THE RIGHT AND THE WRONG

Everybody contributed to today's solid win against the Mariners except Cano and Giambi, who remained in their respective death spirals. Baseball Tonight addressed thier problems and provided confirmation, positive and negative, of what I said in the next to last post. Little Buster Brown asked Fernanado Vina if could explain what is going wrong with Robby, and he provided a quite compelling analysis that made one wonder what the Yankees hitting instructor is doing. According to Vina, Cano is not getting his front foot down quickly enough so that he has a split second moment of equipoise during which he can read the spin on the pitch. He is trying to step and read the pitch in the same motion, which Vina said is impossible. A very small adjustment will fix matters spake the Vina and I must say I believed him. If I were the Yankees, the week probation for the hitting coach just became 5 days. If Cano is not hitting by the end of the Cleveland series...

Giambi was more interesting, at least as a testament to the blind spot people have concerning the shift.. Olney showed a lot of Yankee hits, all of which, he noted, went the other way or up the middle. Vina supplied the technical commentary on what a batter does with his body to keep inside of the ball. All very edifying. But then Olney took over the analysis of Giambi, claiming the Yankees are actually happy with the way he is swinging the bat, though they might lose all patience with him should the results not improve, particularly as he is a contractual lame duck anyway. He then showed Giambi rolling over on one pitch and hitting the ball smartly to second on another. He is just being defeated by the shift Olney proclaims. But that begs the question is the key to hitting a hard thrower like King Hernandez is to go the other way, and if that rule holds for the Jeter, Abreu, Damon, Cabrera and Matsui, why doesn't it hold for the one man whom the defense is daring to hit the other way? Olney made no mention of the obvious fact that if Giambi did what the other hitters did, he would have collected knocks without even hitting the ball well. With Cano, you have three consecutive years telling you he will surely hit eventually, but I just don't see how they can accomodate in Giambi a stubborness that might keep him at or below the Mendoza line for the entire series, especially not with his inability to field, throw or run the bases.

Observation of the Day: Have you noticed the ESPN visual advertising Sunday Night baseball? It is a portion of the left field wall at Fenway, a strange unconscious concession that they are indeed Red Sox Network. The same sort of brazen obtuseness characterized their pre-season reaction to Hank Steinbrenner's claim of bias on their part. They trotted out Peter Gammons, aka Theo Epstein's bathroom attendant, to mock Steinbrenner by likening him to Joseph McCarthy. Yeah, like anyone would need a "secret list" to establish that Gammon of all people is the biggest Chowderville homer since Johnny Most (who once claimed Wilt Chamberlain had bludgeoned Bill Russell in the elbow with his eye). The salient difference being of course that Most was in fact a home town announcer, while the Dali Lama as they call him (why exactly, do they mistake his triteness for profundity, his vacuousness for wisdom--a gross insult to Tibetan Buddhism in any case) purports to be a national commentator.