Although it’s never too soon to start planning for 2011, there will be plenty time to discuss that later. For the moment, on the theme of hey-it-wasn’t-such-a-bad-year, here are my top ten moments of the 2010 Yankees’ season.

Honorable Mentions: Kim Jones’s porkchop incident, Jorge Posada hits two grand slams in two days, Brett Gardner hits a grand slam in an eleven run outburst inning vs. Toronto, A-Rod grand slamming after Mark Teixeira is intentionally walked on multiple occasions…

10. Hope Week Returns

The Yankees might be the big, bad, evil empire…but for the second year running they showed just how big that Yankee heart can be while honoring those whose ability to overcome various disabilities or obstacles inspire hope in so many of us. Some things are bigger than baseball, and HOPE week is a tradition that we all hope may continue.

9. Golson’s gun

Greg Golson was a bench player, a spare body to come in as a late inning defensive replacement or pinch runner. No one really expected much more from him, but on a September night in Tampa, he may have been responsible for the best defensive play of the year.

Closer Mariano Rivera had been struggling (buh?) that month, and the Yankees were nursing a one run lead over the Tampa Bay Rays. When Matt Joyce hit a fly ball to right field, it was an “okay, we can live with this” second out–or so we thought. Carl Crawford, who was on second base, did as we thought he would and tagged up, trying to get to third base. At this point, Golson unleashed a perfect throw, all the way across the diamond, right into A-Rod’s waiting glove. Game, set, match.

8. 600

Bruised shins and banged up calves may have marred Rodriguez’s season, but the Yankee third baseman still has the power to wow, like he did on a Wednesday afternoon game. There were a couple funky notes to his becoming the youngest person ever to hit 600 home runs:

It was the third year anniversary of his 500th home run, and the same starting pitcher–Phil Hughes–was on the mound for the Yankees.

Over the previous weekend, the Yankees had first inning, two-run home runs in multiple games, only to go on and lose almost all of those. Rodriguez’s home run? A first inning, two-run home run (the Yankees won).

7. Papelbad, Part One

Is there a better way to ingratiate yourself as a member of the Yankees than hitting a home run in your first at bat? How about an extra-inning home run that gives the Yankees a lead up in Boston in the first series of the season? Curtis Granderson did both of these, which no doubt built him his fair share of post-trade good will. The moment was huge, but what may have been bigger was that, as the Yankees’ new center-fielder, Granderson helped anchor an outfield that may have been the best the Yankees have had in years. Their defense, coupled with the offensive breakout of Brett Gardner and All Star campaign of Nick Swisher was far more than the Yankees could have possibly expected back in March.

6. The Awareness of Robinson Canó

It’s impossible to pick just one moment or one play for Robinson Canó. That’s how good his season was this year. Truth be told, he was great last year, but for one fluke or another, couldn’t hit with runners on base. This year, however, was a much different story. Canó was the most valuable Yankee, and it wasn’t even close. Whether a grand slam after an intentional walk or a defensive play that looked so easy you almost think you can do it, Canó was owning it.

If you’re a Yankee fan, you are no longer unaware of the team’s superstar second baseman.

5. Behold the power of Colin

Coming into a game to pinch hit is hard enough. Coming in to pinch hit when it’s mid-count and you have two strikes on you is even harder. Now, try doing it as a rookie. Tough, right?

Well, not according to Colin Curtis, who blasted a three-run home run while pinch hitting for Brett Gardner. The Yankees went on to win the game–one of the few Javy Vazquez games that Yankee fans will remember fondly from the 2010 season.

4. Mariano Miracle

At this point, there’s probably nothing more that Mariano Rivera can do to amaze us. In the postseason, in the regular season, it is as though Yankee fans are watching an immortal when the otherwise-very-humble Rivera steps on the mound. Yet, for all the accolades, Rivera still had yet another trick up his sleeve in Arizona.

In the bottom of the tenth inning, after the Yankees had taken an extra-inning lead, after a single, double and intentional walk, the bases were loaded with no one out and Rivera was in his second inning of work.

