The Yankees beat the Guardians 8-6 in Game 4 of the ALCS to take a 3-1 series lead.
Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.
1. A four-run lead over the 2024 Guardians should be an automatic win. Their offense isn’t any good, finishing seventh-best in the American League. They were shut out in two of five games against the Tigers in the ALDS. They scored five runs total in the first two games of this ALCS. They have no depth, two of the worst regular bats in the league in their lineup and feature one true star. They are built around making contact, putting the ball in play, bloop and infield hits, stealing bases and their league-best bullpen. And when you get to that league-best bullpen and have a 6-2 lead with 12 outs to go, that should be more than enough to secure a win.
It wasn’t.
“No lead is safe,” Giancarlo Stanton said after Game 4. Well, some leads should be. The Yankees’ lead in Game 4 should have been, if not for their manager.
2. A day after the Yankees got to the best reliever in the game for three runs, they got to the best setup man in the game for three more. In a game in which Aaron Boone managed like it was a getaway day game at the end of a long road trip in August, Stephen Vogt managed like he had never managed a game before. With runners on second and third and one out and Stanton due up against Cade Smith in the sixth, Vogt decided to let Smith face Stanton. The alternative was to intentionally walk Stanton and bring in the dominant left-handed Tim Herrin to face Anthony Rizzo with the bases loaded. Vogt let Smith pitch to Stanton and Stanton made him pay, hitting a mammoth three-run home run to left-center field to extend the Yankees lead from 3-2 to 6-2, passing Babe Ruth in home runs per postseason at-bats in the process. After the home run, Vogt went to Herrin, and he struck out Rizzo.
It was a foolish mistake. A mistake that can’t happen in October. But it was a mistake made by the Guardians manager. I don’t care about the Guardians. I care about the Yankees, and the Yankees manager made enough mistakes in Game 4.
3. Boone’s litany of mistakes began with removing Luis Gil after four innings. When you know you have limited options in the bullpen and that your elite relief options are exhausted, you can’t only get four innings from your starting pitcher. How are they going to get 15 outs? I thought after Gil was removed.
“We had a long way to go to the finish line, and frankly, I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to get there,” Boone said.
Oh, you weren’t sure where you were getting five innings of outs from your bullpen from? You had me fooled!
In a vacuum, removing Gil when he did made sense because the top of the order was due up for a third time and the top of the order had plated both Guardians runs the first two times they faced Gil. But the postseason isn’t operated in vacuum, and by removing Gil and asking the bullpen to get five innings worth of outs, the path to victory would be littered with obstacles.
The first arm out of the bullpen was Tim Hill for the fifth to preserve a one-run lead. Fine move. Hill has become at worst the Yankees’ fourth-best reliever. He got through the top of the order on 17 pitches.
I would have gone back to Hill for the sixth given the supposed limited resources available, but Boone decided to go with Jake Cousins. OK. Cousins was good for the Yankees all season and had only appeared in one postseason game to date. He’s rested and when he’s on, he’s great. By the time Cousins entered, Stanton had hit the home run off of Smith, so Cousins wasn’t going into the high-leverage situation Hill was faced with — preserving a one-run lead against the top of the order — as he would be facing 5-6-7 with a four-run lead. Cousins pitched around two baserunners to keep it a four-run game. Nine outs to go.
How would Boone get those nine outs? You would have to think both Clay Holmes and Luke Weaver would be unavailable after having pitched in every postseason game to date and after having been lit up the night before. You would think Tommy Kahnle would be asked to pitch at least the ninth, and if only given the ninth, who would get the other six outs?
Boone sent Cousins back out for the seventh and it was immediately first and third with no outs. A jam, sure, but with a four-run lead, the lead couldn’t be blown with one swing of the bat. With two on, no one out and the Guardians’ 2-3-4 hitters due up, Boone called on Holmes.
4. Why Holmes against the heart of the order? It must have been because Weaver was unavailable. Except he wasn’t. Weaver ended up warming up in the ninth. So if Weaver was actually available, why not Weaver or Kahnle in that spot against 2-3-4 than Holmes?
