After a year away from the game and a handful of minor league tune-up starts, Andy Pettitte officially returned to the Yankees on Sunday. His pitching line was nothing to write home about — 6.1 IP, 7 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 3 BB, 2 K — and he ultimately took the loss against the light-hitting Mariners. All four runs came on a pair of two-run homers, including a line drive shot by Justin Smoak that probably doesn’t leave many non-Yankee Stadium stadiums (video).

Anecdotally, the 39-year-old Pettitte looked an awful lot like the previous versions of himself, just with quite a bit of rust. He threw a ton of moving fastballs — 23 two-seamers and 32 cutters out of 94 pitches (58.5%) — but had trouble getting the ball (particularly the cutter) in on right-handed batters…

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Late last week the Yankees (and really all of baseball) got some bad news when Mariano Rivera tore his right ACL shagging fly balls before Thursday’s game. It’s been part of his pre-game routine throughout his entire professional career, but it wasn’t until now that he took a misstep and hurt himself seriously. Rivera did announce that he will return to pitch next year — “I am coming back. Write it down in big letters … I’m not going out like this,” he said on Friday — but the Yankees will still have to weather the storm without him this summer. Luckily for them, David Robertson and Rafael Soriano are more than adequate replacements in the late innings.

The injury and the shock factor that came with it — was this going to be end of his career? — spurred me on to dig up some interesting nuggets about the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history. We all know about the 608 career saves, but save totals alone do not do the man’s career justice. Without further delay, the Mariano Rivera fact sheet…

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The Yankees were beaten by the Kansas City Royals tonight, but the real loss occurred before the game, when Mariano Rivera slipped shagging balls during BP and had to be carted off the field. Addressing the media after the game, Joe Girardi confirmed the worst – Rivera has a torn ACL and will miss the remainder of the 2012 season.

Little needs to be said about Rivera. He’s the best reliever of all time, and even at an age where most pitchers are long retired, he remains one of the dominant relief aces in the sport. Perhaps just as amazing as his consistent excellence has been his durability, as he’s thrown 60+ innings in every season of his career save one. He has appeared in 1,041 games, seventh most all time, and ranks 14th all time in innings pitched by a reliever. Among relievers with at least 500 career innings, Rivera’s 2.05 ERA is easily the best ever.

For baseball’s sake, let’s hope Rivera’s career does not end this way. At 42-years-old, he’s hinted at retirement as a possibility after this season, but you can’t imagine that this is how he wants to go out. This shouldn’t be how one of the truly great careers of all time ends.

For the Yankees, they have options – David Robertson is very good, Rafael Soriano has been an excellent closer before, and the tandem of Cory Wade and Boone Logan can be effective middle relievers. But, there’s no replacing Rivera. Even if they go out on the trade market to bring in another arm, they’re not going to get a guy in Rivera’s league. While relievers in general are often overrated, Mariano Rivera is not. He’s the best at what he does, and now the Yankees will have to find someone else to protect 9th inning leads.

The Yankees can survive this, but losing Rivera is a significant blow.

According to MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch, Michael Pineda has been diagnosed with an “anterior labral tear”, and surgery is set for May 1st. Compared to elbow surgery, which has become almost routine at this point, recoveries from shoulder problems have not gone nearly as well. Since we don’t know the extent of the tear, it is impossible to say that this is the worst case scenario for the Yankees, but it’s certainly not the news the team was hoping for.

Given that he’s having shoulder surgery next week, it’s probably safe to say that Pineda is done for the season. Even a minor procedure is going to put him on the shelf for months, and it’s not clear that there would be enough time left in the minor league season for him to build his arm strength back up to get back to where he would need to be to pitch in the Major Leagues. And, of course, this might not be a minor procedure.

Given that the Yankees parted with prized prospect Jesus Montero and an interesting young arm in Hector Noesi, this is definitely a setback for the franchise, but it’s worth noting that Jose Campos – the other arm received in the deal – has been extremely impressive for class-A Charleston and offers significant value to the franchise himself.

Pitchers are always a risky investment, and any time you pay a significant price for a young arm, you know that it could blow up on any given pitch. However, the consensus at the time of the deal is that it was a smart move for the Yankees to make, and an organization can’t entirely avoid acquiring pitchers simply due to a preference for risk avoidance. If you want a good pitching staff, you’re going to have to take some gambles on some young arms. The Yankees did, and in this case, it didn’t work. That doesn’t make it a bad idea, or a move that the Yankees front office should be criticized for making.

