Phil Hughes Matchups to Watch
Hughes has had a blip of some kind in each of his three starts this season, yielding four home runs. He continues to elevate his pitches at a rate higher than he was doing in the first half of the 2010 season, when he had significant enough success to make the All-Star team.

In 2010, Hughes threw fastballs in the lower third of the strike zone or below about one in every five pitches. This season’ he’s only thrown them in that area about six percent of the time.

The location issue is similar with his offspeed pitches, which have been middle to upper-third more than half the time. Those are the pitches Rangers hitters feast on.

They’ve hit .325 with a .587 slugging percentage in at-bats against a right-handed pitcher that ended with an offspeed pitch in the middle-third of the strike zone or higher. That’s well above the major league average of .257/.427.

Hughes has pitched 15 1/3 innings, allowing three hits against the Rangers in three regular-season appearances (including the 6 1/3 innings of no-hit ball against them early in his career in 2007). He did lose to them twice in the 2010 ALCS, allowing 11 runs in 8 2/3 innings.

Scott Feldman Matchups to Watch
It’s a really small sample, but it’s worth noting that Curtis Granderson is 5-for-8 with three home runs in his career against Scott Feldman, and one of the three outs was a 388-foot fly ball to straightaway center.

Granderson likes Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. He has seven home runs in 86 career at-bats there, though he hit none in the first two games of this series.

Feldman does have a good history against other left-handed hitters. He’s held lefty batters to a .148 batting average since the start of the 2011 season.

Feldman will be making his first start of the season. He’s made four previous starts against the Yankees. Three of them were pretty good (a combined five runs allowed in 19 innings). The other, which was the most recent, was not (four runs in 2 1/3 innings in 2010).

Jeter Watch
Yu Darvish may have been awesome, but Derek Jeter still managed two hits against him, giving him three multi-hit games in a row. He’s 9-for-13 in those three games.

It’s the second time that Jeter has had three straight multi-hit games this season. Last season, Jeter didn’t have his second such streak until August.

Jeter’s career best multi-hit streak is seven games, done twice (1999 and 2009).

Approach to Josh Hamilton
The Yankees were very careful with the Rangers best hitter in Tuesday’s game. Of the 14 pitches he saw, 10 were in the lower-third of the strike zone or below. All four of his plate appearances ended with a pitch to that area.

Hamilton has had some vulnerability to soft stuff down the last few days, with five strikeouts against those pitches in his last four games. The risk is that if you hang the pitch, Hamilton will crush it, as he did with the home run against CC Sabathia in the series opener.