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"GP and Kawada love inn"

Or as it is otherwise known - The MLB Thread

So Yankees, as always busy around deadline day and were quite successful. Abreu and Lidle for a bunch of minor league prospects of which only Smith looks half decent. Don't know too much about Lidle to be honest but Abreu will give another strong bat and some experienced coverage for Sheffield while he's out injured (and more than likely replace him for next season) Also picked up Craig Wilson for Chacon to give us another strong bat. Had him in my MVP Baseball 2005 team as well actually. Might mean Andy Phillips doesn't get as much time as he should though which is a shame.

Red Sox and Jays did nothing and we kept hold of Cano, Melky and Phillips so a good trade deadline time all around for the Yanks

Ouch Baltimore got creamed 16-2 by the Twins.

4-3 loss against the Astros yesterday but Chien-Ming Wang looked very strong over the 5 innings only giving up 1 run. Good to see our Ace leading from the front, you watching Johnson?!?!

Spring Training doesn't really have that much affect on the proper season as it's basically just a warm up for the players to get back into the groove of things, they're not going full pace and really just going easy. It's far more important pitching wise though than batting as it helps the pitchers get their command of the zone back and also allow them to try some new stuff they couldn't in the regular season.

I hope it does carry over though as Dice-K is getting shelled all over the place at the moment, 100 million well spent Bosox mwhahaa

Yeah, it was a good outing.

I was surprised to see Cincinnati top of the league. Also, they've played the Yankees twice and got a draw and a win. Still, the Yankees are the best team out of the American league sides. I guess it's up to Cincinnati to prove it when the season comes around.

How much does preseason have a bearing on the full season? I can't say I've followed it that closely in the past. What sort of percentage of teams who have a good preseason go on to have a good season?

Karstens had another great start against the Twins last night, 4 K's and only 1 run to show for 4 innings work. Not too shabby, i'd pick him for the 5th spot ahead of Pavano

Looks like he is, fanned 4 in his second outing and seemed to be more comfortable out there (probably the sunglasses :-D) A 2 run homer but that was it over the 3 innings . 40 pitches thrown and 29 were strikes, seems to already have good command over the plate. Hope he can keep on improving

Will be interesting to see how Igawa does in his next start, will just take him a few games to get used to the new league and new style of the American game, hopefully when he does get settled in he'll be putting up the same numbers he did in Japan. He was the strikeout king over there hopefully he can reproduce that form

Obviously, it's a bit different to turn a 3 inning pitching performance to a 6-7 inning performance but I'd be very encouraged by what the Yankees have done in preseason. They seem to be scoring runs consistently and conceding few.

Igawa will take time to settle but one thing I've noticed in the 2 starts that I've caught, he has got a decent number of K's.

Also, the bullpen seems to be able to steady the ship if the starter gave up a few runs at the start, which is also a good sign.

This really should be the Yankees season. I can't see a weakness, except maybe in a fielding position or 2, that teams can exploit.

I'm also liking how apart from the Cleveland game and a couple of 5 run games (which still for the Yankees is pretty good given the immsense batting line-up) that the rest of the games have only had 1 or 3 runs given up in them. I know it's only Spring Training but if the Yankees can keep that up in the Regular Season then they'll easily be over 100 wins this season.

Yankees with pitching? The rest of the league must be trembling :-D


Your F1 post has also given me a little motivation to maybe do a Preview of the AL East topic, as i know we've also got a Blue Jays fan running around here. Doubt i'll do a full league preview as i won't be winning a GAD for it so not worth the time and the fact only about 2 or 3 people will actually care, whereas i'll actually enjoy analysing the AL East (especially the Red Sox :-D)

Yup, the 6-5 loss to Cleveland

The Yankees only conceded the one run. I think the Yankees have only lost one game in their preseason so far and that was by the odd run I think.