That’s when Rivera got down to business: a foul out, a pop out and a strike out that ended the game.

It makes us wonder: is there anything the great Rivera can’t do?

3. Sunday Night Surprise

The 2009 Yankees left their mark via the late-inning comeback and walk off. The 2010 Yankees hadn’t done that much, but on this Sunday night in Los Angeles, it felt as though the Yankees stuck a season’s worth of comebacks all into one evening.

The ninth inning play by play:

M Teixeira struck out swinging
A Rodriguez singled; A Rodriguez to second on fielder’s indifference
R Canó doubled; A Rodriguez scored
J Posada singled; A Rodriguez to third
J Posada to second on fielder’s indifference
C Granderson walked
C Huffman singled; R Canó and J Posada scored, C Granderson to third
C Curtis grounded out to first; C Granderson scored, C Huffman to second

The Yankees took the lead on a two-run extra inning home run from Robinson Canó, and the most dramatic comeback win of the regular season was secured.

2. Swisher honors the Boss

Ever have to go back to work after a death in the family? It’s hard. Yet, this is what the Yankees were tasked with doing after George Steinbrenner and Bob Sheppard passed on over the All Star break.

The game was a catharsis; while the tributes to The Boss and Bob Sheppard were moving, the game itself was a tense, playoff-like atmosphere. Although Derek Jeter had a chance to win it in the bottom of the ninth, it feels almost fitting that instead it came down to Swisher, someone who’s loose, fun demeanor may have been precisely what the Yankees needed, because once you’re done mourning, you still need to go on living…

1. Papelbad, Part Two

One gets the feeling that absolutely everything could go wrong in the Yankee season, but if the team is still better than the Red Sox, you can live with it.

So it was this evening, when the Yankees had a 5-0 lead, then blew it in the latter innings, only to recover with a game tying home run from Alex Rodriguez, and a game winning home run from Marcus Thames. The game echoed the pre-2004 sentiments long expressed in the Yankee/Red Sox rivalry: that no matter how hard the Red Sox tried, the Yankees would still somehow find a way to win the game.

To do it versus Jonathan Papelbon, of course, just makes it that much better.

Share on Facebook

View the complete set, including the greatest A-Rod shot ever (well, okay, maybe not) at http://flickr.com/firerosearien

Grab the Nostalgia Train

Honor America

Let CC pitch.

Score runs when the other team doesn’t play defense.

And on home runs.

Pick Andrus off second.

Give the baseball to the Greatest Of All Time.

Victory.

Share on Facebook

(Something about the Yankee bullpen pitching five scoreless innings, the grittiness of Brett Gardner’s sliding into first base starting that five run eighth inning rally, and why you should never hang “Mission Accomplished” banners)

(Nolan’s only sad because Swisher decided to bunt.)

(Or what happens when you use so many pitchers in the bottom of the eighth and your best one never makes an appearance!)

Images via Fangraphs and Reuters. A more serious post in the morning. Maybe.

Share on Facebook

Let’s go over the tropes, shall we?

+ Minnesota takes the early lead

–In every ALDS game last season, Minnesota scored first.
—Minnesota scored first today, jumping out to a 3-0 lead, which looked unbreakable as long as Francisco Liriano was on his game. In the first couple innings, Liriano looked downright unhittable. So the Yankees did what the famed Yankee teams of the late 90s and early 00s would do, they waited, working the pitch count until Liriano was over 100 pitches in the sixth inning, and then took advantage of his tired arm.

+ Yankee bullpen comes up big, Minnesota’s does not.

–Game two of last year’s ALDS comes to mind, the eleven inning affair the Yankees eventually won after heroics from David Robertson and other bullpen members. Tonight, after a mediocre kept-them-in-the-game-for-six performance from Sabathia, Boone Logan, David Robertson, Kerry Wood and Mariano Rivera combined to keep the Twins scoreless in a two run game. On the flip side, Jesse Crain surrendered a two run home run to Mark Teixeira that proved to be the difference–last year, in game two, Joe Nathan first allowed Alex Rodriguez to tie the game in the ninth inning, and then Jose Mijares served up Teixeira’s down-the-line game winner.

