Only American League games on Friday. If you just can’t get enough of the designated hitter experiment (or big-market teams), this is your lucky day!

Yankees at Indians, 2:00 p.m. PT — Andy Pettitte has the postseason experience (18-6, 4.08 ERA over 34 starts), but Fausto Carmona has been a monster in ‘07. One relative weakness of Carmona is his record against left-handed batters. Granted, most pitchers would kill for a .275/.333/.377 line against anyone, but if you’re looking for something that the Yankees might be able to exploit, this is as good a bet as any. Pettitte, meanwhile, stumbled down …read more

How appropriate that so many great baseball platoons were in effect during the decade that brought us the movie Platoon. Steve Treder at Hardball Times (full disclosure: I contribute to THT) has published the latest in his look back at “extraordinarily productive left-right platoon partnerships.”
A couple things stand out to me. First, it’s amazing how much mileage Earl Weaver got out of John Lowenstein and Gary Roenicke in left field. Both were good players with flaws. The genius of Weaver, of course, is that he found a way to maximize their utility while minimizing their flaws. (As an aside, I’m …read more