The Yankees will give the ball to the worst of their starting pitching options to try to save the season and force a Game 5.
The Rays have exposed the Yankees over the last two nights with some help from the home plate umpires. Now the Yankees will give the ball to the worst of their starting pitching options to try to save the season and force a Game 5. The Yankees will be expected to win Game 5 with Gerrit Cole on the mound, but can they even get there?
The high of the Yankees’ Game 1 win has been replaced by the lowest of lows after back-to-back losses have put them on the brink of elimination. They will now need to win two straight games against a team they haven’t won two straight against all season, a team they are 3-10 against in 2020.
I couldn’t watch anymore. I just couldn’t. After Chad Green gave up a two-run home to Michael Perez to put the Yankees down by five runs in Game 3, I knew the game was over. In all honesty, I knew it was over well before that home run.
I knew Game 3 was over when home plate umpire Mark Carlson single-handedly changed the game by calling two should-have-been ball 4s on Luke Voit as strikes 1 and 2 to prevent the Yankees from taking a 2-1 lead. Minutes later, Carlson missed a blatant strike 3 call on Willy Adames, which would have resulted in a strike-him-out, throw-him-out double play. Instead, it gave the Rays runners on first and second with no outs and then Kevin Kiermaier, my most hated Ray, took Masahiro Tanaka deep for a three-run home run to give the Rays a three-run lead. Carlson’s inability to properly identifty balls and strikes changed the game a night after Game 2s home plate umpire CB Bucknor had the worst postseason performance since Robinson Cano’s 2012 ALCS.
Bucknor and Carlson certainly didn’t help the Yankees the last two nights, but ultimately they only served as feul on the fire that is the Yankees’ season going down in flames. The high of the Yankees’ Game 1 win has been replaced by the lowest of lows after back-to-back losses have put them on the brink of elimination. They will now need to win two straight games against a team they haven’t won two straight against all season, a team they are 3-10 against in 2020.
***
Game 2 exposed the Yankees’ inability as an organization to come up with an intelligent and logical postseason pitching plan after they failed to replace Luis Severino, who the Yankees have known since February would miss the season, or James Paxton, who underwent back surgery before the first edition of spring training in 2020 and whose career has essentially been one long injured-list stint with some pitching in between. The Yankees decided that burning Deivi Garcia for the series, their third-best starter, for a one-inning outing, and allowing J.A. Happ, the team’s worst or second-worst starter to pitch the most in Game 2 would put the team in the best possible position to succeed. The offense scored five runs in Game 2, four off of Tyler Glasnow, and still lost because of their idiotic opener plan and another unfathomable night of bullpen management from Aaron Boone who continues to prove he has no business being a major league manager.
In Game 2, trailing 5-4 with a more-than-rested bullpen Boone decided to stick with Happ. Then he went to Adam Ottavino, who he didn’t trust in a close game last week, and then he went to Jonathan Loaisiga, who has done nothing to prove he belongs in high-leverage situations. The combination extended the Rays’ lead from 5-4 to 7-4, and put the game out of reach.
The following night in Game 3, trailing 4-1, Boone went to Chad Green, the team’s third-best reliever. He was willing to go to Green down three runs in Game 3, but not down by one run in Game 2. It was the latest decision from Boone to make absolutely no sense in what has become a never-ending list of decisions to make absolutely no sense since he became Yankees manager. He doubled down on this decision by keeping Green in the game for a second inning, which any Yankees fan can tell you isn’t wise, and two batters later, Green gave up the home run to Perez which forced me to turn the game off.
***
If Wednesday’s start was Masahiro Tanaka’s last as a Yankee, it wasn’t a good one. It was every bit as bad as his start in Game 2 against the Indians last week. No, Carlson didn’t help him out, but he did receive help from Aaron Judge who saved a run-scoring, extra-base hit with an amazing catch. I expected Tanaka to be good, and he wasn’t. He was awful.
The Yankees have the highest payroll in the majors and somehow once again don’t have a postseason rotation. They have Gerrit Cole then a pitcher who has a four-inning leash (Tanaka), a pitcher they think is best used as an opener (Garcia), a pitcher who they should have cut ties with a long time ago (Happ) and a pitcher they don’t trust (Jordan Montgomery). The Yankees clearly view Montgomery as their weakest starting pitching option since they have yet to use him in five postseason games. But on Thursday night in Game 4, with their season on the line, they will give the ball to the pitcher they consider their weakest option.
