Yankees-Royals: Previewing Sabathia's Second Start

CC Sabathia makes his second start of the year today, trying to improve on his dreadful opening day performance. He worked on a mechanical issue with pitching coach Dave Eiland in his bullpen session and believes he corrected the flaw.

It was Sabathia's footwork, especially his front foot, that hindered his performance the first game of the year, so if he has his fastball command early, we will know it should be a much better game from him.

CC is 14-10 with a 3.40 ERA in his career against the Royals, a team he has started the most games against in his career.

In the last two games, Yankees pitchers have struck out 22 batters; after the first two games, we didn't think they would strike anyone out all year—well, at least some fatalistic fans thought that.

Robinson Cano has a .349 career avg against the Royals—the highest he has against any team. Cano also has a 15 game hitting streak, dating back to last year, and is 4-for-6 against Ramirez, who pitches today for the Royals.

The Yankees are the only team to remain errorless thus far in '09; however, a Nick Swisher dropped-ball yesterday could have been easily been scored an error, but wasn't.  Similarly, Cano rushed a throw yesterday that could have been an error.  That scoring was not nearly as favorable as the one given to Swisher.

And now for some related notes:

Mark Teixeira, aka Big Tex, turns 29 today. Happy Birthday, Tex.

The Elias Sports Bureau came up with a couple of interesting things. Jorge Posada has caught at least one game for 15 straight years. The last person to do that was Johnny Bench with the Reds from 1967-83.

Nick Swisher drove in five runs on Thursday, becoming the first Yankee since Roger Maris in 1960 to drive in four or more runs in their first starts with the Yankees.

I will be back with the lineups in a little while. The game doesn't start until 7:00 p.m.

The Red Sox vs Angels is the Fox game of the week at 4:00 p.m. Peter Abraham gets the credit for having this information, and much more, on his blog at http://yankees.lhblogs.com, so check it out.