Yankees-Blue Jays Recap

Yankee Stadium

This was a pretty unexciting game with not much action happening. The Yankees lost 7-3 and dropped to 1-2 with the KHH bloggers in attendance. To make it worse, they have played the Royals, Mets, and Blue Jays when we went, so they have no excuse not to be 3-0. Here are some of my notes from the game:

• Again, we decided to buy peanuts outside the stadium before the game, but we were not going to make the same mistake as last time and buy a huge bag for $2. Instead, we bought 2 smaller bags, which had salt this time, for $3 each, which doesn’t make any sense. It was still less than the big bag, but also too much for us. Next time, we will only buy one small bag.
• When we arrived to our lower level, behind first base seats, we immediately noticed the padded chairs. Even though we were 20 rows up, at Shea none of the chairs are padded. It makes a huge difference and it shows how cheap the Mets are (or how rich the Yankees are). Anyway, it made the game much more enjoyable.
• In the third inning as I was eating my peanuts, one of the shells jumped up and went into the kid’s hair in front of us. I didn’t know what to do because it would be awkward no matter what. If I flicked it out of his hair, he would have noticed, if I told him, that would have been awkward, and if I didn’t do anything his dad might see it and know it was me. Luckily, it innocently fell out a few innings later and nobody noticed. It provided the game with some excitement while it lasted.
• As we bought the magnificent Yankee Stadium lemonade again, Raphi tried to pay with a credit card and the lemonade lady was mad at him. That’s why you need to carry around cash.
• The 6th inning was the disaster inning for Bartolo Colon and the Yankees. The Blue Jays scored 5 runs, and one of the reasons why was 2 intentional walks by Colon. I’m not a big fan of intentional walks, especially in the situations that happened tonight. There was also a 4 pitch walk with the bases loaded to Eric Thames (who?) which only exaggerated the disaster.
• In the bottom of the 6th, the Yankees threatened to make a comeback, but just as this was happening, Robinson Cano shot a sure-to-be double play ball to the shortstop, Yunel Escobar. Instead of turning the double play, Escobar tried to roll the ball to second base to get an out and the runner was called safe and an error was given. It was a pretty hilarious play, but it didn’t matter in the end.
• Curtis Granderson had a pretty interesting game for the Yankees. In 5 plate appearances, he struck out twice and walked 3 times, never putting the ball in play. He also scored all 3 of the Yankee runs after walking to start the inning. The Yankees really needed other contributors besides him tonight. Notably, Posada was awful. In all of his at-bats he didn’t come close to getting a hit. He is batting significantly under .200 and I sense that the end of his Yankee career is near.
• In the top of the 1st, Jose Bautista hit another home run to pad his major league lead in the category. Another category he leads is on base percentage with a whopping over .500 percentage. We were able to see why as he was intentionally walked twice in the game. The Blue Jays pretty much have no hitters besides him, so teams can just walk him whenever they want. Unfortunately, it came back to hurt the Yankees in this game.

Now for some pictures:

The Yankee Stadium lower level menu. Very fancy, especially compared to Shea.

A-Rod at First

Runners on the Corners

The YMCA Crew

Our next event will be on Wednesday as the Red Bulls take on the Colorado Rapids in Harrison. Come join us at RedBull Arena! Even Sam will be there! Also, come out to Arts Night tomorrow at Heschel! Just kidding, I’ll be shocked if anyone actually shows up.

Yankees-Mets Recap

As Raphi put it, this was our first baseball surprise of the year and it was not predictable at all. The Mets won 2-1 in the Bronx to improve to a somewhat respectable 3-5 when we have attended their games and more importantly for them, 22-22 on the year. That is surprising enough. The Yankees fell to 1-1 in front of the KHH bloggers and 23-20 overall. After we saw R.A. Dickey lose at home to the Rockies, Astros, and Giants, he was able to win on the road at Yankee Stadium. Do you get what I mean by unpredictable? Freddy Garcia pitched well, but still got hit with the loss. There were plenty more surprises from this game but I will start from the beginning.

