An August to Remember

Written for Baseball Digest

It was no shock that Andy Pettitte flirted with a perfect game last evening. After all, August was nearly perfect for the New York Yankees. Though Pettitte's perfecto ended on a Jerry Hairston Jr. error with two outs in the 7th inning, and the no-no ended one batter later, the Yankees still pulled out a 5-1 win over the Baltimore Orioles. It improved the Bombers mark to 83-48 (.634) and increased their lead over idle Boston to 6 1/2 games in the AL East.

The Yankees were a spectacular 21-7 for the month, and increased their lead over Boston by 5 1/2 games. No one shined brighter in August than Derek Jeter. The Captain hit a sizzling .377 for the month, with 46 hits, the second straight month he's had 40 or more. Jeter had 15 multi-hit games, seven of which were 3-hit games. He hit six home runs, knocked in 17 runs, and scored 27 runs, while posting a gaudy .977 OPS.

CC Sabathia and Pettitte went a combined 9-0, winning nearly half of the team's games for the month. Sabathia posted a 2.64 ERA and beat the Red Sox twice. He also had a remarkable strikeout to walk ratio of better than 8:1.

Pettitte had been roughed up in the prior three months, but he was vintage Andy Pettitte in August. He put up a 2.50 ERA, (lowering his season ERA to 4.01) and had nearly a strikeout per inning as he held opponents to a .207 average. And no start was better than his performance on the final day of the month in Camden Yards.

Pettitte breezed through the first six innings last night, retiring the first 20 batters he faced. The only tough play being a barehanded pick up that Hairston fielded cleanly to throw out Matt Wieters in the 6th inning. The play turned out to be ironic one inning later when Hairston was eaten up by an Adam Jones grounder for an error. Nick Markakis then sliced a clean single to left for the O's first hit. But still protecting a 2-0 lead at the time, Pettitte kept his composure and got Nolan Reimold to ground out to Jeter to end the inning.

The only drawback to last night's game was another ineffective performance by Brian Bruney, who gave up a walk and a single in the 9th, forcing Joe Girardi to go to Mariano Rivera for his 37th save.