Saturday afternoon’s game was not quite a must win for the Yankees, but it was definitely a game they needed to have to remain within striking distance of the AL East title. Strong pitching and timely hitting from the veteran leaders led the Yankees to an all-around rock solid 5-1 win over the Red Sox.
Holliday Weekend
So it seems Matt Holliday’s first two at-bats against Drew Pomeranz were a good sign, even if he made outs. Holliday actually got the ball airborne both times, which may not seem like much, but Holliday was beating the ball into the ground before going on the disabled list. His ground ball rate in the second half: 55.2%. Way too high for a non-speed guy. Way, way too high. It was 45.5% in the first half and even that’s a little higher than you’d like.
Anyway, with the score tied 1-1 in the sixth inning, Matty Arms airborned the hell out of a fat first pitch fastball from Pomeranz, and ripped it deep into the left field seats for a go-ahead three-run home run. The official distance: 443 feet. I gotta say, given how bad Holliday looked before the disabled list stint, I wasn’t sure he still had that kinda thump in him. It was very much a no-doubter.
Starting the Holliday weekend the right way. ? pic.twitter.com/iabUCf5fNQ
— New York Yankees (@Yankees) September 2, 2017
Getting to the point of the three-run home run was a bit interesting, because I didn’t think there was a chance Pomeranz would even get to face Holliday. Pomeranz started the sixth inning at 92 pitches, many of them high stress, and he walked leadoff hitter Didi Gregorius on six pitches. Walking Didi is no small feat. Going into Saturday’s game he had the same number of walks and homers this season (19).
The walk brought Chase Headley to the plate, the same Chase Headley who opened the scoring with a solo homer in the second inning, and laced a single in the fourth. Pomeranz was approaching 100 pitches, Headley had squared him up twice before and was about to face him a third time … seemed like a good time to get him out of the game. Fortunately, Red Sox manager John Farrell saw things differently, and left him in. Headley singled again, Holliday homered, and the Yankees took a 4-1 lead.
Masa-HERO
Pretty safe to say the crummy version of Masahiro Tanaka, the guy who had a 6.55 ERA (5.68 FIP) in his first 12 starts of the year, is long gone. Tanaka was marvelous yet again Saturday, holding the Red Sox to one run on five hits and two walks in seven innings plus one batter. He struck out three. Five of the 27 batters he faced hit the ball out of the infield in the air. In his last 14 starts, Tanaka has a 3.05 ERA (3.21 FIP) in 88.2 innings. Hell yeah.
The Red Sox scored their run through a combination of Tanaka mistakes and aggressive baserunning. Tanaka left a splitter up to Eduardo Nunez to start the sixth inning, and he hammered it off the wall in left field for a leadoff double. Nunez took a little stutter step going around first and the play at second was really close. It looked like a potential “he hit it so hard he held himself to a single” play, but Nunez hustled it into a double.
The hanging split was Tanaka’s first mistake. His second was bouncing a 55-foot splitter with Mookie Betts at the plate and Nunez at third. Gary Sanchez tried valiantly to block it, but the ball hopped away, and Nunez hustled home. Had he not broken for home instantly, there would’ve been a play at the plate. Two mistakes by Tanaka (hanging splitter, wild pitch) and two hustle plays by Nunez (double, advance on wild pitch) created the run.
Tanaka threw 97 pitches Saturday and generated a healthy 14 swings and misses. He missed bats with four pitches: six whiffs on the splitter, six on the slider, and one each on his two and four-seam fastballs. Here are the pitch locations:
Lots of swings and misses on pitches down below the zone. Quite a few foul tips down there too, so the Red Sox were chasing. No pitcher in baseball is better at getting hitters to chase out of the zone than Tanaka — his 42.0% chase rate is far and away the highest in baseball this year (Corey Kluber is second at 38.9%) — and that was on full display Saturday. Tanaka being great again makes me so happy.
Leftovers
Nice clean game from the bullpen. Not coincidentally, David Robertson and Dellin Betances were the only relievers used. Robertson allowed a dinky infield single to Betts in an otherwise uneventful eighth — he inherited a runner on first from Tanaka — and Betances was overpowering in the ninth. Three batters, three strikeouts on 12 pitches. Go Dellin. The Yankees held the Red Sox to six hits in the game, two of which did not leave the infield.
Three hits for Sanchez, including two infield-ish singles thanks to some adventurous defense by Rafael Devers. Gary also threw out Devers trying to steal, so I guess it was Sanchez 3, Devers 1 on Saturday. Also, Brett Gardner beat out an infield single when Devers flat out took too much time to make the throw on a routine grounder. Routine as routine gets. He took his sweet time and Gardner was safe. Headley also had three hits. He’s hitting .278/.360/.421 (109 wRC+) and has been tearing the cover off the ball since about mid-June.
Aaron Judge went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts but did hit a ball to the wall in left field — I didn’t think it was gone off the bat, but it went farther than I expected – which was about as far as he’s hit a ball in two weeks. Every starter reached base at least once except Judge and Aaron Hicks, and Hicks only got three plate appearances because he left with a tight oblique. Hicks did hit the ball hard twice though. Some snazzy defense robbed him.
The Yankees scored their fifth run thanks largely to a Jacoby Ellsbury leadoff triple in the seventh. He replaced Hicks, then lined a ball into the left-center field gap for three bases. When Ellsbury is going good, he wears out that opposite field gap. He’s been doing it more often lately. Sanchez got Ellsbury home with one of his Devers-aided infield singles.
Box Score, WPA Graph & Standings
Go to ESPN for the box score, MLB.com for the video highlights, and back to ESPN for the updated standings. We have a Bullpen Workload page. Here’s the win probability graph:
Source: FanGraphs
Up Next
This four-game series finally comes to end Sunday night in the ESPN Sunday Night Game. That game starts a little earlier this usual — 7:35pm ET instead of 8pm ET — so maybe it’ll end before midnight? We’ll see. Luis Severino and Chris Sale are the scheduled starting pitchers.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.