I was sitting in right field yesterday for the Yankees 5-3 loss to the Angels, and no I was not one of the people booing. I’m not going to sit here and defend or criticize those people. You pay for a ticket then you have the right to cheer or boo if you want to. Personally I’ve never been one to boo people from my own team, ever. I’ve watched guys like Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, A-Rod even Derek Jeter struggle and have never once thought to boo them. When your a fan of a team your supposed to support those players no matter what, as difficult as that may be sometimes. As I’ve explained to my colleagues here at WTGS these are the same fans that booed Mickey Mantle, believe me they’ll boo Javier Vazquez if they want to.
The problem right now is this isn’t a new player coming in fresh. All Yankee fans have Vazquez awful second half in 2004, as well as a terrible ALCS Game 7 on their minds. With his early struggles it’s easy to understand why the boo’s have all ready begun. Yankee fans are looking for Javi to prove a point, and he hasn’t done that yet. Is Vasquez struggling right now, absolutely but I think we need to give him some time to work through this. Was he great yesterday, of course not but he was defiantly improved from his first start. Javi needs to be sharper his next start, and make sure his pitches are not up in the zone like they were yesterday. He did a good job keeping former Yankee and now Angels cleanup hitter Hideki Matsui in check which impressed me, and giving up three runs in 5.1 isn’t terrible. On a normal day the Yankees are going to score more runs then that, it just so happened that Joel Pineiro was outstanding yesterday.
All you Yankee fans booing yesterday I understand where you’re coming from, but the season is young and there’s still a lot of games to be played. Let’s give Vazquez a few more starts before we send him packing. I watched him pitch last year and I think he has the potential to do very well on this team. If you ask me with the help of pitching coach Dave Eiland, well see the same Vazquez we saw last year.