BOSTON – Joe Torre looks in his players’ eyes and does not see hopelessness coming back at him. Nor is he looking into the mugs of quitters. Sooner or later, Torre knows the uniforms swollen with frustration will punish a pitcher for the awful dry spell in which his Yankees are drowning.
Yet, with seven losses in eight games and having been blanked three times in that dry spell, the Yankees have a lineup that is trying so hard that their white-knuckle grips are squeezing the sawdust out of their sticks.
“Hell yeah, they are frustrated,” Torre said of his All-Star cast of hitters who were handcuffed by Brian Rose last night and beaten by the Red Sox, 6-0, in front of 32,091 at Fenway Park. “I would rather them do that than have the look of despair. I don’t see despair. It’s just a frustrating thing that they are fighting themselves.”
So much so that Torre, two days back on the job, must inform his club it is a collection of very good players going through a drought that every team experiences during the course of a six-month season.
Of course, it’s not easy to tell Paul O’Neill and Chuck Knoblauch there are better days ahead, but that’s part of the gig.
“My job is to reassure them they will be fine. We were a little spoiled last year, we didn’t have any malfunctions,” Torre said of his 21-17 club. “It’s just a matter of getting started. Somebody is going to take a beating one of these days. Tonight it was us and we look to start tomorrow.”
Tuesday night they had Pedro Martinez, arguably the best pitcher in baseball, on the ropes and couldn’t put him away. Last night they faced Rose, a 23-year-old chucker, who was recalled from Triple-A earlier in the day, making his first start of the year and appearing in his 11th big-league game.
And they made him look like Greg Maddux. After Hideki Irabu gave up two runs in the first, one in the second on Jason Varitek’s 436-foot homer to right and another two in the fourth, Rose had a 5-0 bulge to work with. Since the Yankees had scored 11 runs in their previous seven games, the five-run deficit looked like 15.
Work, Rose did, limiting the Yankees to six singles in seven innings to put the Red Sox 1 games ahead of the reeling Yankees in the AL East.
“I take gratification in beating those guys,” said Rose, of Dartmouth, Mass., who at one time was the cream of the Red Sox farm system but whose stock has dropped due to injuries and ineffectiveness.
Rose handled the Yankees by changing speeds and working both sides of the plate. The only inning he was in trouble was the fifth when Jorge Posada, who went 3-for-4, and Scott Brosius singled with one out.
Rose responded by inducing the struggling Knoblauch to bounce into an inning-ending double play. Knoblauch, who went 1-for-4, has three hits in 42 at-bats.
As for the 1-2 Irabu, he failed to build off his two previous outings in which he went seven innings in each and had people believing he was about to become a reliable member of a starting rotation that is made up of David Cone and four question marks.
“He was very inconsistent and made a lot of mistakes, especially at two strikes,” Torre said of Irabu, who lasted 32/3 innings, gave up five runs and nine hits. “He had good stuff at times, but not often enough.”
Trailing, 3-0, in the fourth, Irabu had a chance to keep the Yankees in the game but couldn’t get two-strike forkballs to Varitek and Darren Lewis, the No. 7 and 8 hitters, to dive through the strike zone. Both hitters singled off 0-2 forkballs that stayed up. Irabu battled back to get two outs and was ahead of John Valentin, 0-2, before running the count to 3-2. Valentin then doubled two runs in.
“I had a feeling on the mound that I had a sense I was off, especially to left-handed batters,” said Irabu, whose next scheduled start is Monday against the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium. “I got to the point where if I got an out or a strikeout, it would have changed the course of the game. I used my forkball but I might have thrown it too hard.”
