It began when Alex Rodriguez was pinch-hit for by Raul Ibanez, with Ibanez instantly turning into a hero. Then Rodriguez was left out of the lineup. Then Rodriguez allegedly flirted with female fans in the middle of a game, then Rodriguez was left out of the lineup again. Then people started talking about Alex Rodriguez getting traded to the Marlins and Bob Nightengale went so far as to say:

This will be the last time you’ll ever see Alex Rodriguez in a New York Yankees uniform.

In a series in which the Yankees trail the Tigers three games to zero, somehow it’s still Rodriguez who’s the story, it’s Rodriguez who seems to be getting the lion’s share of the blame. It was a big deal when Rodriguez was benched for Wednesday’s Game 4 against Max Scherzer. After the game was rained out, it was again a big deal when Rodriguez was benched for Thursday’s Game 4 against Max Scherzer, as if anything had changed, or ought to have changed. It is, without question, an unusual thing to see a player like Alex Rodriguez on the bench.

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Instructional league is a tough place to get a complete look at a player but a great place to get a broad sense of a number of players.  In the regular season, a scout will sit on a minor league team for 5-6 games and get a full look at all the notable prospects.  In instructs, the same 5-6 day look will get you 2-3 games and 2-3 camp days.  The rosters are typically larger than the normal 25, with the Pirates listing 93 players on their instructs roster.  Most clubs sub out the whole lineup around the 5^th inning, so even seeing a prospect start 3 games only amounts to a 1-2 game look.

Where a full report from a pro scout could be up to a paragraph on each tool and a summary, instructs reports are typically a handful of sentences in total.  So, my reports from instructs will be these abbreviated impressions, unless it’s a player I got a full look at during the spring.  The Yankees recently closed camp, so I’ll start this series with a three part look at their players from instructs.

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There’s a thing about rain-outs. Actually, there are two things.

1. They suck.
2. In theory, they should offer neither team an advantage.

The first one’s pretty evident. Where once there was supposed to be baseball, now there is no baseball, thanks to the rain, and that sucks. The second one seems pretty evident as well. Instead of there being baseball between two teams on one day, there will be baseball between the two teams the next day, with each team having been identically inconvenienced. But the reality is that the inconveniences aren’t always identical, and that’s what we observe in the ALCS between the Tigers and the Yankees. Rain delayed Game 4 by a day — so far, at least — and this has without question worked out in the Tigers’ favor.

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This post isn’t really about Joe Girardi, even though his name is in the headline and his decisions from yesterday are the inspiration for this post. It’s about Girardi in that he’s a human being, but it’s not about Girardi as a specific human being, because — as I think the results of the poll I put up last night show — there are a lot of people who would have made the same decisions he did. Because, just like the rest of us, Joe Girardi’s decision making process was formed long before he ever played or managed a single baseball game.

At the risk of generalizing, I’d imagine that most of us had parents who let us try things that they knew weren’t going to end particularly well because we’d learn from the pain we were about to bring upon ourselves. Whether it was pulling the cat’s tail or biting into that delicious looking lemon on the table, they would warn us that it wasn’t in our best interests, but knew that we had to experience the results for ourselves to know that it was something we really wanted to do. And, for many of these experiences, we only had to do it once before we realized that we never wanted to do it again.

We learn how to think in a predictable environment. Punch your brother? Go to your room. Eat your vegetables? Have some ice cream. The actions we take as kids almost always have positive or negative rewards that are designed to teach us what kinds of actions we prefer. As a culture, we teach children that every action comes with consequences, and that they can predict what those consequences will be based on what happened the last time they performed that action. You can describe a lot of parenting as predictable repetition.

That training is extremely effective for most things in life, because many of the decisions we face follow this kind of cause/effect relationship. Most of the time, you can effectively judge what the consequence of an action will be based on your own personal experience of what happened the last time you did that same thing. Unfortunately, that decision making process — the one that works really well in life as a whole — is a miserable failure in baseball.

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“You labored, it wasn’t a typical Justin Verlander game.”

That was TBS’s Craig Sager, just after Phil Coke made Justin Verlander’s Game 3 performance officially stand up: 8.1 innings, three hits, no walks, just one run.

It’s not good enough for Justin Verlander. Justin Verlander only struck out three Yankees; never mind that the Tigers’ ace held the New York Yankees to one run over 8.1 innings in Game 3 of the ALCS, we bolt to attention because he didn’t record enough strikeouts.

This is Justin Verlander’s level.

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After Game 3 Tuesday night, the Yankees find themselves behind three games to zero games in the ALCS, one game away from there being no games anymore. What a 3-0 series suggests is domination, and that hasn’t been the case — all three games have been close, with the Tigers just squeaking by. Yet the Yankees have without question been outplayed, and now they can’t lose again. It’s not a surprise they wound up here, since they were behind two games to none before facing Justin Verlander, but one doesn’t typically associate the Yankees with desperation, and this situation is desperate.

