The pressure in on C.C. Sabathia to come through for the Yankees in Friday night's winner-take-all Game 5 in the Bronx.
The Yankees will look to C.C. Sabathia to come through in Friday Night's winner-take-all Game 5 in the Bronx against the Baltimore Orioles. The "ace."
It's what every team wants, but there are 30 major league baseball teams and not nearly that many aces.
The Detroit Tigers have one.
Thursday night Justin Verlander turned in a performance for the ages in a winner-take-all Game 5 in Oakland against the American League's feel-good story of 2012, the Oakland A's.
Verlander was the definition of dominant. Nine innings, four hits, one walk, zero earned runs, and 11 strikeouts. The 11 strikeouts were a major league record in a winner-take-all playoff game. The Tigers took a 2-0 lead in the third inning, and the game felt over.
It wasn't, of course. Those who have watched this Oakland A's team all season know that until the final out is recorded, the A's are never truly done. Yet Thursday night Verlander sure made it tough for a fan to see how the A's were going to mount a rally.
That became increasingly impossible to envision as the Tigers increased their lead to 6-0 as the game wore on. In the end, the A's lost to a better team with a much better pitcher. There's no shame in that. Verlander is as good as any pitcher in baseball right now.
Thursday night's performance was one for the record books, and Friday night the New York Yankees will be looking to C.C. Sabathia for a similar performance.
The Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles are major league baseball's two premier power-hitting teams. Yet through four games in the ALDS the two teams have combined to score a total of 22 runs. In the last three games they've scored only 13 runs. These are not the offenses you're looking for.
Of course the potential exists that Friday night's Game 5 will serve as a reminder that these are in fact two potent offenses. Maybe the final score will be 13-12, but it seems more likely that this game will be another low-scoring, one-run nail-biter.
If you were going to stack baseball's starting pitchers and separate them by tiers of talent and accomplishments, Verlander would be in the top tier. Sabathia would be on the next one down. He's a number one starter, there's no debating that. He's not quite Verlander, though.
Friday night the Yankees might need him to be. Those no-name Orioles starters have been tough to hit for the Yankees. Through four games, Orioles starting pitchers have allowed a total of five earned runs. Yankees starters haven't been much worse. They've allowed eight.
The Yankees don't just need Sabathia to be dominant. They also need him to be efficient.
That's because the Orioles and Yankees have just concluded back-to-back extra inning games in the Bronx.
Wednesday's Game 3 went 12 innings, Thursday's Game 4 went 13. Over the course of those two marathons the Orioles and Yankees bullpens have each used seven different pitchers. The Yankees pen has thrown 10 innings, and the Orioles have thrown 11.1.
Both teams need big performances out of their starting pitchers Friday night, but the Yankees have a lot more reasons to expect one.
The Orioles have been winning baseball games with their bullpen all season. The Baltimore pen led the American League in wins with 32 and was third in innings with 545.1. Normally teams with a lot of bullpen innings aren't that successful. The other four teams that finished at the top of bullpen innings in the AL this season all missed the playoffs.
By contrast, no team in the American League had fewer bullpen innings than the Yankees. New York's pen threw a total of 444 innings in 2012, fewer than all but two other major league teams, the Phillies and Reds.
If Orioles starter Jason Hammel goes out and can't make it through seven innings, that's business as usual for the 2012 Baltimore Orioles. That's not the case for the Yankees. If Sabathia can't make it through six innings then Yankees manager Joe Girardi will be forced to rely on a bullpen that is not used to being worked in the manner they've been used this week.
Sabathia is in the middle of an eight-year, $182 million contract. Jason Hammel is finishing up the first year of a two-year, $7.75 million deal.
Both teams would love to get great performances from their starting pitchers tonight, but the Yankees are paying C.C. Sabathia to come through on nights like Friday. The Orioles? They're playing with house money.