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Author: Neil Keefe

Podcasts • Rangers

Apr 30, 2015

Podcast: Adam Herman

The Rangers’ five-game win over the Penguins in the first round felt easy despite the four one-goal wins, but things aren’t going to get harder against the Capitals.

New York Rangers vs. Washington Capitals

Everything about the Rangers’ first-round series against the Penguins seemed easy. Despite winning all four games by a score of 2-1 with two of them going to overtime, it never felt like the Rangers were going to lose momentum or control of the series against the Penguins, even after their only loss of the series. Things aren’t going to be so easy in the second round for the Rangers against the Capitals.

Adam Herman of Blueshirt Banter joined me to talk about the Rangers’ easy first round, the reaction to small sample sizes in the playoffs, the way to stop Alex Ovechkin and the Capitals’ power play and the confidence level of Rangers fans against the Capitals.

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Podcasts • Rangers

Apr 30, 2015

Podcast: Brian Monzo

The Rangers have a huge advantage in the first two games of the series against the Capitals and they need to make sure they use their layoff and rest to win.

New York Rangers at Washington Capitals

When the Rangers play the Capitals in Game 1 on Thursday night at MSG, it will have been six days since the Rangers eliminated the Penguins in Game 5 of the first round. A six-day layoff is always nice to have at this time of the year and with the Capitals having played two more games and needing to travel, Games 1 and 2 of the upcoming series seem to heavily favor the Rangers.

WFAN Mike’s On: Francesa on the FAN producer Brian Monzo joined me to talk about the Rangers’ first-round series win over the Penguins, Rick Nash’s postseason performance, the level of confidence against the Capitals, the end of the Best Team in New York’s season and predictions for the second round.

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Blogs • Yankees

Apr 29, 2015

Everyone Is a Doctor When It Comes to Masahiro Tanaka

Everyone seems to have an opinion on Masahiro Tanaka’s right arm even though not everyone is a doctor or a surgeon.

Masahiro Tanaka

Tuesday ended up being “that day”. “That day” is the day I have feared since Masahiro Tanaka returned from an elbow tear on Sept. 21. of last season. “That day” is the day Tanaka would land on the disabled list again.

I ranked Tanaka No. 1 on The 2015 Yankees Order of Importance and I said:

At the end of Good Will Hunting, Ben Affleck’s character (Chuckie Sullivan) tells Matt Damon’s character (Will Hunting), “You know what the best part of my day is? The ten seconds before I knock on the door ’cause I let myself think I might get there, and you’d be gone. I’d knock on the door and you just wouldn’t be there. You just left.”

You know what the best part of my day is? Every day when I sign online or go on Twitter or turn on the TV or the radio or check my phone and I don’t hear bad news about Masahiro Tanaka’s right arm.

Tanaka and Pineda are the 2015 Yankees. The success of this season and making sure the Yankees don’t miss the playoffs for a third straight time lies in the health of those two. If they stay healthy, the Yankees have the best 1-2 punch in the AL East. If they don’t, the Yankees don’t have a season.

Well, April 28 ended up being the day when I heard the bad news about Tanaka, and now that he is out of the rotation for at least a month, the first-place Yankees are in trouble. Not as much as trouble as the 2014 Yankees were in without Tanaka because they couldn’t hit, but enough trouble that it’s to rely on Chase Whitley again.

This time it’s not an elbow issue, it’s a forearm one that Tanaka thought was a wrist one when he went to the doctor. His latest MRI didn’t show any new damage to his already-damaged right elbow, but it did show a forearm strain that may or may not be related to the tender wrist Tanaka also has.

The moment George King tweeted that there could be an issue with Tanaka, you could feel the smiles of the old guard, the lazy newspaper columnists in the city, grow bigger and their Grinch-like hearts enlarge at the idea of turmoil around the Yankees and their ace. And when Brian Cashman held a “press conference” with reporters at the Stadium, everyone quickly earned their medical degree and a lifetime of knowledge in orthopedic surgery.

I used to think you had to be really smart, get into a good college, do extremely well there, apply to med schools, get into one, do extremely well there, graduate and then do a residency to become a doctor. I didn’t know you could just write for the Daily News or Post to become one. There are a lot of doctors out there that could have saved a lot of time and money and who wouldn’t be paying back hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans if they had only gotten a job on the copy desk with either of the two tabloids out of college and then worked their way to columnist to achieve their dream of being a doctor or surgeon.

