General Farrell Marches to War

I was going to write something up about how we shouldn't count the Yankees out (in the season series; I have no doubt their stacked lineup will find plenty of other teams with crappy pitching to beat up on over the course of the year) because of how well Joba recovered from his first inning screw ups last night. Their two star starter signings might have ERAs well over the stellar 3.00 you'd expect, but Pettitte and Chamberlain (and maybe Hughes, he still seems like a wild card) seem to be turning in solid performances. Sure, they need a bullpen to keep things under control on the back end, but that's why the baseball gods invented the trading deadline and the waiver wire.

However, I then spotted this headline over at Boston.com: "Farrell: Those things aren't forgotten." As we all know, Chamberlain "somehow" managed to hit Jason Bay, the guy who wrecked his strong performance with one swing of the bat, square in the back on the first pitch of his fifth inning at-bat. Such an occurance is, of course, complete coincidence, especially for a guy who had the command to strike out twelve batters over 5 and 2/3rds, but to predict that there'll be some retaliation the next time the two teams face up doesn't seem like too wild of a forecast, particularly after this quote:

[I]f there was a purpose or intent to throw up and in, or if the intent was even further than that, to send a clear-cut message, you can disguise it a little bit more than with a first-pitch pitch in the middle of the back to Jason Bay. So, those things aren't forgotten. We know that there's a history there between the pitcher in New York and our guys here, so, not to say that he was specifically out to do that, but I think history speaks for itself. And we've got a number of games left with these guys.

I'm assuming you can't out and out declare war on another team, but yeah: that seems pretty close.