+ The Yankee offense is the Yankee offense.

–Every Yankee starter except Gardner and Thames had a hit tonight, and those two reached via a walk each. The Yankees didn’t score till the sixth inning, but when they broke through, the crowd at Target Field went so quiet that when Granderson tripled and Teixeira homered you could have been excused if you had thought those clutch hits were instead outs. The Twins have legitimate hitters that can compete with anyone, a franchise player in Mauer and future Hall of Famer in Thome, but the Yankees led the Majors in runs scored this season, and showed why tonight.

+ Umpiring controversy

–Last year it was a foul ball that was fair, this year a fly ball caught on a shoe-string grab by Greg Golson that was ruled a trap instead of a catch. Had it been correctly called a catch it would have ended the game; since it was a trap it meant that Mariano Rivera, who’d already thrown twenty pitches for the four out save attempt, had to now pitch to Jim Thome with a runner on first.

Fortunately, for Yankee fans, Thome popped up on the first pitch and a crisis was averted…

+ Minnesota can’t win in Minnesota.

–The Twins are now 0-6 vs the Yankees in the postseason at Minnesota.

Share on Facebook

The standings don’t care.

The standings don’t care if a game is won in April or August, by one or by twenty, in sunshine or in rain. All that matters is that a win is a win, and the team with the most in the W column keeps on playing, long after the nights have become longer than the days.

For the fans, however, when narrative is everything, some wins just matter more than others.

Take tonight, for example.

With the Yankees’ having split with the Rays and in danger of being swept in the final home series of the season, they discarded their previous plan to try to conserve innings for their young fifth starter, Phil Hughes, and instead bade him the task of pitching tonight’s game. Not clinching a Wild Card spot is one thing; not even reducing the magic number would have been quite another.

So it was that tonight almost felt, to some, like a need for validation–that the Yankees are not the 2007 Mets, that they will still be playing baseball on Halloween. Losses build upon one another, and losing tonight’s game–where both starters were excellent and Alex Rodriguez worked some familiar late-inning magic–would have been that type of demoralizing loss that can take the color out of autumn leaves.

The win was far from perfect, and there is an emerging worry about Mariano Rivera, who has now blown three saves in one month. Is it his annual dead arm period, or something more serious? It’s not the first time Rivera has blown a save and it won’t be the last, but no one wearing pinstripes, on their uniform or, trite as it sounds, in their hearts, has had to watch a closer who was mere human for at least the past sixteen years. We simply don’t know what humanity on the mound in the ninth inning looks like, and any time previous we may have seen it, we pretend we haven’t.

On the other hand, in some respects the game illustrated the best about the Yankees: a young starter who looks poised to take the mound in the playoffs, the once almost-anathema Rodriguez hitting a late game home run and then fake-bunting to allow a steal of third base, a clutch single from Robbie Canó, dramatically cementing his MVP candidacy if he had not already done so, two and two-thirds innings of absolutely stunning bullpen work from David Robertson, Kerry Wood, Joba Chamberlain and Boone Logan, and a walk-off walk from Juan Miranda–far from the biggest bat on the roster.

All it takes is one win, strategically placed at the right time, to change the outlook from fans and writers: an elimination number of three with a week of baseball left still allows for hope; an elimination number of one would require a six or seven game losing streak.

Of course, the standings don’t care about what the fans think; they’re there, printed in greyscale in the Times and the Record and the News and the Post, and fifty years from now you probably won’t remember how the Yankees got that 93rd win of theirs, but in the end, all that the standings care about is that they did.

Share on Facebook

Via @bloggingbombers/Mark Feinsand and @ledger_yankees/Marc Carig, Mariano Rivera has pulled himself from the All Star game, saying he’s been pitching hurt.

Let’s just hope that he is not seriously hurt, and that the All Star Break provides Rivera with (at least some of) the rest he needs to help the Yankees for the second half of the season.

Share on Facebook

Silly New York Times doesn’t have an embed option, but WATCH. THIS..