If you have read the columns written by Dr. John Harper of the Daily News or Dr. Kevin Kernan of the Post, which both read like the flaming bag of dog crap that Billy Madison leaves on old man Clemens’ front steps, you would know they are clearly as qualified as someone like Dr. James Andrews or Dr. David Altchek to diagnose an elbow tear or even suggest Tommy John surgery. Dr. Harper and Dr. Kernan probably don’t know what MRI stands for let alone have the ability to read one or understand what goes on in a human elbow, but every chance they get, they’re quick to let you know that “Masahiro Tanaka should get Tommy John surgery!” and that he should have gotten it last July. Somehow they write under the impression that Tommy John surgery is a very simple procedure with a 100 percent recovery success rate.

On Wednesday in the Daily News, Dr. Harper had a column titled “Future of Masahiro Tanaka’s elbow could be doomed as Yankees’ ace head to disabled list” (the typo on “head” is there, so I left it in). In the opening sentence, Harper cites fellow doctor Pedro Martinez, who must have used the $146 million he made in his career to attend medical school after retiring in 2009 as a source for Tanaka needing surgery. Later on, he cites Dr. Curt Schilling, in trying to prove his point. And in between, he filled his word space with a timeline of Brian Cashman’s “press conference” and quotes from the Yankees general manager, who said he will follow the doctors’ orders. The real doctors. Not the newspaper ones.

Kernan’s “column” (if you consider 693 words of bad one-liners and quotes and tweets a column) on Wednesday in the Post was titled “Why Tanaka Needs Tommy John Surgery”. With a headline like that, I expected the byline to be of someone like Dr. Andrews or Dr. Altchek or someone who has performed the surgery or someone who is an expert on the surgery or someone with a medical degree. But nope, “By Kevin Kernan” was right there.

Tanaka is now on the 15-day disabled list. Brian Cashman said we likely won’t see him back in the rotation for a month. If everything goes right, Tanaka should be healthy and back to putting up zeroes by the end of May. But that’s if everything goes right, and when it comes to arm injuries, things rarely seem to go right.

If Tanaka ever gets Tommy John surgery, it will be because a real doctor decided he needs it and not someone who plays a doctor in the newspaper.

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Blogs • Email Exchanges • Yankees

Apr 27, 2015

The Yankees and Rays Will Be in Tight Race All Year

After nearly a month of baseball, every team in the AL East is in a battle for first place and that’s likely to continue for the entire season.

New York Yankees at Tampa Bay Rays

This season was supposed to be a down year for the AL East, but after three weeks, it’s been the best division in baseball. Two games separate the five teams and the Yankees and Rays are atop the division at 11-8 with a three-game series between the two teams starting on Monday.

With the Yankees and Rays meeting in the Bronx for the first time this season, Daniel Russell of DRaysBay joined me to talk about losing the Rays’ impressive start, Rays fans’ perspective of A-Rod, Chris Archer’s dominance of the Yankees and how the AL East will play out this summer now that both teams have seen every team in the division.

Keefe: Since the last series between the two teams, the Rays have gone 5-1, winning a series against the Red Sox and sweeping the Blue Jays. After their hot start, the Rays were recently 6-8 and I thought it might be the start of their decline with the roster turnover and injuries they are dealing with, but they have rebounded to share the lead in the division with the Yankees.

For a team that was expected to have to win a lot of 2-1 and 3-2 games this year, they have done that, but they have also had no trouble putting up big numbers here and there in the first month of the season.

Given the names in their lineup, the Rays’ offense was supposed to be the weak link for 2015, but it has managed to do just enough to win games with great pitching. I guess we should all just be used to that by now?

Russell: The Rays continue to be a team built off run prevention and just-enough offense, but you’re right, the offense has done well. Most of that comes from matching up well in the handedness department. Guys like David DeJesus, Tim Beckham, Brandon Guyer and Logan Forsythe have been critical.

For any team to find success, there needs to be a little luck involved, and the Rays have done particularly well in their pinch-hitting department. That’s remarkable, as the team topped out its disabled list at 12 guys on Wednesday among several other playing-hurt guys like Souza, Cabrera, and Jennings.

Now as the starters come back into the fold, it will certainly be interesting to see what the Rays do with the guys off the bench who’ve delivered.

A lot of that has to do with taking walks as well, which we are all well acquainted with in the division. The only three teams in the American League with 10 percent walk rates are the Yankees, Rays, and Red Sox, but it’s true the offense has been putting up strong numbers.

Tampa Bay chips away at their opponents, and it’s been paying off. Their 113 wRC+ is fifth in the American League, ahead of New York at sixth (107).

Keefe: Evan Longoria hasn’t really been a part of those big numbers. He’s hitting .306/.413/.468, but he also has just one home run and four RBIs, which puts him in the Jacoby Ellsbury Club (one home run, two RBIs) early this season.

Where has Longoria’s power been? Do you ever worry about him?

Russell: Longoria has been ridiculously productive this month, so it doesn’t bother me yet that he hasn’t homered since opening day. All 19 games of the season thus far have been played in domes or under roofs, so the longballs will come.

