No one ever complains that their favorite baseball team hits too many grounders to the second baseman or that they hit too many routine fly balls to left-center field.
Those would be actual problems with an offense and you’d expect to hear some people register their displeasure with the frequency of those outcomes. We bring this up because some sectors of New York have made it known that they object to the number of home runs that the Yankees are hitting this season.
You know who doesn’t share that point of view? Chris Capuano and the Mets, that’s who.
The Yankees took Capuano deep four times on Saturday night in the Bronx, accounting for all six of their runs against him in a win that evened the first round of the 2011 Subway Series heading into Sunday’s rubber match. Perhaps the 7-3 win would have pleased more people if the Yankees scored their runs on a bunch of singles and doubles, but it seems like a pretty unnecessary bit of nitpicking.
You never hear people complain about having too much sex, too much money or too much bacon (okay, but not until after they eat all of it), so why would there be a problem with too many home runs? The answer is inevitably that there will be a problem when they run into good pitchers, which suggests David Price, Jon Lester and others aren’t actually good pitchers.
They are, of course, and we'll just remind all the dissenters that the Yankees lead the American League in runs scored despite their "problem" with too many homers. They're a good bet to keep that up if Curtis Granderson's stunning turnaround against lefties (eight homers after Saturday night) continues over the entire season.
After all, how can you complain about the lack of offense one night and then turn around to complain about too much of it on the next night unless you are just an unhappy person? Enough about psychology, let’s get back to baseball.
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You’ll read no big assumption that the Yankee offense is back based on their power explosion Saturday because we’ve already done that dance too many times this season before having the music stop a short time later. We will say that it still feels like a certainty that the team will have a long run of offensive production like they got against Capuano.
Once you combine that with a sturdy start by A.J. Burnett and another escape act by David Robertson, you’ve got yourself a recipe for the kind of sustained success that’s eluded the Yankees so far this season.
While admitting that it is slightly harder to get all those things on a nightly basis than it is to pick the date of the Rapture out of thin air, everyone can agree that it seems a lot easier to get it right eventually.
