David Malinsky
6* NY YANKEES over BOSTON
In turning a 4* ticket against Boston last night there were obviously some Tampa Bay play-on aspects, but much of it still had to do with the current Red Sox state of affairs. We can buck a struggled and troubled team again here. When you have lost five in a row on the road, the last thing that you need is to play a series like this one with no down time, particularly when your bullpen badly needs it.
As noted yesterday, Jonathan Papelbon has not worked since last Friday, largely because they have not been able to get a game to him. It has not been the fault of the starters, with Josh Beckett, Justin Masterson, Tim Wakefield and Daisuke Matsuzaka all pitching well enough to win in the last four games. But the middle relief corps is just a mess right now, and that group becomes magnified because the one starter that did fail in the 0-5 run, Jon Lester, goes front and center tonight. How bad has the bullpen been - how about a 12.60 ERA and a 2.50 WHIP in those five games? With Hideki Okajima in a major funk (dead last in the Major League?s in allowing inherited runners to score), and the absence of Mike Timlin?s poise shaking the middle corps, they are ripe to be exploited by the kind of hitters that they will face here.
As for Lester, there is a major home/away gap in his numbers, both in terms of quality and quantity, and it is something that will bring that bullpen into play. At Fenway it is a solid 2.54 ERA, and 6.2 innings per start. On the road those numbers go to 4.66 and 5.1. He lasted only five innings in his last outing at Houston, where he was knocked around for six runs on nine hits, including a pair of home runs, and that does not have his confidence where it needs to be for his first ever outing at Yankee Stadium. His inability to bridge this game to Papelbon opens up all of those Boston bullpen issues, and is a prime reason why we believe that this one breaks wide open.
The other key to making this one easy is the form of Andy Pettitte. It was not too long ago that he might have suffered the most humbling moment of his long career, an afternoon in which he allowed 10 runs vs. the punchless Royals, capped by a Jose Guillen grand slam in the 7th inning, But Pettitte showed his true professionalism off of that embarrassment - it has been a 4-0/1.00 run since then, with 23 strikeouts vs. only 19 hits allowed over those 27 innings. He is more than capable of being the bridge to Mariano Rivera, and the rest of the Yankee relief corps is also well-set off of last night?s blowout. Their task is made much easier here by the current slumps of Manny Ramirez (10-68) and Jacob Ellsbury (11-59), which have created major holes at the two most important offensive sports in the Boston lineup.
The oddsmakers have set a short price here on a game in which the Yankees bring significant edges over a flawed side. And the price is just low enough for us to be able to go to the 6* level.