I wouldn't be so quick to call the Jays pretenders. Look what they're doing with a patchwork starting rotation. Brian Tallet? Ricky Romero? These guys are getting wins and Halladay is Halladay. They will have to scrap, but you can't count them out just because they had one skid.
Holy Smokes Batman, this thread has turned into a haven of trolls. JoeJet, Cakes, and DaveCrazy all make an appearance when the Yankees lose? Unheard of....
I'm wide awake, dude. Well, I am now, anyway, after sleeping through the night. But yeah, some of you need to get a grip. Beckett has been unreal lately. He pitched a hell of a game. (Of course, he was also getting calls on balls six inches off the plate, which helps.) But it's one game. The Yanks are still tied for first. And, as for the whining about not beating playoff-caliber teams... does your memory extend beyond the previous 24 hours? Because what were the results of most recent series the Yanks have played? Texas (best team in AL when Yanks faced them) - won two of three Tampa (best run differential in all of baseball) - won two of three Cleveland (okay, they suck) - won two of three Texas again (best team in AL at the time) - won two of three
^ I agree Cap. No team was going to hit Beckett last night. So I don't get upset with the loss. However, if Wang blows tonight and Joe hesitates to bring Hughes in to clean up, and the team loses I'll be upset. After all, the team has always been able to hit Wakefield so there shouldn't be excuses.
Obviously Becket and Lester aren't going to keep up at the pace they've been on for their last few starts. But if from here on out we basically see something close to '07 Becket and '08 Lester, this team is going to be a nightmare to face especially with the bullpen it already has. I wouldn't be too worried if I were a Yankees fan though. They still have an amazing offense plus Sabathia and Burnett (thats still a plus despite last night's shitshow). What I would worry about, for both teams though, is the Rays. Yeah, they're six games out but as Cappy mentioned with their run differential they should be close to the top. They've dealt with some injuries,but they are still super young, and super talented. Like really young and really talented at the same time. If I had more time, I would print out there entire lineup and starting rotation complete with age numbers to make my point.
so I have to say some good things about Fenway. For 50 bucks you get a pretty good seat. Better than a 50 dollar seat at Yankee stadium. There was a lot of people wearing Yankee gear and I saw very few massholes yelling at them, throwing shit etc. It was all pretty good-mannered ribbing. The food os pretty fuckin good. And considering how the game was going, I walked around and samplped a lot of it....12 dollar lobster roll, 6 dollar sausage and pepper sangwich outside, 9 dollar turkey sangwich with stuffing and cranberry sauce on it, 7 dollar cuban sangwich and a 5 dollar soft serve twist....walked up to the green monstah seats and you can shove those seats right up your ass.... Best part is you can leave the game and hang out on the sidewalks and smoke and buy souvenirs in teh stores and then go back into the stadium.....Subway system was obviously designed by retaaaahds though....good times
yeah it was good....fuckin freezing though.....the food stand down the third base line which had the turkey sandwich and the cubans actually puts samples out on the counter...little cut up pieces of the sandwiches! The burrito place too. I filled up on samples and THEN bought all that shit....feelin a little bloated this morning...I was gonna stay for tonights game too but the wife told me to get my ass home.....Im so gay. no homo.
Yeah, yeah. The first thing I'll say is, I shouldn't have been so rude to you last night. Obviously I was giving in to emotion. This team has an ability to do that to me that even the Jets can't seem to match. As for the teams you posted, I do not consider Texas a serious playoff team. They're a carbon copy of the Yankees throughout this decade. Tons of offense, mediocre pitching. Tampa might be a contender. Healthy, who knows? But they're not. Their run differential and record, when viewed together, only tells me that they are able to go out and beat up on some teams, but can't beat the contenders. Sound familiar? They beat up on KC last week, destroyed Florida a couple weeks back, had a blowout in Oakland the week before that, beat up Boston one game early last month as well as once at the end of April, and had blowouts against both the Orioles and Yanks early in April. Overall, they beat the snot out of poor teams, and play just under the good ones. Cleveland we agree on. They suck. Though they did have a nice time against us early in the year. The Red Sox are the only team in the entire AL I am even remotely concerned with. If the Yankees aren't beating up everyone else, that tells us it's over already. The Yankees are far more talented, top to bottom, than almost every other team. They should be beating those teams. Those aren't the teams we will be seeing in October though. (Maybe Texas.) The Sox are the team we need to prove we can beat. Even Yankees players were saying as much before yesterday's game. Well played, sir! :up:
And they can beat them. And they will beat them. While disappointed with the results, I'm not worried about the first five games. Three of them could/should have gone other way and all were played without our best player. If they're 3-16 against the Sox at the end of the year, I'll worry then. One game, though, against their best pitcher? Nah... I'm not gonna sweat it.
