Won’t be burying the hatchet
Divisional rivals with a history of hard feelings set to meet in best-of-five playoff series
NEWYORK— The Stable vs. the Savages.
Just another way to say topseeded Tampa Bay and the No. 5 Yankees meet in the best-of-five AL division series starting Monday at neutral site San Diego.
Tampa Bay players wear blue T-shirts with four horses lined up behind a fence, a reference to Rays manager Kevin Cash declaring “I’ve got a whole damn stable full of guys that throw98 miles an hour” in response to Aroldis Chapman throwing a 101 mph pitch near Mike Brosseau’s head on Sept. 1.
New York sold “Savages in the Box” shirts for $29.99 each last year, memorializing manager Aaron Boone’s infamous comment on his batters during a profane rant at rookie umpire Brennan Miller in a July 18 doubleheader opener against the Rays.
“That’s the entertainment business of it,” Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton said Thursday. “At the end of the day, it’s series like this that make the statement, not anything else.”
Tampa Bay swept two games from Toronto in the first round for its first postseason series win since 2008. The Yankees took two straight at Cleveland, including a memorable 10-9 victory on Wednesday night that took 4 hours, 50 minutes, the longest nine-inning game in major league history.
Hard feelings date to at least March 2008, when Tampa Bay’s Elliot Johnson ran over Francisco Cervelli during a spring training game, breaking the catcher’s right wrist. Three days later, Shelley Duncan’s hard slide with spikes raised into second baseman Akinori Iwamura sparked a bench-clearing scrum that resulted in two players and two coaches being ejected.
New York hit .218 with 13 homers against Tampa Bay, averaging 3.4 runs per game. Yankees pitchers had a 4.84 ERA vs. the Rays, allowing 47 runs and 16 homers.
But the Rays’ dominance has been greater generally at the Trop. Tampa Bay is 56-41 at home against the Yankees since 2010, winning its home season series nine times with one split.
“There’s a lot of attention this time of year,” Rays general manager Erik Neander said. “There’s a lot of noise. There’s a lot of stuff you could choose to worry about and to distract you. I think, at this point, that might be there for a fleeting moment when you’ve got to answer a question about it, but our group is awfully focused on doing the things that they can control and focused on winning games.”
Tampa Bay is likely to start 2018 AL Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell (4-1) in the opener, Tyler Glasnow(5-1) and Charlie Morton (2-2) in the first three games. The Yankees will go with ace and former Astros pitcher Gerrit Cole (7-3) and Masahiro Tanaka (3-3), then probably with J.A. Happ (2-2) and rookie Deivi Garcia (3-2).
Boone already has committed to starting Kyle Higashioka behind the plate for Cole rather than Sanchez.
While the Rays are top seed, Brosseau downplayed his team’s positioning.
“Any time you’ve got Yankees against Tampa, it doesn’t matter what the record is, most likely we’re going to be considered the underdog,” he said. “I think that fuels our fire a little bit. I think we have a team full of people that may be considered underdogs throughout their entire career. It’s a driving factor for sure. We like playing thatway. We like playing with that chip on our shoulder, kind of that mentality to prove people wrong.”