Seriously.

They explain how Mo can get away with pretty much just throwing one pitch–by making it impossible for hitters to distinguish if a pitch is a fastball or a cutter, two pitches that end up in very different places.

You get to see how adept he is at hitting the corners–especially the inside corner to lefties–but, hey, you might have already known that.

Share on Facebook

Extra inning games on the road are hard enough to win as it is.

Don’t make it harder by having your best reliever languishing in the bullpen for a save opportunity that may never come.

Saves are pointless.

Good pitching is not.

Share on Facebook

A couple days ago, Bexy over at Mystique and Aura, wrote a post about how utterly awesome Mariano Rivera’s 1996 season was, and why it meant so much to the team, given that the rotation was, shall we say, not the best one the Yankees have ever had.

If you haven’t read it (okay, if you’re reading this, you probably have), I highly recommend doing so before continuing on with the rest of this post.

I would, courtesy of a recent discussion with loyal blog reader JGS, like to expand on this.

I’ll start by throwing this out there:

In Rivera’s games 6-17, he pitched a total of 25 innings–more in a month than some starters do, nowadays, and he held the team to a line of: .086 /.129/.099/.228.

Yes, you read that right. In successive outings that would likely have destroyed the arms of lesser men, Rivera held opponents to a .099 slugging–just one double in seven hits.

The thing that may be most astounding about Mariano’s 1996 season, however, is not that he gave up just one home run all year, it’s that he pitched a total of 107 reliever innings, which means that there were multiple appearances of multiple innings on consecutive days, and he has, since then, never sustained a (go ahead and knock on wood here) serious arm or shoulder injury.

Sure, he’s had some shoulder problems–like in 2008, where he had the other season of his life, and pitched on an injured shoulder–but Rivera has never missed significant time with an arm injury.

With all the fuss today about pitch counts and innings limits, it seems almost remarkable that Rivera would have been allowed to undertake that workload, something about which Ramon Troncoso or Fernando Nieve would have nightmares wherein Scott Proctor haunts them, but then we remember that the 1996 Yankees were managed by Joe Torre, and suddenly it doesn’t seem quite so surprising.

There were only eleven years between 1996 and 2007, and yet the way the Yankees handled Joba Chamberlain when he first came up, as an elite set-up man, seems so far, far different from the way Mariano Rivera pitched. There are caveats–such as Joba had an injury history and Torre a bullpen abuse history that Rivera did not and Torre had not yet amassed in 1996.

Still, it seems today amazing that Rivera accomplished in 1996 what he did, and that he never had to pay the baseball-karma-injury price.

Maybe, in 1996, Mo was a bit divine….

Share on Facebook

Javier Vazquez–yes, that Javier Vazquez–pitched awesome tonight.

There’s no other way around it. Through six innings he had just 70 pitches; he walked two, struck out six and allowed just one it.

The Mets may have been struggling, but Vazquez really was that good tonight.

The problem, however, was that he was kicking rear ends and taking names against the Mets, at Citifield, which means that NL rules apply, which means that he, as the pitcher, had to bat, which, in turn, means that he, as a Yankee pitcher, had to get hurt in doing so.

The diagnosis: bruised right index finger–yeah, that means the pitching hand.

Fortunately, the X-Rays came back negative, so no broken finger, but the last thing the Yankees really needed here was another injury.

It’s not the first time an American League team has lost a pitcher due to injury while batting in the National League, and it probably won’t be the last.

****

Congratulations ought to go to Kevin Russo, who had himself a game: his first major league hit, and then his first major league extra base hit, which also happened to be the only RBI hit of the game for the Yankees.

Let’s not talk about how the Yankees, in other innings, had runners on second and third with less than two out and could not score a run. Such things are depressing.

Happier things: Joba seemed to right himself, and Mariano was (mostly) his old self–though apparently Jason Bay stole his secret sauce.

Anyway, the Red Sox have lost and as this is being written, the Rays and Jays are also losing. The Yankees will send Phil Hughes out on the mound tomorrow, and go for the series win.

Share on Facebook