Even if Tanaka had been great and Boone didn’t let Green throw a second inning, it’s likely the Yankees still would have lost. Since Giancarlo Stanton’s home run in the fourth inning of Game 2, the Yankees have scored five runs over 14 innings, as the offense is once again performing their annual October disappearing act, led by Aaron Judge, Luke Voit and Gleyber Torres.
***
There’s a reason the Rays are the No. 1 seed in the American League playoffs. They were the best team in the regular season and that has carried over into the postseason. They easily dispatched the Blue Jays in two games last week and have easily rolled over the Yankees the last two nights. They are a much better team than the Yankees at a fraction of the cost. They have the best 1-2-3 rotation in the league with Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Charlie Morton to go along with the deepest bullpen in the league. They have a lineup full of pesky hitters, well balanced with righties and lefties, who make enough contact to avoid rally-destroying innings like the Yankees have, and who have enough power to ruin games like they did on Wednesday night.
If you were to construct a team to beat the Yankees, you would use the Rays’ exact roster. The Rays were built to win a championship, and in order to do so, they would have to be built to beat and get by the Yankees, and they are perfectly built to do so.
***
I don’t expect the Yankees to win Game 4 on Thursday night. If they do win, I expect them to win Game 5 with Gerrit Cole pitching, but I just don’t see how they get there. I don’t see how Montgomery is able to navigate his way even one time through the Rays’ lineup, and even if he were able to provide three or four great innings, how are the Yankees getting 18 or 15 outs to save their season? They have two relievers who are capable of getting big outs and at most, those two relievers could give the team 12 outs, and I’m sure that’s two or three outs more than the Yankees would feel comfortable with asking them to get.
Even if you forget about Montgomery, how are the Yankees going to score runs in Game 4? The Rays are going with an opener, a term and strategy they created and revolutionized, and one the Yankees have unsuccessfully tried to use in back-to-back postseasons. That means the Rays are going to trot unhittable reliever after unhittable reliever out of the bullpen for nine innings to try to advance to the ALCS. The Yankees will have to do something they haven’t been able to do the last three nights and weren’t able to do in 10 regular-season games: hit against the Rays’ relievers.
***
Wednesday night’s Game 2 loss felt a lot like last season’s Game 4 loss to the Astros in the ALCS. Yes, the Yankees’ season is technically still alive, but it doesn’t feel like it is. Wednesday night gave me some time to let it settle in that on Thursday night there might not be Yankees baseball until next spring, and given the state of the country, and the owners’ clear mandate they won’t play a full season of baseball without fans in the stands, who knows when Yankees baseball will actually return after their 2020 season ends?
I hope I’m wrong. I really hope I am. I hope the offense we saw in the first three postseason games returns and Montgomery is good enough to give the Yankees length and Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman can close it out. That’s asking for a lot. It’s asking for a miracle. But that’s what the Yankees will need to win this series and avoid wasting another season in their championship window: a miracle.
The Yankees relinquished their ALDS lead and desperately need to win Game 3 or their season will likely end this week.
The Yankees are in big trouble. They relinquished their ALDS lead with the worst possible first-guessed pitching decision and now they desperately need to win Game 3 or their season will likely end this week.
I was all for Deivi Garcia starting Game 2 of the ALDS. That plan I was OK with. What actually transpired with I wasn’t OK with. I don’t think there’s a Yankees fan out there who was OK with it.
I was all for Deivi Garcia starting Game 2 of the ALDS. Sure, it was risky, and sure, it was going against the easy logic of letting Masahiro Tanaka, one of the best postseason pitchers of all time start, but if the Yankees could pull it off and win Game 2 without using Tanaka, they would essentially have the series won. They would have Tanaka on extra rest to close out the Rays in Game 3. That plan I was OK with. What actually transpired with I wasn’t OK with. I don’t think there’s a Yankees fan out there who was OK with it.