In the mean time, Longo has a 14.7 percent walk rate and a 14.7 percent strikeout rate, while batting a .306 AVG at a 152 wRC+. It’s too soon to panic.

Keefe: The Yankees went to Tampa as a bad baseball team. They couldn’t hit or pitch with any consistency and their defense and base running was atrocious. They were 3-6 before the first game of that three game series, but then everything changed on that Friday night. Everything changed when Alex Rodriguez took over the game.

A-Rod finished 3-for-4 with two home runs and four RBIs and hit the go-ahead single in the top of the eighth in the Yankees’ win. Since that night, the Yankees have gone 8-2 to climb to the top of the AL East.

Last night on Sunday Night Baseball against the Mets, A-Rod got the Yankees started with an opposite-field home run, his fifth of the season, just two weeks after saving the Yankees’ season on Sunday Night Baseball against the Red Sox with a first-inning, bases-clearing double.

I am a huge A-Rod fan and supported, mainly because he has been treated so much worse and differently than other PED users, but also because he helps the team win. From an outsider’s perspective and from someone who watched their team lose a game single-handedly because of him, what are you feelings on A-Rod?

Russell: I’m not all Rays fans, I’m sure the fan base hates him, but what I love about baseball – and sports in general – is entertainment and narrative. A-Rod getting clean, then coming back and being the dominant baseball player he always was supposed to be, is just pure entertainment.

The Yankees winning just makes me hate the Yankees more. That sort of passion is reserved to the laundry for me.

Keefe: For the second series this year, the Yankees will thankfully miss Chris Archer as he pitched the day before the start of both series.

In six career starts against the Yankees, Archer is 5-0 with 1.93 ERA. Outside of Felix Hernandez, I think Archer is the active pitcher with the most dominant performances against the Yankees. So of course I’m ecstatic we won’t see him again this week.

What makes Archer so special? Is he considered to be the ace of the staff with Cobb and Moore still out, and is he the ace even with them back?

Russell: Archer can thrive on two pitches two times through the lineup. Thanks to some added strength this off-season he’s pushing 98 with the fastball and has a wipe out slider. When the third time comes around, he introduces the change and no one knows what to do with it. It’s a joy to watch.

He’s also an intelligent kid, a big personality, and someone who constantly gives back to the community. He signed a longterm deal thankful for everything the club has done for him.

They don’t make ’em like Archer too often.

Keefe: The Yankees and Rays are tied atop the AL East at 11-8 with the entire division separated by two games. I have a feeling it’s going to be like that the entire season with all five teams in the race and no one really pulling away and riding and hiding for the summer with the division lead.

What are your early thoughts on the division now that you have seen the Rays play all the teams?

Russell: I’ll agree I expected the division to be pretty tight, I don’t really see any club pulling ahead. New York and Toronto are susceptible to injury, the Orioles and Red Sox to pitching problems and Tampa Bay to the offense slipping away.

The fact that the Rays have not only tread water in the division, but been able to pull ahead some of the other teams, has been really something. If this is what the Rays’ B-Team can do, I’m excited to see what happens when the injured players are re-introduced.

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Blogs • Yankees

Apr 27, 2015

Subway Series Diary: Yankee Stadium

The Yankees won the first Subway Series of the season, stopped the Mets’ winning streak and reminded everyone they are and always will be New York’s team.

New York Yankees vs. New York Mets

I love the Subway Series. I always have and always will. I don’t care if it’s not what it once was or if it doesn’t have the same appeal now that interleague play happens every day. And I certainly don’t care that Carlos Beltran thinks it’s not the same as it used to be since Carlos Beltran isn’t the same he used to be.

This Subway Series was the first one in a while that had real hype and real meaning given the state of the two teams and their first-place positions. Yankees fans wanted to let the Mets fans know that the city isn’t up for grabs and Mets fans wanted to “invade” Yankee Stadium and let Yankees fans know that the Mets might be relevant for a full season for the first time in seven years.

I decided to go to the diary format that I used for the Yankees-Red Sox series two weeks ago, which I have also used for the Subway Series in the past. Just pretend like you’re reading this in one of those black-and-white Mead composition notebooks.

FRIDAY
Last May, Jacob deGrom made his debut in the majors in the Subway Series at Citi Field and pitched seven innings, allowing one earned run on four hits with two walks and six strikeouts. He took the loss in a 1-0 game. On Friday, deGrom made his Yankee Stadium Subway Series debut and pitched five innings, allowing six earned runs on eight hits with two walks and two strikeouts. And oh yeah, three home runs.

I remember in 2012 when Yankees fans complained about the team hitting too many home runs and not being able to string together hits and rallies and manufacture runs. That Yankees team went to the ALCS. The last two years, I haven’t heard any Yankees fan complain about home runs because the team has been unable to hit them, leading to two embarrassing offensive seasons and back-to-back postseason-less seasons. It’s good to have the Bronx Bombers back.

