Quiz: What do Gardner, Sanchez, Judge, Gregorius, Holliday, Castro and even Chase Headley (occasionally) have in common?  Hint: they do something that Mark Teixeira never did – at least batting left-handed.  Answer: they hit to the opposite field.  If you’ve been watching a lot of Yankee games of late, you see this year how teams are not shifting as much and when they do, the Yankee hitters are adjusting.  Even Aaron Judge with all his power goes to right field time and time again.  Teixeira and McCann in large part both were strictly pull hitters and as team leaders, the rest of the players seemed to fall in line.  This year, the best hitters go to all fields and that is contagious.  We rarely hear the announcers talk about the shifts this year for that reason.  SU says: “Mark Teixeira: we salute you.  Thank you for retiring and allowing the team to once again prosper.”  For the record, he hit .292 in his first year with the Yankees in 2009, and his highest season batting average for the rest of his career in the Bronx was .256.  That’s what happens when you blindly hit into the shift every at bat.

Greg Bird is hitting .300 in his minor league rehab games with no power.  SU says leave him down there until he starts to get some extra base hits.  They need  him to be productive from day #1 in order not to lose more confidence.  Someone will need to go when Ellsbury returns as well as Bird.  Carter figures to be the odd man out.

SU has been thinking about the player development differences between MLB and the NBA.  Why is it that even the best young players in baseball really need several years in the minor leagues to figure things out while the NBA is anxious to take 19-year olds and throw them out there right away at the pro level?  A guy like Judge needed several years at different levels in the minor leagues to finally make it to the Bronx in late 2016.  Starlin Castro made it up to the Cubs at 19 or 20 but that was the exception.  Same with Jeter.  And why aren’t there multiple levels of the D-League in basketball as there are in baseball’s minor leagues?  I guess you could say that the European League or China is another form of minor leagues for the NBA.  Thoughts?

SU checked out the composite box scores for the NBA Finals.  The Warriors have 130+ assists so far to the Cavs’ 82 on only 9 more field goals.  Kyrie Irving, for all his greatness and he is a truly great offensive player, is all 1-on-1.  The key question is whether he can do that on the road in this series.  SU believes that if Cleveland can steal game 5 tomorrow night, this is going to 7 games.  After last season, the Warriors will have that little bit of doubt especially if there is an injury to a key guy or if Draymon Green loses his mind which is always possible.  However, if Kyrie can’t have that type of game, it will be blowout city Monday night for Golden State which is the better team.

Finally, SU fave Djokovic basically tanked the last half of his quarterfinal match in Paris.  Bad job and time to take a sabbatical.  He is lost out there mentally and has lost the fire to compete through adversity.  We have seen this over the years with players like Borg or even Agassi who needed an extensive timeout but not lately and not with the Big Four players.  It’s very striking and perhaps a lesson for the younger, up and coming stars on how they manage their careers.  And hard to watch for SU.