Aside from Holmes’ strong ALDS and his appearances in Games 1 and 2 of the ALCS, he had been a disaster for months, culminating in his removal from the closer role right before Labor Day. He had unraveled just over 24 hours earlier when he took the loss in Game 3, throwing middle-middle sinkers, whether because of the reversion to his regular-season self or exhaustion from his postseason workload. Cousins had thrown 27 pitches in the game, typically a lot for a three-to-four-out reliever, but he also had pitched once in three weeks. He would never be more rested.
Again, in a vacuum, it made sense to take Cousins out, but a vacuum doesn’t account for the options remaining: an exhausted Holmes and Weaver, a pitcher who wasn’t on the ALDS roster and was just added to the postseason roster that morning in Mark Leiter Jr. and a pitcher who also wasn’t on the ALDS roster and hasn’t been good since May in Marcus Stroman. And those seemed to be the only options because Boone was married to Kahnle in the ninth, idiotically managing for set innings rather than the situation at hand. This is why Gil should have stayed and/or Hill should have thrown more than one inning.
If Boone was willing to use Holmes in the seventh, why didn’t he just start the seventh, clean with no one on? Was Boone trying to steal outs yet again? You bet he was. He said as much after the game, saying he wanted to see if he could “steal a couple of outs” with Cousins. We’re in the seventh year of Boone managing this way.
Holmes looked every bit as bad as he did the night before and really since mid-May. He allowed back-to-back doubles to Jose Ramirez and Josh Naylor and walked Lane Thomas. He faced four batters and three reached. He allowed both of his inherited runners from Cousins to score and gave up a run of his own. A truly remarkable performance. When he left the mound, the 6-2 lead had become a 6-5 lead.
Leiter Jr. relieved Holmes. Brian Cashman’s prized pitching deadline pickup pitched to a 4.98 ERA in 21 appearances with the Yankees, allowing six home runs and 39 baserunners in 21 2/3 innings. He was left off of both the ALDS and ALCS rosters, and had just been added hours earlier due to a calf injury for Ian Hamilton.
Leiter Jr. entered with the Yankees clinging to a one-run lead with runners on first and second and one out and Game 3 hero Jhonkensy Noel due up. Noel hit a ball off Leiter Jr. that the camera led you to believe was going to clear Progressive Field and Lake Erie and land in Canada. Instead, it was caught at the wall by Alex Verdugo. Leiter Jr. got the two remaining outs of the inning to hold the lead at 6-5.
The lead was still 6-5 when Boone sent Leiter Jr. back out for the eighth. After a leadoff double to the light-hitting Bo Naylor, Leiter Jr. got two outs before allowing the tying run to score on a defensive disaster between he and Rizzo on a ball back to the mound.
5. At the time, the game felt over. The Guardians were going to pitch Emmanuel Clase in the ninth, and likely the 10th as well and the Yankees had no one left to turn to except for Kahnle. How would they prevent the Guardians from scoring for multiple innings until Clase was removed because certainly after his Game 3 meltdown, there was no way he was going to be anything other than unhittable like he was for six months.
As expected, Vogt went to Clase, and Rizzo, one of the goats from the eighth-inning defensive miscue, greeted him with a single. Jon Berti pinch ran for Rizzo and raced to third on a line-drive single by Anthony Volpe. (Volpe also had a big hit off Clase in Cleveland in April. Volpe has a knack for getting hits off some of the game’s best relievers. In this postseason, he has looked as good as he did for the first two weeks of the regular season before becoming an automatic out for the next six months. Where has this version of Volpe been since the second week of April?) Berti scored on a Guardians-like infield roller from Verdugo and Volpe scored after Gleyber Torres lined another base hit off of Clase. The Yankees had gotten to Clase on back-to-back nights and had built a two-run lead off of him. But they still needed to get three outs.
6. Boone went to Kahnle for the ninth. Kahnle had finished his work in Game 2 of the series with four straight changeups. In Game 3, he threw 26 pitches, all changeups. He had thrown 30 straight changeups to Guardians hitters and they had nothing to show for it. They would be hunting the pitch in the ninth inning of Game 4.
