The first month of the baseball season is over and the Yankees find themselves in third place with a losing record. While this is certainly an improvement over last season, I don't think it's what any of us expected. Baseball, however, is all about the unexpected and a lot of what has gone wrong for the Yankees are things that no one could have seen coming, let alone do anything about:
- A schedule which started by playing twenty games straight without an off day.
- Miserably cold and/or rainy conditions in the first thirteen of those games.
- A Papal visit to Yankee Stadium which created a schedule where the team would play a Major League record 18 road games in April, with only two days at home between 8 and 10 day trips.
- Injuries which caused Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada and Alex Rodriguez, three of the most valuable and durable players in the game, to miss significant time.
- Injuries to the backups for Jeter and Posada, with Jose Molina only able to catch sporadically as he worked through a hamstring strain and Wilson Betemit unable to play at all thanks to corneal ulcers.
- The freakish coincidence of A-Rod going pulling his quad the night before his wife gave birth. This kept him from getting an MRI, something which might have kept him from aggravating the injury.
- Pneumonia which hospitalized Joba Chamberlain's father and caused the pitcher to leave the team in order to be with his family.
- A torn Lisfranc ligament in Brian Bruney's foot which may cause him to miss the rest of the season
Looking at that list, I have to say that it's something of a minor miracle that the team is only one game under .500. This isn't to say that the team shouldn't be doing better. While you can't really blame anyone for the above mishaps, you can question how Brian Cashman, Joe Girardi and the rest of the Yankees' staff have reacted to them, and I'll be doing that tomorrow.
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