As Garcia was battling against Austin Meadows in the top of the first, and also battling against home plate umpire CB Bucknor, who had one of the worst postseason games imaginable calling balls and strikes, J.A. Happ began to warm up in the bullpen. Garcia hadn’t even retired the first Rays batter of the game and Happ was throwing in the Yankees bullpen. I assumed it was protection for Garcia if he were to melt down like Luis Severino in the 2017 wild-card game and unable to give the Yankees anything. Then came the bottom of the second with the game tied at 1, and in came Happ.
Happ wasn’t warming up for protection, he was warming up as part of a set plan and “strategy” by the Yankees. The Yankees had gotten the Rays to build a lineup to face Garcia, inserting many left-handed hitters into it. Now with Happ in the game, the Rays would either have to start removing position players for pinch hitters to get right-left matchups or send left-handed hitters to the plate against the left-handed Happ. The Yankees had decided to try to trick the Rays rather than do what was best for their own team in the second game of a best-of-5 series. The same way the Yankees are always worried about their own lineup construction for late-game situations and scenarios that might never present themselves, the Yankees built their pitching plan for Game 2 based on how the Rays would then have to react.
***
Have you ever seen a commercial so bad you can’t understand how a group of executives sat around a conference room table and came up with the idea and how many people had to sign off on it to make the bad idea actually come to fruition? That’s what happened with the Yankees in Game 2. Someone employed by the most prestigious organization in major sports said, “What if we name Garcia as our Game 2 starter, so Kevin Cash puts a lot of left-handed bats into the lineup, and then after the first inning, we go to J.A. Happ to start with a clean inning?” Then everyone including Aaron Boone, Brian Cashman, a bunch of unnamed Ivy league graduates who have tried to prove “being hot” and “hot streaks” and “clutch” don’t exist and baseball lifers who have only ever known playing and working in the game agreed on that plan to the point that it came to fruition.
In theory, you could maybe make the case it’s a sound strategy and a good idea, but in that theory, the left-hander coming out of the bullpen is Clayton Kershaw or Blake Snell or someone with actual ability. Not Happ.
I wrote and talked all season about how bad Happ is, and how untrustworthy he is. I called for the Yankees to stop giving him starts completely after his two disgraceful starts to begin the season, and I begged the Yankees to give Garcia or Clarke Schmidt the opportunity to be part of the rotation. I wrote and said all of this as Happ was struggling to get through four innings in his starts, while he was feuding with the Yankees through the media about them working around his $17 million option for 2021. Happ was miraculously able to put together a string of good starts, but those came against horrible teams who weren’t close to sniffing the playoffs in a season in which 16 of the league’s 30 teams reach the playoffs. This fooled some into thinking Happ had turned back into the pitcher the Yankees traded for at the 2018 deadline. It didn’t fool me.
I have said for weeks Happ couldn’t be a part of the postseason plan. He hasn’t been good enough to start a postseason game since the moment before he threw a pitch to J.D. Martinez in the first inning of Game 1 of the 2018 ALDS, which resulted in a three-run home run and ruined that game. Since that inning, Happ has been bad to very bad to being on the brink of being in the majors as a Yankee spanning the entire 2019 regular season, 2019 postseason and 2020 regular season, outside of a few starts when he beat the Orioles, Red Sox and Mets. And now the 2020 postseason can be added to the list as well.
***
Happ relieved Garcia and my first thought was This better fucking work. The Yankees were removing a 21-year-old kid completely capable of shutting down the Rays’ lineup for four or five or even six innings to bring in a 37-year-old who was last good enough to pitch in the postseason two calendar years ago. The first batter, the left-handed Joey Wendle, singled. Three batters later the Rays had a 3-1 lead after Mike Zunino hit a home run. After Zunino, the left-handed Meadows walked. Happ was supposed to neutralize the left-handed heavy lineup the Rays had constructed to face Garcia, and he had allowed two of the four left-handed bats he had faced to reach base.
The second inning was bad, but the third inning was the nightmare I had expected with Happ pitching in the postseason. Ji-Man Choi (another left-handed bat) walked with one out, and then Manuel Margot hit a two-run home to straightaway center. The Rays now led 5-1, and Happ had allowed as many runs (four) as outs recorded. The left-handed Wendle came up next and singled off Happ for the second time in as many innings and then Willy Adames reached on an error by Happ himself.
