BALTIMORE — Mark Teixeira has been present for two brutal games and he already knows what it means when a Yankees season opens as poorly as this one.
“It’s very important,” Teixeira said of today’s game against the Orioles at Camden Yards. “It’s not a must-win, but we should have a fire lit under our butts.”
In years past, George Steinbrenner’s harsh words on the back page of The Post would light the fuse had his high-priced players started 0-2 and looked worse doing it.
But The Boss, like his team, no longer barks. Looking to atone for an Opening Day debacle, the Yankees laid a premature Easter egg last night when Chien-Ming Wang put them in an early hole on the way to a 7-5 loss to the Orioles in front of 22,856.
As bad as CC Sabathia was Monday, Wang was worse. Due to his left leg being too quick and his right-arm action too long, Wang’s signature sinker didn’t behave. In 3 2/3 terrible innings, he gave up seven runs, nine hits, walked three and didn’t fan a batter.
“Nowhere,” Wang said of his sinker.
By the time the Yankees scored three runs in the ninth on Derek Jeter’s two-run home run to right and Teixeira’s two-out, RBI double, it was too late. Getting one run in five innings against a pedestrian Koji Uehara while Wang was being spanked (he gave up five runs in the fourth) wasn’t enough.
Uehara once was among the elite hurlers in Japan. Now, the 34-year-old right-hander’s stuff is mediocre at best, but thanks to an effective change-up and a splitter that danced in and out of the strike zone, he posted a victory in his major league debut with a five-inning stint in which he gave up one run.
“I can understand people make a big deal of it, that’s usually the way it goes,” Jeter said of the 0-2 start that A.J. Burnett will attempt to halt today to keep the Yankees away from an 0-3 beginning they last experienced in 1998. “Players try to stay positive. We had good at-bats in the ninth inning. Hopefully, it carries over into [today].”
As for Teixeira, the $180 million investment understands why people are talking about his 1-for-9 start.
“My last two [exhibition] at-bats in New York I was crushing the ball,” Teixeira said. “I come here and I can’t hit anything.”
With his hometown crowd booing every movement, Teixeira popped up to infielders in his first three at-bats and looked bad striking out in the fourth. In the ninth, turned around to bat right-handed for the first time, the switch-hitting Teixeira laced a double to right-center off George Sherrill that scored Johnny Damon from first and cut the deficit to 7-5.
However, Hideki Matsui ended the game by popping up. Matsui, a former teammate of Uehara’s, went 0-for-5 and was hitless in three at-bats with runners in scoring position.
Is it too early to panic? Sure. However, it’s not too soon to gaze at a 3-for-19 (.158) team batting average with runners in scoring position. Or the fact that Sabathia and Wang have hurled a combined eight awful innings in which they have given up 17 hits, 13 runs walked eight and are searching for their first strikeout.
“Right now, I don’t think anybody expected to be in this situation,” Damon said. “But [today] is a different day.”
And it’s one that had better result in a win to allow the release valve on the pinstriped pressure cooker to open.