What’s interesting is that, while the Yankees faced long odds going up against Verlander on Tuesday, one could argue that plenty of things broke in their favor. It was a cold night, with the wind blowing in, and that helped to even the playing field, since the Verlander run environment couldn’t be reduced by as much as the Yankees pitchers’ run environment. The Yankees pitchers themselves allowed just two runs in eight innings, giving the offense a real chance. Verlander didn’t look like his overpowering self, single run and three hits aside; he tied a season-low for strikeouts with three, and on a handful or two of occasions Verlander left a hittable pitch over the plate that the Yankees didn’t drill. And then at the very end, the Yankees made their final out with the tying run on second and the go-ahead run on first.

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The New York Yankees find themselves in the unenviable position of trailing the Detroit Tigers two games to zero in the ALCS, having given away home-field advantage. The Yankees do have the consolation of not yet having lost with ace CC Sabathia, who could still make two starts. But then, the Yankees have the anti-consolation of not yet having lost to Justin Verlander, who could still make two starts. It’s Verlander who’s taking the hill Tuesday night, as the Tigers look to take a truly commanding lead in the best-of-seven.

The Yankees have struggled to hit in the playoffs so far, and they’ve struggled to hit against a bunch of pitchers who aren’t the best starting pitcher in the world. I don’t need to tell you that Justin Verlander is a little excellent. On top of that, he’ll be pitching Tuesday night at home, against a struggling lineup, on a cool October evening that should only depress offense even further. Tigers fans couldn’t possibly be happier with the way things are set up. Yankees fans, therefore, couldn’t possibly be less happy.

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The Detroit Tigers won 88 games in the regular season, tied for the least of all the playoff teams, and good for seventh in the American League. They advanced despite winning fewer games than both the Angels and the Rays. Based only on that, you’d assume that the Tigers are a team with vulnerabilities, and indeed, vulnerabilities they’ve got. Infield defense is a known weakness, although so far in the playoffs Jhonny Peralta has decided to just play all positions at the same time. And then there’s the bullpen. There’s a lot of chatter these days about the Detroit Tigers’ bullpen.

And there’s chatter for a reason. In Game 2 of the ALDS against the A’s, the Tigers’ bullpen gave away a late lead. In Game 4 of the ALDS, the bullpen did the same thing. In Game 1 of the ALCS, a 4-0 lead in the ninth turned into a 4-4 tie in the tenth. The Tigers, clearly, have survived, winning their first series and winning the first two games of their second, but now there’s a lot of distrust. There’s a lot of pressure on the Tigers’ starters, because people are wary of the relievers behind them.

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If there’s good news for the New York Yankees, it’s that, while they’re behind two games to zero to the Detroit Tigers in the ALCS, they haven’t yet started CC Sabathia. The flip side of that, though, is that the Tigers haven’t yet started Justin Verlander, and they’re about to, in Tuesday’s Game 3. The series is by no means over, as the Giants demonstrated in the Division Series round against the Reds, but it’s a little Verlander dominance away from feeling over, and Verlander is frequently dominant. Given the losses and the struggles and the Derek Jeter injury, these are challenging times for the Empire.

In Sunday’s Game 2, the Yankees were shut out 3-0 by Anibal Sanchez and the Tigers’ bullpen. This was a game in which Hiroki Kuroda was perfect through five innings, and still he never pitched with a lead. The Yankees, during the regular season, had the best team offense in baseball. It’s largely gone missing in the playoffs, and though they say pitching and defense wins championships, you also need at least a little hitting too. Sunday, the Yankees had none of it.

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I will now include, for your consideration, an incomplete list of things this ALCS Game 1 post could’ve been about:

1. Robinson Cano being called out at first in the second inning
2. Alex Rodriguez continuing to struggle
3. Doug Fister picking it up after getting drilled by a comebacker
4. Delmon Young torching the playoffs
5. Jose Valverde being a massive liability
6. Ichiro and the home-run porch
7. Raul Ibanez condensing a career’s worth of heroics into one week
8. The Tigers’ bullpen being poorly set up behind the starters
9. Drew Smyly dominating

The opener of the American League Championship Series did not leave us wanting for twists and intrigue, with the Tigers finally knocking off the Yankees 6-4 in 12 innings and five hours. It’s good to know the crescendo of the Division Series round has carried over into the next. Game 1 left us with entirely too many question marks and talking points, but after everything else, we were left with one major story drowning out the others: Derek Jeter is hurt. He’s hurt bad, and he’s done for the playoffs.

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