Young Manny Banuelos was on the mound to start for Trenton. He was not at his best but his stuff mostly kept batters off balance. He got some swing and misses on high fastballs and his changeup was a killer but he used a lot of pitches early and wasn’t able to complete five innings.  He recorded six strikeouts in 4.2 innings, walking two. Akron scored two while he was on the mound but both runs scored on an errant throw by third baseman Justin Snyder, making them unearned.

I was definitely impressed by the small lefty and his stuff. He’s but 19 and obviously has a bit of fine tuning to do but the kid’s got a bright future. I would think he starts next year in Trenton getting bumped to Scranton Wilkes-Barre pretty quickly if things goes well.

Here’s a video of Banuelos tossing a pitch, to give you an idea of how he throws:

Not much effort with big results. Pretty freaking awesome.

Austin Romine, who’s been in a bit of a slump lately (likely at least partly because this is his first full season catching all the time) had a decent night at the plate. He was 1-3 with a walk and a 2B, and all of his at bats were quality. He seems to be getting his bat back on track, and he’s headed to the AFL to put a bit more work in. I’m not sure how much he’ll play there, I would be shocked if the organization wants to push him that much given the circumstances.

Austin Romine

Corban Joseph has had some trouble adjusting to AA and struggled a bit more tonight, striking out twice. I think that he’ll adjust and be okay but obviously that won’t be happening until next year. His sometimes iffy defense looked a lot better tonight than when I saw him last, he made a couple of nice rangey plays including a scoop with a nice toss to the shortstop to start a doubleplay.

Corban Joseph

Depending on what the team decides to do with David Adams it’s possible that Joseph starts out playing 3B for Trenton next year, moving back to 2B if/when Adams gets the bump up to AAA. Or vice versa, of course, but Adams is a better fielder and more likely to stick there. Neither of them are sure things at second.

Pat Venditte made his first AA appearance, which was exciting for a lot of people but not so much for me. I saw him several times on Staten Island on 2008 and knew what to expect. He was the same Pat I knew from those wonderful Short Season A days, though he only threw from the left side. His slider (from the left) still has a nasty bite and he got a strikeout and two routine groundouts.

As usual, I took a lot of pictures. If you like pictures of baby baseball players, follow along after the jump. If you don’t, there’s a good chance you are a bad person.

Cito Culver hasn’t really done much offensively in the few weeks he’s been on Staten Island but I was again impressed by his defense last night. He has good range and a nice arm, though he did have an almost errant throw that was saved by Kyle Roller. He also bobbled a ball on a routineish play and was charged with an error for that. If both he and Eduardo Sosa are in Charleston next year they’ll have a very nice up the middle defense.

Gary Sanchez tried to make the fancy play on a sac bunt and threw to second instead of first, a good throw would have gotten the runner but unfortunately it was not a good throw. He got absolutely beat up once the bullpen came in. Mike Recchia and William Oliver had no control at all. Recchia threw three (THREE!) wild pitches in 1 2/3 innings of work, and walked five batters. I don’t think Sanchez really had a shot on any of the WP, they were just bad. Recchia has never displayed horrible control any time that I’ve seen him so I was a bit taken aback by his appearance.

The weirdest play in the game was a botched rundown between second and third, the runner was eventually safe at third on a dropped throw. By Kelvin De Leon. I have no idea how De Leon got there and why he was involved in the play but I was very confused felt bad for him.

Dan Burawa pitched the last two innings for Staten Island and once again his stuff looked good. He struck out three and walked two.

Here’s my videos and pictures from the night. Enjoy.

And here’s my photo dump, there’s a lot so follow along after the jump if you’re interested.

I didn’t get as many pictures as I normally would due to the weather (it’s hard to hold an umbrella and operate a camera at the same time!), but I was able to get some and will be back later in the week to hopefully get a lot more.

Starting for the Yankees was Nik Turley, who is a tall lefty (6’7″!) that the team drafted in 2008. He was their 50th round pick and they gave him $150,000 to sign out of high school. At the time of his signing, he was labelled a “project” and the nicest way to put it is that he still is. While he’s been on Staten Island for most of the year, this is the first time I saw him. I wasn’t very impressed, he had some major command issues and just totally lost the zone here and there for a batter or two at a time. The stadium gun wasn’t working but the word we got is that his fastball was 88-91. While that’s not bad from a lefty, you generally expect more out of someone that tall.

