrero pulled his creaky body into second with a double, and he scored with two outs on a single by Morales. It was the last base runner Sabathia allowed until the seventh, when he had a 4-1 lead.

Damon, who was 1 for 12 in the division series, led off the Yankees’ fifth with a double to left center. After Rodriguez walked with one out, Matsui drove a double — a legitimate hit, this time — to left. Damon scored easily and Rodriguez motored around third.

With his surgically repaired hip, Rodriguez has been less likely to take extra bases this season. But he has been off for four days, and must have felt spry enough to challenge the arms of Rivera and Aybar. He ended in a heap at the plate with catcher Jeff Mathis, who lost his helmet and mask in the collision, but not the ball.

Even in making an out, though, Rodriguez had taken the Angels’ game to them, with daring and aggressive base running. There was more of the same in the sixth, when it seemed as if the Angels, not the Yankees, were the ones on the bases.

With two out and nobody on, Lackey walked Melky Cabrera for the second time. Cabrera had drawn two walks in just one of his last 65 games, and despite playing center field, he is not much of a stolen-base threat.

Yet he concerned Lackey enough to prompt a pickoff throw, which spun away from Morales at first for an error. Cabrera took second, and scored the Yankees’ second unearned run when Jeter blistered a single up the middle. For good measure, the hit bounced off Torii Hunter’s glove for another error.

Lackey was finished after 114 pitches and five and two-thirds innings. Sabathia, meanwhile, had just 80 pitches through six. Strong defense kept his pitch count low.

In the sixth, Damon slid to rob Abreu of a hit and Sabathia nimbly grabbed Hunter’s bunt and threw him out him at first. Hunter and Manager Mike Scioscia argued, to no avail, that Mark Teixeira’s foot had come off the bag.

In the seventh, after a walk to Morales, Cano dove to his left to corral a grounder by Howie Kendrick. Sabathia followed by striking out the pinch-hitter Mike Napoli on a changeup, and he exulted on the mound, pumping his fist and shouting.

It was the kind of reaction a pitcher might have at the end of a postseason series, just before his joyous teammates swarm him in a dog pile. This series is just beginning, but unless the Angels find themselves, it will not last very long.

News source：http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/sports/baseball/17yankees.html?_r=1&ref=sports

Yankees Take Opener According to Plan

Yankees 7, Twins 2

By TYLER KEPNER

Published: October 7, 2009

The Yankees’ old shrine still stands on 161st Street in the Bronx, dark and cold and gutted. The October games that made it so famous have moved across the street, where the new Yankee Stadium hosted its first playoff game in style Wednesday night.

The bright lights twinkled above the signature frieze, and three decks of seats thumped on a night when nearly everything went perfectly for the Yankees. They snuffed the Minnesota Twins, 7-2, in the first game of their division series, benefiting from the kind of shutdown pitching they have lacked in October for much of this decade.

The Yankees scripted this after missing the playoffs last season. They signed C. C. Sabathia to be their ace, to overwhelm hitters when he had to. They nurtured and kept homegrown arms like Phil Hughes, Phil Coke and Joba Chamberlain. And they hoped that Mariano Rivera, as ever, would throttle their opponents.

It all happened Wednesday, when Sabathia struck out eight and allowed one earned run over six and two-thirds innings, and the bullpen blanked the Twins. Derek Jeter jolted the offense with a two-run homer in the third, and Alex Rodriguez shook his playoff slump with two run-scoring singles.

Every Yankees batter had a hit or a run except Mark Teixeira, and it added up to something the Yankees could not do against the Twins in their two prior playoff meetings. In 2003 and 2004, Minnesota won the first game at Yankee Stadium, only to lose the next three.

The Twins had won the American League Central crown in 12 innings Tuesday, beating Detroit in a playoff and arriving at their Manhattan hotel at 3:50 a.m. on Wednesday. But there were no real signs of fatigue: in fact, they scored first.

This is the third postseason in a row for Sabathia, with his third team. In 2007, he lost his last two starts for the Cleveland Indians, who fell a game short of the World Series. Last fall in Philadelphia, he was knocked out in the third inning of his only playoff start for Milwaukee.

Sabathia said those failures motivated him, and after giving up a leadoff double, he did what the Yankees pay him $23 million a year to do, generating strikeouts with runners in scoring position. He fanned Orlando Cabrera and Joe Mauer with sliders, and a flyout ended the first.

Included in that inning, though, was a danger sign. Jorge Posada is baseball’s career leader in postseason games as a catcher, but he looked crossed up with Sabathia on a passed ball. Two innings later, it happened again and cost the Yankees a run.

A single by Cabrera and a double by Mauer put two runners on for Michael Cuddyer, who singled to right for a run. Then Posada missed Sabathia’s first pitch to Jason Kubel, and glared at Sabathia as he trotted to retrieve it.

Everyone involved seemed confused: Mauer stopped in his tracks between third and home, and Sabathia stopped before covering the plate. Sensing an opening, perhaps, Mauer dashed home and slid in for a two-run lead. It was charged as another passed ball, making Posada the first catcher in 10 years with two passed balls in a first-round game.

To that point, the Twins rookie starter Brian Duensing, 25, had retired six Yankees in a row. Duensing, a teammate of Chamberlain’s at the University of Nebraska, had never been to New York. He was having a fine time until meeting a local landmark in the third.

With one out and one on, Jeter curled a hanging off-speed pitch down the left-field line for a homer. It was Jeter’s 18th in the postseason, as many as Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson, and it tied the game, 2-2.

Rodriguez, who had ended the first inning with a lazy pop-up to right, ended the third with a strikeout. That made 40 consecutive runners Rodriguez had stranded in the postseason, a streak of futility that dated to 2004.

The rest of the Yankees were hitting Duensing harder their second time through the order, and with two out and a runner on first in the fourth, Nick Swisher blistered a double down the left-field line to score Robinson Cano.

With two out in the fifth and Jeter at second after Duensing’s first walk, the Twins decided to pitch to Rodriguez with the left-handed Hideki Matsui on deck, but Duensing was not careful.

Duensing challenged him with a first-pitch fastball, and Rodriguez hammered it to left-center. He had finally broken through.

Jeter came in, Duensing went out, and reliever Francisco Liriano grooved a fastball to Matsui, who crushed it into Monument Park in straightaway center for a two-run homer and a 6-2 lead.

Up by four runs, the Yankees cruised. Twins Manager Ron Gardenhire had called his team scrappy before the game, a style that serves the Twins well every season. But more power would have been useful on Wednesday, to make up the deficit quickly, and the Twins did not have it.

Sabathia retired Mauer on a groundout with a man on second to end the fifth, and he needed just eight pitches in a 1-2-3 sixth. He issued his only walk with one out in the seventh, then deflected a bouncer off his shin that might have been an inning-ending double-play ball.

With his pitch count rising, Sabathia lasted one more batter, getting Denard Span to fly to right. Swisher, who worked on his throws this season so he would not be lifted for defense late in games, fired a strike to the plate. It kept the runner at third, and Swisher pumped his fist in delight.

Joe Girardi came to the mound to remove Sabathia after 113 pitches. Sabathia had made just the fifth quality start (minimum six innings, maximum three earned runs) for the Yankees in their last 18 postseason games, and the fans saluted him with cheers. They had longed for such playoff dominance again, and they appreciated it.

Sabathia lifted his cap on his way to the dugout, basking in the first October standing ovation in his new team’s new home. If the Yankees keep playing like this, there will be many more.

News source：http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/sports/baseball/08yankees.html?_r=1&hp