Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Mariners 3, Yankees 2

Stinnett killed us, I'm guessing--and I say guessing because the game was absent TV coverage. Watching ESPN's GameCast, I noticed Ichiro get a hit in the eighth inning, described as an "infield hit to the catcher."

Huh? An infield hit to the catcher? How does that work, except as a bunt?

I'd heard of Ichiro bouncing the ball off home plate and beating it out, but these usually wind up in the pitcher's glove.

So: infield hit to the catcher. Interesting.

Then Ichiro steals, Stinnett's wild throw sends him to third. Then a sac fly brings him home.

I'm thinking about back in the day, a decade ago, Girardi and Leyritz, all the catching you'd ever need, with Posada in the pipeline. King (Leyritz) leaves, Posada moves up; Girardi goes to the Cubs, King returns to do what he does best: hit the ball into the parking lot come October.

Now we've got the battling, blameless Posada killing himself 135+ starts per season. (His handling of Rivera through another tough ninth the other night was masterful.) And we've got Stinnett: can't hit, can't catch, can't throw. Triple threat.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but we have The Unit to thank for Stinnett.....twice!

We had to deal top catching prospect (Dinar?) to the Dodgers, for them to send Green to AZ, who in turn sent the Yanks Johnson.

This followed by The Pinstripes picking up Stinnett in order to apease Johnson. Stinnett was his everyday catcher during the D-Backs World Series run in '01. In this I assume, was to help The Unit get back to his old fourm.

Oh well, don't just ask me, SunDevilJoe has his own rather blunt opinion of Stinnett.

As Sterling said yesterday, bad waste of a good Johnson start.