During the off-season, the one prospect question I never seem to have an answer for in chats is, “give me a sleeper prospect for the upcoming season.” For me, sleeper prospects are discussed throughout the season as a player’s performance is perceived as far more impressive than the prospect chatter surrounding said player.

In 2011, a few sleeper favorites included Rangers Christian Villanueva, Xander Bogaerts, Brandon Jacobs and Nathan Eovaldi who made the jump from unheralded prospects to top-100 performers in a season’s time. However, sleepers in general were few and far between during the 2011 season as so few stones go left unturned with the amount of prospect and rankings information flowing freely on the Internet.

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99.6%. That was the Red Sox’s win expectancy when Vicente Padilla struck out Andruw Jones to open the seventh inning on Saturday. Freddy Garcia did not make it out of the second inning and rookie southpaw Felix Doubront had handcuffed the Yankees’ lineup through six innings, surrendering only a solo homer to Mark Teixeira along the way. The game was all Boston with eight outs to go, and that’s when the national FOX broadcast cut away to the ninth inning of Phil Humber’s perfect game.

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Following last night’s majestic performance in which he pulled three home runs into the right field seats at Yankee Stadium, it should come as no surprise that Curtis Granderson is putting up eye-popping numbers to the pull side. He will enter play Friday with 11 hits — including six home runs — on 24 total balls in play hit to the right side of the diamond. That’s a .458 average, a 1.250 slugging percentage, and a tremendous 366 wRC+.

Granderson entered Thursday’s memorable contest with just a .208 average and a .780 OPS — all of which is fine for the early goings of the season, but nowhere near what Granderson can accomplish. In the first 12 games of the season Granderson was getting the ball to pull, where he hit .445 with an absurd 1.049 slugging percentage in 2011, but he wasn’t getting the results.

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The third time was the charm in Rome, Georgia as Gary Sanchez finally donned the tools of ignorance and led the Charleston Yankees against the Rome Braves. Having missed him twice previously, I found myself on edge during pre-game stretching, defensive drills and batting practice, finally able to breathe a sigh of relief after seeing Sanchez’ name posted on the concourse whiteboard where starting lineups are transferred to individual scorecards. Batting fifth, the two-time top-100 prospect displayed a set of tools worthy of such a lofty ranking. However, his present skills require quite a bit of faith in order to project Sanchez as a power hitting catcher at the big league level.

Video after the jump

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By now, there is not much that Justin Verlander does that should surprise us. The Tigers ace has thrown not one, but two no-hitters and regularly displays the hardest fastball, in terms of average velocity, in the league. Since 2009, only Ubaldo Jimenez has an average four-seam fastball equal to Verlander’s in terms of velocity (95.4), and given Jimenez’s recently struggles Verlander essentially stands alone.

In his last start against the Kansas City Royals, Verlander entered the ninth inning having thrown 104 pitches. Up to that point, the righthander had not thrown more than 18 pitches in a single inning. He would go on to close the game out by throwing 27 more pitches, bringing his pitch total for the night to 131. What was more impressive than the fact that he threw 131 pitches was the fact that, in the 9th inning, he threw four fastballs that topped 100 mph. (Now, the gun in Kansas City that night may have been a little hot, but we are still talking about 98+ mph fastballs.)

It has been said that Verlander is one of those pitchers who generally gains velocity as the game goes on, and that such a trait is quite stable. I was curious about how Verlander compared to other hard-throwing starters who pitched deep into games. To be clear up front, there are not many pitchers who not only throw extremely hard but also pitch as deep into games as Verlander. I came up with two such pitchers: Felix Hernandez and CC Sabathia. Since 2009, Verlander, Hernandez, and Sabathia all averaged over 107 pitches per game, seven innings per start, and ~94 mph on their four-seam fastballs.

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If the Yankees and their fans had second thoughts about Hiroki Kuroda following his shaky first start against the Rays last week, the Japanese righty may have put them to bed Friday afternoon. The 37-year-old righty dominated the Angels for eight innings in his Yankee Stadium debut, allowing just five hits, two walks, and not a single run. If not for a Bobby Abreu infield single to lead off the ninth, Kuroda may have been able to complete the shutout; instead, at 109 pitches, Joe Girardi opted to let David Robertson finish the job.

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