On any given night...

When you listen to a New York Yankees radio broadcast, you better be ready to hear one cliche' after another. John Sterling waxes poetic over and over again, 162 games a year. While I'd usually rather listen to Bette Midler or Barbara Streisand than Sterling and Suzyn Waldman, I really have no other choice when driving somewhere.

Throughout any game you can hear Sterling talking about "what a crazy game" baseball is. "You just can't predict this game Suzyn," is one of his favorite phrases. While Sterling is a tough listen and his overuse of such a phrase grates on my very last nerve, the man does have a point. Baseball is the one sport where one player out of 9 (or ten in the AL) can completely carry a team for the night. For the last three games, the Yanks have been baffled by three different starting pitchers for the Washington Nationals. Sharion Martis, John Lannan, and Craig Stammen shut down the high priced Yankee line up with ease.

You may hear, if you listen to sports talk radio here in the New York City area, that the Yankees don't do well against pitchers they haven't seen before. While I think there may be a growing issue for the pinstripers with facing new blood, I think this completely discounts the truth of the matter. Good pitching will always beat good hitting.
A majority of the Yankees line up is currently in a bad slump, but when you are facing a team on pace to break the 1962 Mets record for futility, you assume New York would back into two wins out of three in this series. But clearly that didn't happen.

Martis, Lannan, and Stammen attacked the strike zone. They mixed up their pitches and were not awed by playing in the Bronx. Maybe Mystique and Aura had the week off... or maybe their contracts were extended when the old building closed. But these three pitchers were good. Plain and simple. Good pitching beat good hitting this week at Yankee Stadium. The cliche' works.