The first surprise of the night was that Raphi was less than 20 minutes late. This gave us enough time to go buy pizza before arriving at the Stadium. I had 2 slices and Raphi had 0, probably a very wise choice. As we were walking to the Stadium, we passed someone selling bags of peanuts on the street. There was one that was salted for $3 and one that was unsalted for $2. The cheaper one was also the much bigger one, so we thought, why not? and bought the unsalted peanuts and took them into the stadium with us. I don’t like to start eating them until at least the end of the first inning, especially because I had just eaten 2 slices of pizza, but we started eating them at 7:25, just as the 2nd inning was beginning. Before long, we had realized what we had just gotten ourselves into. This bag was ginormous, much bigger than any other peanut bag that we had had prior (and some of those were too big to handle). By the time we were a third of the way done, I was already completely sick of them and wanted to throw the rest away, but I could not disrespect the peanuts like that. We had to finish them. During the 7th inning stretch, I looked down at the peanuts and thought that I was finally almost done. The problem was that I felt that way until the top of the 9th inning when we finally finished them. We had been eating them nonstop and we only finished them at 9:45. We had been constantly eating them the whole game and it took us almost two and a half hours to finish them. Raphi deserves a lot of credit for finishing the peanuts, but I deserve to be in the Hall of Fame of peanut eaters for my performance tonight. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of how many peanuts we ate:

Full Bag of Peanuts

Empty Bag of Peanuts

Ripped Peanuts

What a Catastrophe

So Gross

Even though we ate all those peanuts, there was still more food that we ate. As I mentioned before, I ate 2 slices of pizza before the game. Raphi also bought a hot dog midway through the game to get the peanut taste out of his mouth. He should enter a Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contest. He can compete against Mark Sanchez (it was against the Raiders, by the way).

Also from Mark Sanchez (we need some football in this blog):

Once the game started and I had already eaten many of the peanuts, my mouth longed for something other than the peanuty badness. I decided to go search for a drink. The first drink I saw that didn’t have a huge line and wasn’t water was a lemonade stand. I didn’t really want this, but I had no other options. And it looked bad too. It looked like they just put a lemon in a cup of water. But I was very wrong. It was delicious; maybe the best lemonade I had ever drank. It was so good that Raphi also got one later. Here’s a picture of our almost finished lemonades:

Delicious Lemonades

We have calculated that we must have eaten about 3,500 calories combined tonight. That is 1,750 each, almost the amount that you are supposed to have for a day in 4 hours. When I got home I looked at my stomach in the mirror and it looked bigger than it was before, I’m not lying. And I feel like I have to throw up. Enough about food; on to the game.

The Mets lineup was pretty gross tonight. The 5-9 hitters were Fernando Martinez (also the DH, what a joke), Justin Turner, Josh Thole, Jason Pridie, and Ruben Tejada. How that team beats the Yankees, I have no idea. Justin Turner had a bunt single in his first at-bat and had 3 hits in the game. He also broke a Mets record for the most consecutive games with an RBI for a rookie with 6. Wow, Justin Turner now holds a Mets record. Another surprise was that the only run the Yankees scored the whole game came on a Mark Teixeira first row home run in the third inning. Their offense was pretty disgusting to say the least. Yet another surprise: the Mets bullpen was shockingly good. If you remember my article from a few days ago, Mike O’Connor pitched a great 7th inning and Izzy and K-Rod shut the door for the Yankees. However, Joba and David Robertson pitched well out of the Yankees’ pen.

After attending this game, I feel the need to rant at Mets fans. First, I want to take you back to a few days ago on Wednesday. There must have been less than 1,000 people at Shea to watch the Mets take on the Nationals, and the fans that were there were very unspirited. There was not much cheering. Heck, I was able to distract Gorzy to make a terrible pick off throw. Now fast forward to today. There were probably at least 10,000 Mets fans at Yankee Stadium. And most of them didn’t honestly care about the Mets. They just want the Yankees to lose. They want to prove to all the Yankees fans that their team is bad because they lost to the lowly Mets. They don’t even think that their own team is good. They only want to annoy Yankees fans. They know that their team has no chance at the playoffs, so they might as well try to ruin the Yankees’ chance. That is all. Now it’s time for a few more pictures:

Random Fernando Martinez Stat

Yankees

The Field

Our Seats

K-Rod

In other baseball news, after the Nationals were blanked 2 nights in a row against the Mets, they scored 17 tonight against the Orioles. Typical. Blue Jays pitcher Jo-Jo Reyes pitched 7 innings and had a 2-0 lead, but the bullpen could not hang on and the Blue Jays still lost. Of note is that Jo-Jo Reyes has not gotten a win in 26 straight starts. That’s 26. Reyes is 5-18 for his career in 45 starts and his last win came on June 13, 2008 against you guessed it, the Mets (just kidding, the Angels, but I wish it was the Mets). Did you think that Jason Giambi’s power streak was just good for one game? Well it wasn’t. The Giambino went yard again tonight in Milwaukee. Keep it going big fella!