FOR Yankee fans among the 55,526 at the Stadium yesterday, watching Mariano Rivera walk off the mound in the middle of the eighth inning, stride for stride with trainer Gene Monahan, was akin to watching a loved one walk oh-so wobbly back from the mailbox, clutching a freshly opened IRS audit notice.
It doesn’t necessarily mean disaster is on the horizon, it’s just that it’s a little on the scary side.
“We noticed when he was warming up his velocity wasn’t the same,” veteran lefty Mike Stanton said. “We knew something was wrong.”
That something is located in the back of Rivera’s precious right shoulder. If that something is serious, this is one need the Yankees can’t address on the trade market.
For one thing, Rivera has no equal. For another, good closers aren’t traded. And good closers for non-contending teams don’t necessarily make effective ones for contenders. Some guts aren’t made for what September cooks. A good reliever in Tampa Bay or Pittsburgh or Milwaukee can become a bad reliever overnight in New York.
If Rivera’s shoulder turns out worse than he honestly believes, his replacement must be found from within the organization. That was Steve Karsay’s nose poking out of George Steinbrenner’s doghouse late yesterday afternoon.
The numbers say no bullpen in the American League has been as bad as the Yankees’ since the All-Star break and nobody contributed more to those sloppy statistics than Karsay.
In gaining a measure of redemption, Karsay succeeded in slapping a muffler on the panic alarms over the Rivera situation for a day at least. Karsay pitched three shutout innings and survived four walks while notching the win in the Yankees’ 9-8, 11-inning triumph over the penny-pinching Red Sox.
The win pushed the Yanks three games ahead in the AL East. The comfort of that distance can’t be measured without knowing more about the condition of Rivera’s right shoulder. Even with Rivera, the bullpen’s been awful lately.
“Bullpens go through peaks and valleys during a season,” Karsay said. He’s right. A bad bullpen can become a dominating one without warning.
“You’re like a family down there, a family within a family,” Karsay said.
Relievers are the most down-to-earth group in baseball. They’re the most likely to wear blue jeans to the ballpark, the least likely to wear designer sunglasses. They hang together, slump together, streak together.
When one is offended, chances are all of them are offended. Karsay was offended when Red Sox reliever Wayne Gomes flexed his muscle and pointed to it after getting Shane Spencer to ground into an inning-ending double play in the 10th.
“I’ve never been inclined to do it,” Karsay said. “It’s something where I feel you’re showing up the other team. It’s one thing to be excited for yourself and do a little pumping the fist. Some of the antics that happen over there, I look at it as showing up our team, to continue it until you’re in the dugout, I don’t do that or even think about doing that.”
The Red Sox need more muscle, all right, but not the muscle of Wayne Gomes. The muscle they need is in the Nl at the moment, banging baseballs off scoreboards. Too bad the arms of the Red Sox owners aren’t long enough to reach deep enough into their pockets to get Mo Vaughn to chase the Yankees.