Other than that, I think the best way to go is bullet-points.

• Rob Segedin does not look like an agile guy at first glance but seemed to move pretty well at 3B last night. Given the sample size of one game, I’m not going to label him as an above average fielder but he made at least three nice plays on balls including an excellent pick.
• Cito Culver got his first NYPL hit, a liner up the middle. He handled his position in the field pretty well, especially for a kid his age. After some of the minor league “shortstops” I have seen this year, it was a nice treat.
• Gary Sanchez is a big kid. His calves are huge and he is built like a Molina. Since he’s so very young, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing and he’ll have to work hard to keep up on his conditioning. He was charged with a passed ball that I personally would have scored a wild pitch.
• Daniel Burawa pitched an inning in relief, and I sent Greg over to the scout with a gun to find out what he was throwing (the answer was “95″). He had some command issues and threw pretty much all fastballs.

Here’s a bad quality video of Burawa pitching to Daniel Anderson (who singled). While Burawa himself is a bit blurry, you can see that he’s got a few funky things going on in his motion that can help out with deception:

And lastly, here are the pictures that I took last night.

I’ll have something more comprehensive later in the week, weather permitting.

Here’s where we are up to this point (two weeks ago or so) in the season:

Click for the full-size version.

July was a good month for Yankees pitching. That wonderful difference between ERA and xFIP means that they didn’t give up as many homeruns as expected with a normalized HR/FB rate.

Let’s take a quick look at the breakdown for the month:

Click for the full-size version.

Looking at this, you can see that the rotation was 1) Very good; 2) Pretty much performed (as a whole) as their peripherals said they would. Don’t mistake this for every pitcher in the rotation being awesome,we’ll take a look at that a little further down.

The bullpen has been very good as of late, and their numbers in July reinforce this. Relievers can and do often outperform their peripherals such as HR/FB%. It’s not necessarily a skill or something you should count on as repeatable but it’s not an uncommon occurrence in the limited amount of innings relievers pitch. Take, for example, Mariano Rivera’s career HR/FB rate of 6.3%. And no, not everyone is Mariano—not even close—but do remember that he pitches quite a lot of the relief innings put in by the Yankees bullpen.

Click for the full-size version.

Last month is eerily similar to the first month of the year, no? Anyway, since it’s silly to pretend the rotation was all performing on that level let’s take a look at how each member fared:

To the shock of no one who watches baseball CC Sabathia was the anchor of the Yankees rotation. He was very, very good and his numbers are a very large part of why the overall rotation numbers looked so great.

Andy’s FIP is exaggerated by the 2 1/3 innings he pitched (walking 3) before getting pulled with a groin injury. We miss him and he should come back before I hang myself after watching Dustin Moseley pitch (it’s not Moseley’s fault he just is what he is, and that is not very good).

The reason Burnett and Sabathia have such big differences in their FIP/xFIP is that they gave up so few homeruns in July (big old duh, I know). To be specific, AJ gave up 1 and CC 0. Hard to believe about AJ specifically, but there you have it.

Javier Vazquez was who he is, and Phil Hughes has been working through a bought of Babypitcheritis.

To be fair, Hughes’ numbers are exaggerated by two bad starts. He also had a very good start and two ok starts. Then again, that sort of month is Babypitcheritis in a nutshell. I’m sure he’ll be fine.

Click for the full-size version.

The bullpen went from horrifying to hooray pretty quickly and stayed that way. This is thanks to David Robertson turning things around (which I knew he would because he is clearly powered by my love), Boone Logan somehow turning into a good pitcher (I don’t get it either, but I’ll take it as long as it lasts), no more Chan Ho Park (sorry things didn’t work out, buddy) and so on. Life’s been good lately. No complaints!

These two graphs don’t tell us anything we don’t know about AJ Burnett: He is inconsistent and has magnificent and truly horrible starts. That’s just how he rolls. Like a roller coaster that is not actually possible. The line is simply tracking up many runs he’s given up each start.

