Here we are in the middle of game one of the Yankees/D-Rays double header and I’m back up in the press box. Going into this one there were a good number of media members who had two things on their mind: 1) double headers are brutally long days with three hours to kill between games and 2) Yankee starters Kei Igawa and Matt DeSalvo are going to make things even more painful.

At the start it looked like Igawa was going to make good on those predictions when he gave up solo home runs in the first and second innings…but he wound up putting in five innings, giving up just those two runs.  Somewhere on the Yankee bench Joe Torre must have let out a sigh of relief.  Still, to put it in the words of one MLB official sitting next to me, Igawa “got lucky…he wasn’t that good.” True. With seven hits and three walks in those five innings, he was playing with fire.

But he got the one out he really needed with the bases loaded in the fourth.

That’s when Ty Wigginton (future Yankee?) came to the plate with two outs and Igawa threw him a high strike.  Igawa then followed with a high and wide pitch that Wigginton swung through before taking a ball high.  On the 1-2 count Igawa dealt again and got the D-Ray third baseman to fly out to right.  It was the difference between doing the job and failing as a base hit would have easily plated two.

For Igawa and the impatient media, it was enough to make game one bearable.

At this point the Yankees offense has taken over with a two-run hit by Andy Phillips and a two-run home run by rookie Shelley Duncan, both in the sixth.  It’s 7-2, Yanks.
Game notes through eight innings:

*Posada has no business trying to go first to third on a single (second inning).

*Igawa’s homers and Farnsworth’s seventh inning walk…the crowd booed for both, but seemed a little bored of doing it in both cases.

*Andy Phillips is getting some of the biggest hits on the ball club as of late…his two-run single in the sixth broke the game open.

*Phillips then paid the price for his hit when he got smacked in the head by Shelley Duncan after the rookie’s first major league home run…the smile on Duncan face, however, was priceless.

*In the top of the eighth inning Scott Proctor and Ty Wigginton faced off with a fly out to center as the result. The two players could be traded for each other between games.