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Missed opportunities Yankees fail to take advantage of Diamondbacks' miscues
Updated: Wednesday October 31, 2001 4:44 AM
By Jamal Greene, Sports Illustrated NEW YORK -- An opposing team cannot, it has been said, under any circumstances, give the New York Yankees a fourth out in a playoff game. Well, how about five? Or six? Or seven? The Diamondbacks did just that and more in Game 3, but the Yankees repeatedly failed to make them pay as they have playoff opponents past. The fourth inning was particularly illustrative. With two outs in the bottom of the inning and Diamondbacks starter Brian Anderson pitching to Yankees left fielder Shane Spencer, Spencer popped a pitch high and foul behind the plate. Arizona catcher Damian Miller drifted uneasily toward the screen before missing the ball entirely. It landed 3 feet in front of the screen. The fiercely flapping flags above the stadium outfield facade and the official scoring (no error charged) notwithstanding, it was a play a major league catcher should make. Spencer walked. The next batter, third baseman Scott Brosius, hit a routine grounder to short. Shortstop Tony Womack set himself in front of the ball and gloved it, but it popped out Little League style. What should have been the fourth out of the inning was an error that gave the Yankees a legitimate, if artificially instigated, two-out rally.
The folly continued when shortstop Alfonso Soriano popped a ball in front of the plate that Miller simply let drop. It rolled foul and Spencer actually scored from second, but the umpires ruled it a foul ball because Miller never touched it. "It was a tough play and I messed it up -- three times," said Miller, who also dropped a pop-up when he collided with first baseman Mark Grace behind the plate in the sixth. The karma of the fourth inning suggested the Diamondbacks were about to be snake-bitten, but Soriano flew out to center to end the threat. "The wind had 'D' doing some pass patterns out there, but none of them ended up hurting us," Grace said. "That's a tribute to B.A." Is it though? Perhaps the Yankee scriptwriters' brains were paralyzed by the almost-November New York chill. Maybe -- and you're forgiven if you hadn't considered the possibility -- this just isn't New York's year. Whatever the case, it seems appropriate to ask whether, with Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson looming in two of the next three games, the source of their offensive woes is brilliant pitching by Arizona or anemic hitting by New York. How to tell good pitching from bad hitting is a conundrum as old as baseball itself, a result of the game's zero-sum nature. It is useful, though, to look at pitch counts as something of a tiebreaker. Anderson allowed just two runs and five hits, but in 5 1/3 innings he threw a whopping 107 pitches. "Rarely am I going to leave a game in the sixth inning having thrown 107 pitches and not be down by 10 runs," said Anderson, who had not started a game in nearly two months. "I knew their game plan would be to work me. I threw every pitch like it was my last." A good-hitting team jumps all over a rusty pitcher trying to turn up the juice high in his pitch count. The Yankees didn't. Arizona committed three errors and its pitchers threw two wild pitches. The Yankees scored two runs. Schilling and Johnson must be licking their chops.
Said New York manager Joe Torre: "They made some errors tonight and we could not take advantage of any of them, and that concerned me because that's never a good sign."
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