I know Mark Teixeira has been my go-to source for “Ladies and gentlemen” for the last four or so seasons and rightfully so given his admission of breaking down, his horrific production and his long list of injuries and disabled list visits. But so far this season Teixeira has been all we can ask for of him at this point: a power-hitting first baseman, who could care less about hitting for average.

No matter what Teixeira says, he isn’t going to try to go to the other way left-handed or try to beat the shift with a bunt now and then. He’s always going to have one thing on his mind from the left side and that’s trying to reach the short porch in right. If he hits .100 from the left side and .200 overall because of it, he doesn’t care. He’s going to keep on doing it. So far his plan has worked with two home runs against deGrom (and another one on Sunday against Harvey) and after the series he had eight home runs on the year with 18 RBIs in 18 games. Project those numbers out for a full season and that’s 68 home runs and 161 RBIs in 161 games (since he had one game off). Teixeira has a better chance of hitting 68 home runs with 161 RBIs than he does of playing every game the rest of the season, but I just want him to keep hitting home runs and I will forget about him getting out four out of every five at-bats.

SATURDAY
There’s not a whole lot to talk about from Saturday’s debacle other than that Matt Harvey was great and CC Sabathia was awful. I expected Harvey, a Yankees fan from New London, Conn., to come out and pitch a great game in his first Stadium audition for his 2019 team and he did just that. He’s an elite pitcher in the league and when you face someone like him, you can be giving up seven earned runs in five innings and think you’re going to win. You can’t even give up three runs in nine innings if you really want a chance of beating him.

Sabathia is now 0-4 with a 5.96 ERA in four starts. Five days after pitching a complete game in Detroit and taking the loss in a 2-1 game, Sabathia returned to his 2013-2014 self and was embarrassed by a bad Mets lineup. I have no idea how the Mets have been able to put together the best record in baseball given their lineup. Even with the greatest team pitching, which they haven’t gotten, no team should be off to the start the Mets are with their lineup, but somehow they are. If CC is going to give us one good performance every four starts this season, it’s going to be a long summer. A very, very long summer.

SUNDAY
The rubber game. When I saw the pitching matchups for this series before it started, I expected a split in the first two games and then figured it would come down to Nathan Eovaldi-Jonathon Niese on Sunday Night Baseball, and that’s exactly what happened. Yes, I’m a genius. Now if only I could get that kind of prediction right for a 12-team MLB parlay this week.

So far Brian Cashman’s offseason trades have been disastrous. Didi Gregorius can’t hit or field or run the bases and Shane Greene is 3-1 with a 3.00 ERA. Nathan Eovaldi can’t put away hitters with two strikes despite throwing high-90s and close to 100 mph and the Yankees sure could use Martin Prado’s right-handed bat and versatility around the field. (David Phelps is whatever).

It’s hard to watch Eovaldi pitch. (Though it might not be as hard as it is to watch the Mets play defense.) He’s basically Phil Hughes 2.0 with even better stuff, which makes him even more frustrating. How can he not strike anyone out despite throwing so hard, and like Curt Schilling and John Kruk said on ESPN, why is he trying to making his best pitch of each at-bat on the first pitch of each at-bat? He is throwing 0-2 put-away pitches on the first pitch to each hitter. Where is the work Cashman preached that Larry Rothschild would do with him to turn his career around? Eovaldi is 25 and has thrown 481 2/3 innings in the majors. You would think by now he would have figured out how to strike someone out with exceptional velocity, but he hasn’t.

It’s crazy that Eovaldi doesn’t have a strikeout-per-inning this season and it’s even crazier that he has allowed 31 hits in 21 2/3 innings. How are either of those things possible for someone with his talent? How? HOW? H-O-W?

I don’t usually agree with Joe Girardi, but I loved his decision to pull Eovaldi in the fifth inning. It was sort of punishment for not getting through five and nearly blowing a three-run lead. Chasen Shreve came in and did the job and he was followed by Chris Martin and Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller, who have become the best 1-2 bullpen in the majors and have shortened Yankees games to seven innings. If the league wants shorter games, forget pitch clocks after commercial breaks and not letting hitters step out of the box if they take a pitch. Just make it a rule that if the Yankees are winning after seven innings then the game is over since it is anyway with Betances and Miller. Here is their combined line for the season: 18.2 IP, 7 H, 1 R, 0 ER, 11 BB, 31 K. That’s real life.

The Yankees won their third straight series and improved to 8-2 in their last 10 and remain in a tie atop the AL East except with the Rays and not the Red Sox. For another Subway Series, the Mets and their fans were reminded that they are the little brother in this city. And because of that, I will always love the Subway Series.

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