But so far it's 6. You're not looking past last night because it suits your argument now. You're big on the sample size argument, and 6 is just a hair shy of a third of the times the Yankees will play the Sox this year. That's a relevant sample size, regardless of missing one player.
I know you're trying to look on the brighter side of things and I agree to some extent. But when I stop to think about the 0-6 record we have against them, it's a little hard for me to not start worrying or sweating. I do hope Wang has a great game tonight. He's due. The way he's struggled starting this season doesn't make me feel comfortable at all, but I'm hoping this is the game he turns it around. Otherwise, you could be looking at us leaving Boston with a 1-8 record in the series.
That's not how sample size works. The full nineteen games (or is it eighteen this year) would still be a relatively small sample size by which to judge performance in absolute terms. And I am looking past last night. I'm just putting those earlier games in context... the Yanks lost five games to the Sox when they weren't playing well in general (Tex was hitting under .200, remember?), and they were without arguably their best player. So I don't really see a need to view last night's game as some continuation of the previous five except in an arbitrary sense. Let me put it another way... were you expecting to win last night's game? I wasn't.
This is ridiculous. I think you're right, we only play 18 times this year. As for the sample size, what other sample size could you possibly have beyond all the games they play each other this year? That gives you your entire sample for the team's performance against the Red Sox this year. Would you really say something like "Well, I know the Yankees went 6-12 against the Red Sox this year, but if they had another 20 games, it would probably be closer to 19-19"? The fact is, while the Yankees are not winning under your supposed "small" sample size, the Red Sox are. If last night didn't appear to you to be a continuation of past performance this year, then you were either watching on Gamecast, or you didn't follow the game at all. Beckett was good, and I'm not taking anything away from him, but the Yankees' lineup looked like they had never picked up a bat before last night. You get 5 to 7 games in October to beat a team. So far, we've been eliminated under either format. Swept actually. That's enough sample size to tell you that unless something turns around quickly, the Yankees can't advance to the World Series this year. As for last night's game, hell yes I expected to win. I sure as hell didn't expect to be Beckett's bitch.
Sigh. You're right. This is ridiculous. Viable sample size is not determined as a percentage of a total data pool. It's determined by an objectively large size that minimizes variance. If I were going to flip a coin eighteen times, and it came up heads five times in a row... would you freak out and say, "My God! The odds must not be 50/50?!" Or would you chalk it up to variance? What if I then said I was going to flip the coin thirteen more times... and in the end it was 13 heads and 5 tails. Would you say the coin is weighted improperly? Or that there were shenanigans going on? Or would you realize that there were few enough flips that you could chalk it up to variance? Even though eighteen coin flips is all you get, it's not enough to rule out variance as a likely cause of the deviation from the expected outcome. See above example. Probably. Do you realize what the Yanks/Sox record is over the past three-plus seasons is something like 76-75 Sox? Sometimes you seem so reasonable, and then you go and say shit like this. First of all, you most certainly are taking something away from Beckett with your excuses. Sorry, but the way he was pitching last night, NO ONE would have touched him. It's been like that for three straight starts from him. He's been scary good. Secondly, the reason it is not a continuation of the previous five games is that the Yanks aren't even close to being the same team that they were when the teams last met. Teixeira (the slow starter) has starting hitting the ball well. A-Rod is back. Posada is healthy. Mo's velocity is back up. They actually have to face Sabathia this time. The bullpen's been pretty good lately. I'll judge the next two series as more indicative of where the two teams stand than I would the first five games. Postseason is a small sample size, as well. That's why it's (mostly) a crap shoot. Then the problem is your expectations, not the team underperforming. Because the way Beckett has been pitching favored the Sox very heavily lasy night.
Seven to nothing heavily? Not hitting Beckett last night is one thing. Not hitting their bullpen is another. Giving up a truckload of runs, and a homer to the shell still referred to as Papi, is okay? The Sox and Yankees have evenly matched up for the past 10+ years. Bigdamndeal. What matters is right now the Red Sox are far superior to the Yankees, and have proven as much six consecutive times. They've also shown no signs that they will be playing down to the Yankees any time soon. ARod was hurt (even though he was there last night and was a net negative in his effect on the outcome.) Teixeira is a slow starter (who has been hitting, but looked foolish last night.) Beckett threw 6 great innings (leaving 3 for the Yankees to muster a whimper against the pen.) Burnett didn't make it out of the 3rd (even though we paid him a lot to be our 2nd or 3rd best pitcher.) I see an awful lot of excuses. I see very few good results. The Yankees cannot beat Boston is what I see. (And of course they'll beat Wakefield, and someone will inevitably say "See? They can beat them." Save it.)
