The Yankees beat the Royals 4-3 in 11 innings on Wednesday to win the series with Juan Soto breaking out of his slump.
Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.
1. After the Yankees’ offensive performance on Tuesday looked like an October foreshadowing, the first five-plus innings on Wednesday looked the same.
On Tuesday, the Yankees went 3-for-30 with 14 strikeouts and didn’t have a single runner reach second base. On Wednesday, through the first 5 1/3 innings, the Yankees were 2-for-17 with six strikeouts and a walk. They still hadn’t had a runner reach second base. No runner in scoring position for 14 1/3 innings.
After Gleyber Torres put the bat on his shoulder for an entire six-pitch walk (including taking back-to-back curves on 2-2 and 3-2), Juan Soto came to the plate.
Soto fouled off a 2-2 pitch into his ankle and hobbled around before needing to stay on the ground for a couple of minutes. It was a scary moment with visions of Soto missing the rest of the season playing out in my head. Thankfully, Soto was able to walk it off and get back in the box, fouling away another pitch after the scare. Two pitches after looking like he may be seriously hurt, Soto sat back on a hanging curve from the league leader in strikeouts per nine innings Cole Ragans and crushed it into the right-field bleachers to give the Yankees a 2-1 lead. (Why Ragans went changeup-curve after Soto fouled a slider off into his ankle, I don’t know, but I’m grateful he did.)
2. “Sometimes when you hit yourself like that, you go away a little bit,” Soto said. “I tried to just focus, take my time and go in there and make good contact.”
On Wednesday, I wrote: I thought Soto would be immune to the Yankees’ annual late-season offensive swoon, but it’s contagious enough that it’s impacting the 25-year-old superstar. The two-run home run was the kind of at-bat and moment I envisioned from Soto when the Yankees traded for him. When the rest of the team is slumping and not performing, I figured he would carry them. When the rest of the offense disappears in October, I know he will be there given his postseason success with the Nationals and Padres.
The runs were the first the Yankees had scored since Monday. After not homering in the entire series at Wrigley Field and being shut out on Tuesday, it was just the second of the last six games the Yankees hit a home run in.
3. The lead didn’t last long. The very next inning Aaron Boone went to Clay Holmes, knowing very well he would have to face the top of the Royals’ lineup. A single, single, lineup and sacrifice fly later, and the Royals had tied the game and Holmes had his 12th blown save of the season.
Using Holmes in the seventh inning of a one-run game against the top of the Royals’ order is the same as using him as the closer. Boone still hasn’t learned his lesson despite eight of Holmes’ 12 blown saves turning into losses for the team. One of those losses came against these same Royals back on June 13. It was that loss in Kansas City that sent the Yankees’ season into a free fall. If Holmes only half-sucked and only four of those eight had turned into losses, the Yankees would have a six-game loss-column lead on the Orioles. He has single-handedly put the Yankees in the current standings battle they are in to avoid playing in the best-of-3, wild-card series.
But like I have written and said many times, I’m never mad at the player or pitcher in a situation like this, and I’m not mad at Holmes. He didn’t let himself stay in the closer role after blowing 11 saves. He doesn’t keep deciding to bring himself into games. And he didn’t bring himself into a one-run game on Wednesday. You would think a “closer” with a 5.14 ERA over three-and-a-half months would need more than one clean inning in a loss to the Cubs after being demoted before being thrown back into high-leverage situations. Not for Boone. Holmes had five days off after his disastrous performance in Texas, threw a 1-2-3, 12-pitch inning in Chicago, and Boone decided he was ready to get back into a crucial role. The Yankees used five relievers in the game and all of them did their job except for Holmes.
4. The Yankees had a chance to take the lead back in the bottom of the seventh. With one out, Anthony Volpe singled and Anthony Rizzo walked, bringing up Jose Trevino. If you were going to have a draft for the worst hitter in the majors to be up with runners on first and second and one out and the threat of a double play looming, Trevino would be the first overall pick. He’s slow, he makes weak contact, and typically hits the ball on the ground right to the shortstop. He has hit into 11 double plays this season in just 68 games. Trevino is better at hitting double plays than anything else.
Knowing that and knowing that Trevino is a miserable hitter aside from his knack for rally-ruining double plays and knowing he’s hitting .083 with a .366 OPS since coming off the injured list in mid-August, he’s not just the last player on the Yankees you want up in that spot, he may be the last player in the entire sport.
5. Fortunately, Boone had options. With a lefty on the mound, he could take his chances with the left-handed Austin Wells, or if he wanted to stick with the righty vs. lefty matchup, he could use the switch-hitting Jasson Dominguez or the switch-hitting Oswaldo Cabrera or Jon Berti. Any of those four options would have been better a choice than Trevino. Unfortunately, Boone didn’t do anything.
Instead, Boone used Cabrera as a pinch runner at first for Rizzo and then let Trevino bat for himself. Trevino hit the ball on the ground to first, was tagged out running to first, and Volpe idiotically tried to score from second on the ground ball and was tagged out at home. An unconventional double play to end the inning.
To compound Boone’s stupidity, when Trevino’s spot in the order came up with the tying run on third and one out in the 10th inning, he used Wells as a pinch hitter … against a lefty! So he was willing to use the left-handed Wells against a lefty with the tying run on third and one out in the 10th, but he wasn’t willing to use the left-handed Wells against a lefty with the go-ahead run on second and one out in the seventh. Please make it make sense.
6. Between the decision to use Holmes in a one-run game and against the top of the Royals’ order, and the decision to let Trevino hit for himself with four better pinch-hit options available, Boone had quite the seventh inning. The atmosphere and intensity of the game was playoff-like with a division pennant and first-round bye hanging in the balance, and Boone was at his worst. The bigger the game and the closer the score, every decision Boone makes will have an enormous impact on the outcome and how this season ends, and once again, he seems incapable of making logical in-game choices.
7. So much for Dominguez playing every day. Two days after arriving, he was on the bench so Verdugo could play. Rather than let the switch-hitting Dominguez start against a lefty, Boone went with the left-handed Verdugo against the left. Verdugo hit two ground balls to the right side in the game, and with that, he tied the record for the most groundouts to the right side in a single season with 111 in the Statcast Era (since 2015). Verdugo has 16 games remaining to break the record and once he does, I think it’s a record that will last forever, like Wayne Gretzky’s points record or Cy Young’s wins record. Because no one that bad and hitting that many ground balls to the right side would be given as many plate appearances as Verdugo has been given this season.
8. Luis Gil didn’t have his best stuff and still only allowed one run (a solo home run) over five innings. There have been so many games this season Gil didn’t have his best stuff and still put together a performance like he did on Wednesday. He should be the Yankees’ Game 2 starter in the postseason, but we all know it’s going to be Carlos Rodon. Owed money always wins over actual performance.
9. I can never believe Giancarlo Stanton’s batting average when the graphic displays it with him at the plate. He’s hitting .230 this season, which may as well be .330 since I feel like he’s hitting .130. In his last seven games, Stanton is 1-for-26 with 10 strikeouts.
10. Soto came out of his slump, and maybe Judge is close to coming out of his? He had a line-drive single and two walks in the game. It would be glorious if Judge got his power stroke back in time for this four-game Red Sox series. It would go a long way to helping the Yankees win the division and a long way to keeping the Red Sox out of the postseason for the fifth time in six years.
Last modified: Sep 12, 2024