This year’s roller coaster has been a bit bumpier than what we experienced in 2009. It hasn’t really been much fun to watch. Hopefully–and this is hope beyond hope–we’ll go down that hill and not have another long climb up. But he’s facing the Rangers in Texas tonight and that is honestly rather frightening, though the good news is he’s not likely to give up more runs than he did in his last start!

Click for full size

Click for full size

A quick catch-up: Andrew Brackman dropped to the Yankees in the first round in 2007 due to signability concerns and they grabbed him then signed him to a contract that I am not a big fan of because it escalates the need for his development time (major league deal for a not polished pitcher, nooooo). He pretty much immediately had Tommy John surgery, and last year was his first pitching in the system. He didn’t really impress much with his stuff or results but he’s been much better this year.

Nota Bene:  I am not a scout and am not trying to represent myself as such. I cannot talk about mechanics, I won’t grade pitches or tools, I am just talking about my impressions of notable kids I happen to see.

The first thing you notice about Andrew Brackman is, not surprisingly, that he is very tall. He’s 6’11″ which is the sort of height that sounds impressive and manages to look even more impressive (it’s also why the Yankees and other folks drooled over him so much).

That's a tall pitcher!

I had what you might call a good seat for the game:

The best part of prospect stalking, aside from the stalking of prospects, is getting seats that are much better than I’ll ever have if/when they make it to the Major Leagues, and at approximately 1/1000th the price.

Brackman is amazing to look at because he is a checklist of all the things scouts love in a pitching prospect physically:

1. Tall
2. Room to fill out
3. Long arms
4. I’m sure there’s something else I’m forgetting

Look at that picture. You can hear the screams of “DOWNWARD PLANE!!!!” from the mouths of frothing talent evaluators in the background if you listen closely enough.

Waterfront Park doesn’t have a radar gun up for the crowd, but my friend checked with some of the scouts sitting behind us who told us Brackman was sitting 93-94 and hitting 96 which is a huge difference from last year. His curveball was, to my eye, everything you have heard. I know that last year he sort of lost it but when it’s there it is a great, great pitch. He has a changeup (not sure on the speed) that was also very nice. His fastball sinks a bit so he gets a lot of groundouts rather than fly outs, which is also nice.

Also he runs funny (which makes sense given his height and gangliness) but I was giggling too much to take pictures of him running to cover first base on a play.

If you want to read an actual real scouting report, check out Frankie Piliere’s writeup. He was also at the game and said that it’s the first time he’s seen Brackman and been “impressed”, which is good!

Brackman went through 4 innings with not much drama, but was lifted in the 5th after recording two outs. He walked two in a row and had just totally lost the zone, which is apparently a thing that happens to him when he hits around 80 pitches. The word is that he loses his mechanics a bit at that point for whatever reason, though I obviously cannot confirm that. You can read some more about that over at Mike Ashmore’s Thunder Thoughts.

Taking advantage of my seating, I recorded a few videos that are not great quality for anyone interested.

And lastly, I took a lot of pictures. Most of these of Brackman, a few of them are 1-2-3 action shots of him tossing and a couple of other non tall pitcher shots.

There’s a lot of them, so if you’re interested following along after the jump.

I understand their motivation too: When are you gonna see another guy hit a round number like 600 homeruns again? Not for a while though there are some people on with a great chance to do so. But I hate them as the people I’m sharing my baseball experience with because I am a temperamental crazy sorta snobby baseball fan.

Last night there were throngs of people wearing brand new A-Rod jerseys who seemed to have no idea what a baseball is. The rows around me in the bleachers emptied out between A-Rod at bats. People who were familiar with this baseball thing complained a lot about Lance Berkman being the the most horrible acquisition the Yankees have ever made. Apparently he is a terrible baseball player, maybe even the worst in MLB and it’s not close.

In 2007 when Alex was closing in on 500 homeruns a lot of the same idiocy was around, of course. Much like now whenever he hit a ball into the air, thousands of people went nuts even if it didn’t leave the infield. I was aggravated then too but wasn’t going to as many games. The game before he hit 500, I actually was driven nearly insane by the yell at all fly balls crowd. It was not pretty.