In the top of the fourth, the Yankees closed the deficit to one run after Giancarlo Stanton hit his second home run of the game and his third in as many at-bats to make it a 5-4 game. The Yankees would have five innings and 15 outs to tie the game or take the lead, and Boone was now going to have to actually manage and not just go off the script given to him by that front office idiot who had come up with this plan. Boone’s first decision in what was now a one-run game was to stick with Happ, who put two more on base before Boone finally pulled him. Happ needed 69 pitches to get eight outs. In his 2 2/3 innings, he allowed nine baserunners, four earned runs and two home runs, walked three, hit a batter and made an error. He was even worse than I could have ever envisioned him being.
The untrustworthy duo of Adam Ottavino, who can’t throw strikes or hold runners, and Jonathan Loaisiga, who is essentially the Nicaraguan Nathan Eovaldi with his high-90s, but very straight and very hittable fastball, made sure the Yankees didn’t come back by allowing a pair of runs. And the Yankees’ offense didn’t look like they could come back anyway, setting a team record for strikeouts in a postseason game with 18. 18! Jonathan Holder (1 IP, 0 ER, 1 K) and Nick Nelson (1 IP, 0 ER, 2 K) proved to be the two best Yankees pitchers in the game.
***
If you had told me yesterday at 8:09 p.m. the Yankees would score four runs off Tyler Glasnow, Stanton would hit two home runs and Glasnow would only last five innings, I would have started worrying about the Astros and an ALCS rematch. Instead, the Yankees’ best-of-5 against the Rays is now a best-of-3.
It was always going to be extremely difficult to beat the Rays in a short series because they are essentially built to beat the Yankees. They hit Gerrit Cole well, they have two hard-throwing right-handed power pitchers in Glasnow and Charlie Morton, and a never-ending stable of trustworthy right-handed relievers who match up perfectly against the right-handed heavy Yankees. The one advantage the Yankees might have had in the series was the mystery and unknown of Garcia, who the Rays had never seen before. But instead of using that mystery, the Yankees chose to let Happ give them one more parting gift on his way out the door as a now impending free agent by taking a giant dump on the Petco Park mound.
Now it’s up to Tanaka to save the Yankees’ season, the same way it was up to him when the Yankees trailed the Indians 2-0 in the 2017 ALDS and when the Yankees trailed the Red Sox 1-0 in the 2018 ALDS after Happ’s memorable start. No, the Yankees aren’t trailing in this series like they were in those two, but they need to play, pitch and mange like they are because Game 3 is a must-win game, considering the Yankees don’t have a Game 4 starter. It’s not that they don’t have a Game 4 starter because they haven’t announced one like they did with Game 2. It’s that they actually don’t have a Game 4 starter.
It’s 100 percent not Happ. It can’t possibly be Jordan Montgomery. It has to be Garcia who only threw 27 pitches on Tuesday, the only 27 pitches he has thrown in 10 days. But maybe the Yankees will try another unconventional strategy. Maybe they will give the ball to Michael King, who they inexplicably let open so many games this season, and he will go three innings and give up his mandatory quota of at least three earned runs, and then they will turn it over to Holder or Nelson or Luis Cessa.
The Yankees now have to win a best-of-3 against a team they are now 3-8 against this season in order to erase the monumentally bad Game 2 pitching decision which was first-guessed when it was made and not second-guessed after the fact. The Yankees will have forever to think about their regrettable decision to not just go the easy route and go with Tanaka or to not commit to Garcia for a real start in Game 2 if they go on to lose this series and their season ends this week and another season of their current championship window is wasted. At least they have the right pitcher going in Game 3 to make sure that doesn’t happen.
The Yankees’ offense showed up for the third straight game to open the postseason and made sure Gerrit Cole’s off night didn’t cost them a win.
Gerrit Cole didn’t pitch like any Yankees fan expected him to pitch in Game 1 of the ALDS, but he pitched the way he has against the Rays all season. Thankfully, the Yankees’ offense showed up for the third straight game to open the postseason and made sure Cole’s off night didn’t cost the Yankees a win in the best-of-5.
