Did you watch the CC Sabathia Start or Did You Simply Read the Box Score?

When CC Sabathia was taken out of the ball game on Thursday night I made the tweet that if you actually watched the game instead of simply looking at the box score you could pull a lot of positives out of the start. I wrote this knowing full well that there would be someone out there somewhere that would simply read the final line and write a “CC sucks” post and there were plenty to read on Friday morning. Do these writers not get paid to watch the games and actually know what’s going on or is irresponsible journalism the norm these days?

The final line saw five Blue Jays cross the plate before CC was taken out including four in the second inning but if you actually watched the game you know that doesn’t tell the whole story. Everyone knows that in the spring and the early months of the season the last thing to come back for a pitcher is their control and CC had surprisingly good control during the contest. Sabathia had almost a 2/1 strike to ball ratio in the contest and sawed off at least three bats if my memory serves. CC simply fell onto some bad luck in the contest mixed in with some bad defense.

In that second inning Sabathia induced a ground ball that should have been a double play but it bounced off his glove and everyone was safe after an errant throw from Didi Gregorius. On another play, his final play, Carlos Beltran had the runner out at third to stop the bleeding before hitting the runner and allowing the fifth run to score on an error. CC was able to move the ball where he wanted with offspeed stuff away and power stuff inside. CC was pitching, not throwing, and it was a beautiful thing.

CC was the recipient of some bad luck flares and broken bat gifts for the Blue Jays while his defense didn’t do him any favors. CC was not 2009 CC and flat out skipped covering first base and third base more than a few times in the game but while not being completely dissolved of all fault in the Yankees loss looked a lot better than his box score and final line would suggest. But I guess everyone knew that since they watched the game before they wrote about it and CC does really suck.