Kahnle got a favorable strike 3 call to sit down Thomas on six straight changeups, but walked Noel on six more changeups. Andres Gimenez floated the second straight changeup he saw from Kahnle into the outfield to put runners on and first and second with one out. Bo Naylor flew out on the first pitch — a changeup — he saw and Kahnle got Brayan Rocchio to hit a ground ball to second on the third pitch of his at-bat (which featured only changeups). Berti, now playing second, booted the ball initially, but recovered to throw out Rocchio and end the game. Kahnle threw 18 pitches, all changeups. Adding to his Games 2 and 3 totals, he has now thrown 44 straight changeups to the Guardians and they have failed to score.
7. “Obviously last night was a really though loss,” Boone said. “Whatever happened today — win, lose or draw — there’s no doubt in my mind we’d come out ready to roll.”
(Boone does know you can’t “draw” in baseball, right? What are you talking about?)
The Yankees came out ready to roll thanks to Juan Soto who gave the Yankees a 2-0 lead before an out was recorded with a first-inning home run. Each win this postseason means another game of Soto in pinstripes. I’m not ready for his time as a Yankee to end. I never want it to end. Like I have written many times in these Thoughts this season, if he’s not a Yankee in 2025, I will have to retire from the game. A clean break. It’s been a good three-plus decades. If he’s not a Yankee in 2025 and beyond though, I won’t be around to watch. I will learn an instrument or a new language or do whatever people who don’t watch baseball daily from late-March through October do.
8. The Yankees are one win away from the World Series. It’s the furthest any team during Boone’s tenure has gone, surpassing their previous-best of being two wins away in the 2019 ALCS.
“As far as I’m concerned, we haven’t done nothing,” Stanton said. “We’ve got to get it done tomorrow and on to the next.”
Stanton has always said the right thing as a Yankee. His Yankees career has been frustrating due to the unbelievable amount of injuries and missed games, only made more frustrating by seeing what he’s capable of when healthy, like we have seen this October. He’s right, the Yankees haven’t done anything. Being up 3-1 doesn’t guarantee you anything. Just ask Ramirez, whose Guardians were up 3-1 in the 2016 World Series and held a lead in Game 5 before losing that game and the next two and the World Series.
Stanton needs to be batting cleanup for the rest of the postseason. I don’t care who is starting for the opposition and what arm they throw with. Stop forcing lefties into the lineup to separate Judge and Stanton. It was bad enough when Boone was doing it for years with Brett Gardner and Aaron Hicks, and it was equally bad when he stuck with Wells in that spot for all of September and the first seven postseason games. It’s inexplicable that now Jazz Chisholm is there.
9. Carlos Rodon needs to be great in Game 5, the way he was in Game 1. End the series in five and get five days off. Don’t send it to a Game 6 and don’t send it back to New York. A Game 6 takes Gerrit Cole out of the equation for Game 1 of the World Series on Friday.
I don’t know what Boone’s plan is for the non-Rodon outs in Game 5. Weaver is the only non-Stroman reliever not named Tim Mayza who didn’t pitch in Game 4. I would think he would be available for six outs, especially if the Yankees lead and a win allows them five days off. I think at best Rodon can give six innings since he has pitched seven innings once (July 22) since mid-June. Maybe he will surprise us. Maybe he will earn some more of that $162 million and go seven and hand it off to Weaver for the last two.
10. “This team always bounces back and answers the right way,” Judge said. “This was definitely a big win.”
Of course it was a big win. It’s the difference between now needing to win one of three games to go to the World Series or having Rodon start with the possibility of trailing in the series with a Game 5 loss. As for Judge’s comment about the team “always bouncing back,” umm, do you not remember mid-June to early September?
With one more win, we can all forget about mid-June to early September. With five more wins, we can all finally heal from the Boone era. We can somewhat forgive Boone for the last six years of ineptitude and Cashman for the billions of dollars and thousands of games and hours wasted over the last 15 years.
Six down, five to go.
Last modified: Oct 22, 2024