If the team could harness the alleged wind tunnel and just push a lazy fly ball over the wall tonight at some point, I would appreciate it. Not because I’m going to be there but because I’m tired of hearing about it, and being exposed to people who think every pop up is outta here, and because if I stab someone I’m probably going to jail which I don’t really want to do.

Luckily I didn’t have to resort to begging or making promises I had no intention of keeping because I know a lot of (fellow) baseball nerds. We hopped in the car in the early afternoon and were off to Trenton to watch baseball (and hilariously meet up with a few more baseball nerds).

Waterfront Park opened up in 1994 and underwent some renovations recently, but I have nothing to compare it to so no comments there. Entry into the park was fast, we went up to a ticket gate and breezed through security (the guy kind of looked in my backpack). I’m not sure if there are more ADA friendly entrances but at the one we entered the park in, you go up a rather large flight of stairs to enter. I assume there must be something around but I didn’t look for it, and was mostly interested in getting into my seat ASAP.

I had no idea there was a giveaway but upon entering we were handed New York Yankees luggage tags. They are made of polyurethane or something similar, but were much better quality than the ones I’ve gotten from the actual Yankees.

My new exciting luggage tag! I actually needed one, so this was a nice surprise.

Waterfront Park is set up so that you walk down to your seats from the concourse, pretty typical of minor league parks. There are two levels of seating, the “Pavillion” and “Club Seats” which are separated by a small walkway. We were sitting in Club Section 16, slightly up the Third Base line. This is what our view of the action straight on looked like:

Waterfront Park - Club Section 16

One thing I was really overjoyed by was that the Thunder don’t use batboys, no they have the greatest gimmick of all time: Bat dogs. Every team should have bat dogs. They rule.

Trenton Thunder Bat Dog in Action

The Thunder have a few championships and a few retired numbers:

They haven’t always been a Yankees affiliate, so yes that is the Garciaparra you’re thinking of.

The game itself was not very good. Hector Noesi started off well (7 pitch first inning, 7 strikes thrown) but then fell apart a bit in the second, did okay in the third and totally came undone in the fourth. He seemed to lose his command in the second and fourth inning, which is bad for a pitcher like him who relies to heavily on it rather than stuff, and fell victim to a combination of atrocious defense and getting hit hard. It wasn’t very fun to watch in a vacumn. At some point I looked at the seats in the row of front of me and  spent some time trying to figure out of this scribble was meant to be a swastika:

I have no idea, it’s probably not it was just weird to see.

The crowd had a lot of people in Phillies gear, which isn’t surprising given the proximity of Trenton to Philadelphia. It seemed like 75% of the people at the game were totally obsessed with getting on the dodgy, low quality “FAN CAM” but that’s nothing new or exciting. They were showing people sitting next to me at some point, I put my program over my face in case the camera wandered over. I’m a little anti-social.

Waterfront Park is a nice place to see a game, and I’ll be heading there again this upcoming Friday to collect a David Robertson bobblehead. This time I’ll be taking the train, which I’m sure will be an experience.

Finally, here’s the dump of all the pictures I took that aren’t terrible:

Things started off a little scary as the first out was a deep fly to right field. I could not at first tell if it was going over the wall, and honestly I don’t think Nick Swisher could either. It landed in his glove in the end and there was much rejoicing.

Now, if you hang around the internet during games you see a lot of “BABIP nooooooo!!” type comments. It’s sort of a catch all and overused by everyone, including me. I cannot, however, describe the results of the next two at bats as anything but the God of BABIP punching Joba in the gut.

First, Scott Podsednik bunted for a hit. Argh. Next, Jason Kendall hit a ball so slowly that it died halfway up the line to A-Rod for a “base hit”. It was not a bunt, Kendall had made such bad contact with the pitch that it barely moved the baseball, which happened to end up in no man’s land.

At this point the people around me started booing, and calling for Mariano to come into the game. It was pretty ridiculous.

I am not a Joba defender and I think there is more going on with him than just bad luck on balls in play, but last night was clearly a bizarre freak inning. I know that frustration boils over and all that but if there was ever a game where the drama wasn’t his fault, it was yesterday.  Let’s not forget about the blown call at third base where everyone who was watching the game except Chad Fairchild (the 3B umpire) saw Alex Rodriguez tag Podsednik before he slid into the base.

