Yankees Bullpen Spoils Otherwise Perfect Day in Bronx

NEW YORK -- It was a glorious sunny afternoon in the Big Apple -- the perfect day for the Yankees to show off their brand-new, $1.3 billion ballpark. The place looked great. The stands were packed. The field was littered with Yankee greats of the past. Yogi Berra threw out the first pitch. Kelly Clarkson sang the anthem. Everybody from the ushers holding the "Can I help you?" signs to feeble old George Steinbrenner himself was in an absolutely fantastic mood.

And then they had to go and ruin everything by playing the game.
Oh yeah, when they tell their kids and grandkids they were here these people will undoubtedly remember all the pomp and pageantry of the day. Might even remember that Jorge Posada, as worthy a candidate as they had in the place, hit the new stadium's first home run. And that's good, because it means they might not remember that, while Yankee relievers Jose Veras and Damaso Marte were combining to give up nine runs in the seventh inning, the whole place was chanting, "We want Swisher! We want Swisher!"

"Yeah, I think everybody heard that," said Nick Swisher, the Yankees' starting right fielder and cleanup hitter, who pitched an inning of scoreless relief Monday night in the Yankees' 15-5 loss to the Rays. "I didn't really know what to say."

It's a touchy subject, for sure. The Yankees' bullpen has a 6.30 ERA over the first 10 games of the 2009 season. And that includes three scoreless innings from closer Mariano Rivera. Take those out, and the rest of the Yankee relievers are sputtering along at an even 7.00.

As usual, the problem is not with Rivera but rather with the men charged with bridging the innings between the starting pitcher and Rivera. On this day, ace CC Sabathia only made it through 5 2/3 innings, racking up 122 pitches because he couldn't throw strikes and get ahead of the patient Cleveland hitters. That left it to Edwar Ramirez, Phil Coke, Veras and Marte to steer the game into the late innings, and the latter two were not up to the task.

"We have to get everyone going in our bullpen," manager Joe Girardi said. "(Rivera)'s been great, and (Brian Bruney). (Ramirez) has been better lately, and Jonathan Albaladejo's been all right. But we have to get the other three guys going, because you can't rely on just four guys in a bullpen. It's been up and down, and we need to get more consistency out of it."

This is a big deal in Yankee-land for a number of reasons. First, Yankee fans remain spoiled, even after all these years, by the Jeff Nelson/Mike Stanton/Ramiro Mendoza setup relief corps that helped bring home all those World Series titles in the late 1990s. The Yankees have been trying (and failing) for about seven or eight years now to re-create that formula. Until recently, their system wasn't developing pitchers who could fill those setup relief roles, and they've been unsuccessful when trying to do it through trades or free agency.

The latest example of that last is Marte, acquired last July from Pittsburgh and signed early this past offseason to a three-year, $12 million contract. Marte's contract looks really silly in light of the way the bottom fell out of the left-handed relief market later in the winter (hello, Will Ohman?). And it's going to look flat-out disastrous if Marte keeps giving up grand slams in the seventh inning of close games.

"My location today was very bad," Marte explained. "And any time you miss that bad, they're going to hit the ball, you know?"

That scintillating analysis aside, Marte's failure as the Yankees' primary setup man would only intensify the crazy talk radio callers' persistent belief that Joba Chamberlain is being wasted in the starting rotation when he was so good as a setup reliever. If the Yankees can't find somebody reliable to pitch in front of Rivera, the Joba controversy will never go away. And believe me, nobody wants that.

"We're going to be okay," a fired-up Veras insisted. "It's better that it happens now, early, than later. We can fix it. We can check what happeened. We can check the video, check with our pitching coach, see what happened. We screwed up today, but we're going to have better games that we had today. We're going to be okay. We're going to fix it."

That's the hope, of course. The Yankees are embarking on a very challenging AL East race with Boston and Tampa Bay. There are major questions about their ability to score enough runs to place in the top two in that race, and until they get Alex Rodriguez back in the lineup and find out how good he can be on a bum hip, those questions will remain.

To add questions about the bullpen is to amass too many questions. And if they can't get it straightened out over the coming weeks and months, Veras and his pals will find they've screwed up more than just the feel-good stadium opener.