Almost Perfect

Yesterday I questioned whether the Yankee offense would be able to produce against the Red Sox pitching. The answer, it seems, was only in the most frustrating way possible. The team managed ten hits and four walks, which was very nice, but stranded a whopping nine baserunners. Thankfully, the four runs they did manage to score were enough, and I think it's only a matter of time before they start stringing these hits together.

Of course the big story last night wasn't the Yankees stranded on the basepaths, but the one standing on the mound. Chien-Ming Wang came within a hair's breadth of a perfect game last night, and in a very different way from the previous time he came close to a perfect game last May. Instead of sinker after unhittable sinker, Wang increasingly mixed in sliders, four seam fastballs, and splitters. It was these pitches that Wang was working on with Dave Eiland in spring training, and that work seems to have taken his game to a new level. Considering the level he was at before, that's pretty impressive. The true test, however, will come on a day when his sinker isn't working for him. If he's truly improved his secondary pitches to the point where he can still win without the sinker, we could see a Cy Young type of season.