He danced around Billy Butler a bit (or it looked like that from my seat), which was okay by me as he has an OPS of nearly .900 against RHP and took his chances with Jose Guillen. Guillen is a decent, but not great hitter and not at all patient. He quickly grounded out to short, inning over, crisis averted.

Anyway, my basic point here is that Joba didn’t suck. The first out was hit much, much harder than either of the two singles. The inning should have been over before he even faced Butler but the third bungled call of the game happened to go against the Yankees. It was an actual “bad luck” night, and those suck and are awful to watch and the timing was bad but they happen to everyone. It’s happened to Mariano at least once this year.

I know that a lot of people have lost all confidence with Joba, and I admit I don’t really have much because you never know which version is going to show up until the inning is in progress. But if you go crazy and overreact every time there’s a little blip it’s probably not very good for your health.

I don’t (usually) work crazy hours and I am (usually) not on call, but I do have a laptop that I often use to bring work back and forth between my office and my home. It’s not a work issued laptop, but it makes my life a lot easier. Working on one file instead of sending things all over the place and having several versions floating around is pretty helpful!

The Yankees, however, throw a wrench into my precious routine with their security guidelines that ban laptops. On days where I go to a game after work I have to make a decision whether to take my laptop to work and lock it in my desk or leave it at home.  Sure, there’s the bag check across the street but I am not comfortable leaving my laptop there and I am not willing to pay $10 to do so in any case. It’s a small, yet rather aggravating thing that bothers me enough times during the season that I feel the need to whine.

I know that it interferes with other people more than it does me, so I dedicate this whine to those of you out there who are glued to their laptops for work and sometimes like to take part of a night off for a game. May your laptops never be broken while behind the counter at a store on the other side of River Avenue.

Probably the worst thing about the ban beyond the impact it has on people is that nobody seems to have any real answers about why laptops are still on the Prohibited Items List. Even after loosening the formerly totally insane bag policy the team has not budged on laptops. In fact, they added iPads to The List for whatever mysterious reason (but the team didn’t actually make it known–someone found out when they were told they couldn’t bring it in and then another person verified it, etc).

There has been speculation that these bans are in place so that people don’t get distracted by any laptops or iPads in use. Frankly, this is stupid. There are a zillion things going on at a game at once. People standing up and sitting down, people yelling, roving vendors, video screens, aggravating people doing the wave, that random person a few rows away doing something weird and so on. I do not for a second believe that these two random items in use are any more distracting than the crazy loud HIP HIP!!! dudes 99% of the time.

And honestly if someone near you is doing something that is killing your enjoyment you can follow these simple steps (most of the time you can stop after Step 1 or 2):

1. Ask them, nicely, to cut it out.
2. Ask them, less nicely, to cut it out.
3. Nuclear option: Contact security.

Use your judgement, usually just repeating Step 1 a few times works.

The typical response to this seems to be:  ”Well you’re going to a baseball game, why do you even need your laptop?”

That’s just a sign that you’re not thinking about anything and just being an ignorant snob. Sorry if that sounded harsh, but if you take two seconds you can think it through pretty easily.

Here’s some reasons why people might bring their laptops to a baseball game that don’t involve using the laptop during a game:

• They have a job where they need to bring a laptop to and from work.
• Commuter student headed to a game after classes.
• They are going to a game after being somewhere where they had to bring their laptop.
• They are going to a game and afterwards have to go somewhere with their laptop.

Really, people, it’s not hard.

Plus, if someone wants to use a laptop at a game more power to them. There are legit baseball reasons like scoring apps to be using one, though I wouldn’t risk damaging mine by pulling it out at my seat. If they’re watching porn or something ridiculously violent then yeah that’s a problem, but it’s not a problem without a solution.

I’ve been told that you can actually get a laptop into Yankee Stadium these days because security doesn’t really spend a lot of time scrutinizing items. I’m not willing to risk this since I don’t want to check mine across the street in the event that I am busted. But if security isn’t even noticing them, it makes the ban that much goofier.

No other baseball park I’ve been to in the last four years has a laptop ban, what makes going to Yankee Stadium so different?