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The Yankees got a brilliant start out of Michael Pineda last night, but they need another good performance out of the man who is supposed to be the team's ace to earn at least a series split. CC Sabathia turned in a very good game against the Blue Jays on Sunday before imploding a bit in his final inning of work. Here's tonight's lineup behind Sabathia:
#Yankees lineup vs BOS: Jeter SS, Ellsbury CF, Beltran RF, Soriano DH, Cervelli C, Solarte 3B, Suzuki LF, Roberts 2B, Johnson 1B, Sabathia P
— New York Yankees (@Yankees) April 11, 2014
Brett Gardner and Brian McCann get the night off against Red Sox starter Jon Lester. Ichiro Suzuki will take Gardner's place in left field while Francisco Cervelli gets the start behind the plate. Derek Jeter leads off in the Gardner-less lineup instead of Jacoby Ellsbury, which is a bit interesting. Everything else is pretty much as we've come to expect it with Mark Teixeira on the DL. The bottom part of the lineup is pretty reminiscent of 2013, though. Yikes.
In other news, MLB will not suspend Michael Pineda for what appeared to be pine tar on his pitching hand in Thursday night's game against Boston. Joe Torre said that he would, however, be speaking to the Yankees about the incident. It would be rather foolish to punish Pineda when the Red Sox were almost certainly aware of what was going on and said nothing to the umpiring crew. In fact, they all had a similar answer when asked about it after the game: it's common practice and therefore no big deal. Still, Pineda could stand to be more subtle with it going forward. It seems like opposing teams don't care that a pitcher is trying to get some extra grip on the ball as long as they aren't being as blatant about it as Pineda was. Time to move on from this non-story.
Michael Pineda essentially no-comments the day after pine tar game, wont address what was on hands, says he wont have anything on next start
— Daniel Barbarisi (@DanBarbarisi) April 11, 2014
Speaking of Mark Teixeira, the team plans on having him back before May 1st, but doesn't expect that Brendan Ryan will be back then. Joe Girardi said last night that Ryan had just begun the lowest levels of baseball activity while trying to recover from an injury that cost him pretty much all of spring training. That's good news for Dean Anna and Yangervis Solarte, one of which will probably lose their spot on the team when Ryan returns. Solarte in particular has certainly made the most of the time he's gotten.
You can watch tonight's game on YES, MLB Network (provided you aren't in the blacked out area), or MLB.tv at 7:05 pm.