There is no gameplan for facing R.A. Dickey, just hoping you get lucky.
The Yankees are set to face the red-hot Dickey on Sunday night in the Subway Series finale and Curtis Granderson admitted that there is really no way to plan for a knuckleballer like Dickey.
“All of the other knuckleballers I’ve faced its been very similar, you can’t go in there with any mindset or plan,” Granderson told The Post. “You just have to just hope to get lucky, that the wind isn’t too high and helping him too much and hopefully get him out of his rhythm.”
Granderson, the Yankees’ leader in home runs, is familiar with Dickey, but has not had much success against the league leader in virtually every pitching category. Granderson is 3-for-15 against Dickey with only two extra-base hits.
Getty Images for Delta
Curtis Granderson and David Wright at Friday's Delta Dugout event.
“I’ve faced him before, I’ve had success against him and he’s had success against me,” Granderson said at a Delta Dugout event at Grand Central Terminal. “Hopefully [I can] get some balls out in the middle of the plate that don’t dance too much and put them in play and put them in play hard.”
It’s also not as if anyone in baseball expected the Cy Young-caliber numbers that Dickey is putting up at 37 years old.
“Everybody always wants to tune in to see because you never know what’s going to happen,” Granderson said. “No one could have predicted that R.A. Dickey would throw back-to-back one-hit games and have the streak he’s been having.”
Dickey’s performance has been so overwhelming that he is drawing comparisons to arguably the best closer of all-time, Mariano Rivera.
“I’ve never seen somebody be so dominant with one pitch” Mets third baseman David Wright told The Post. “It’s obviously a much smaller sample size but it’s almost like Mariano Rivera and how dominant Mariano is with the cutter, R.A. Dickey is doing that with the knuckleball. Obviously there’s no comparing careers, but the example is using one pitch to dominate hitters.”
Dickey currently leads the majors in wins (11), ERA (2.00) and WHIP (0.89), in a season that was only as unpredictable as his knuckleball.
asulla-heffinger@nypost.com
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Curtis Granderson, Granderson, R.A. Dickey, R.A. Dickey, David Wright, Delta Dugout, DeltaCurtis Granderson, Dickey, Mariano Rivera, Grand Central Terminal
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