YANKEES ADVANCE TO ALDS
Relievers bail out Severino; Didi, Judge & Brett blast Twins, set up Cleveland trip
This was before the biggest night they have had at Yankee Stadium in a long time had officially begun, with the crowd coming hard and late at the Stadium along 161st St. It was maybe 20 minutes before the first pitch, and four hours before the Yankees would be back on the board in October, when somebody near Babe Ruth Plaza yelled out, “Is it Game 1 or Game 7?” And because it was a wild-card game, it felt like both. Most of the best Yankee memories, of course, are still from across 161st St. from the new place, where the old Yankees made memories and made more history at this time of the year in baseball than any team ever has or ever will. But on this night, the 2017 Yankees made their own history. Because across all the years for the Yankees, on either side of 161st St., the Yankees had never won a postseason game when their starting pitcher was only able to get them one out. They had done everything else in October. They had never done that. Until they did it against the Twins on Tuesday night, in a game they finally ended up winning 8-4, and winning themselves a trip to Cleveland in the process. Luis Severino, who had pitched like such a star for the Yankees this season, lasted just one-third of an inning on Tuesday night. He lasted about 20 minutes. By the time he left, after 29 pitches, the Twins had gotten him for two home runs and there were two more runners on, at second and third. The score was 3-0, Twins. The way Severino had pitched reminded you of the time, in a Game 5 at home against the Tigers in 2011. Ivan Nova was the hot kid of that season for the Yankees. He got the ball that night with a season on the line. Gave up two home runs in the first inning. Yankees went home. Now they were down three runs to the Twins, and Severino was gone, and here came Chad Green and his big arm out of the bullpen. This was before David Robertson would show up in the third, asked to pick up Green with the bases loaded the way Green had picked up Severino. This was a moment when the Yankees’ season was very much on the line, much too early in the Wild Card game. Maybe the Yankees would still have scored eight runs, even if they had fallen behind by five. No one knew it in the top of the first and top of October at Yankee Stadium.
So here is what Chad Green, in the biggest moment of his baseball career, did. He struck out Byron Buxton. Then he struck out the Twins’ catcher, Jason Castro. A few minutes later Didi Gregorius, one of the best trades Brian Cashman has ever made, hit a 3-run home run to tie the game. The Twins would get one more run, in the third, when Buxton got down the line fast enough to keep himself out of a double play and get the Twins the only run they would get off the Yankees’ bullpen on this night. But somehow you knew, by the time the first inning was over, that the Yankees would beat the Twins, just because they always do in October.
Robertson would go 3.1 innings on this night, and strike out five, pitch from the third and into the sixth the way Mo Rivera once pitched the late innings on occasions like this. Tommy Kahnle would come on after Robertson, and finally Aroldis Chapman in the ninth. Over the last 8.2 innings of this game, the one when so much excitement and so much promise for this Yankee team could have gone to waste, Green and Robertson and Kahnle and Chapman made their own history on the north side of 161st.
It all started with Green, who not only struck out the last two guys of the top of the first but the first two guys in the top of the second. It really did feel like the earliest in a postseason ballgame a save had ever been recorded for the New York Yankees.
I asked Jeff Nelson, once a great Yankee reliever himself, on championship Yankee teams, what it was like to come in the way Green did and know he had to get a strikeout.
“Sometimes you try to hard and end up getting yourself into a bad count,” Nelson said. “And sometimes you get H strikeouts like he got tonight.” e got his strikeouts and Robertson got his and the Yankees backed all this with three home runs: From Gregorius, from Brett Gardner, and from Aaron Judge, who hit one out to left that seemed to get there faster than a text message. All season long, we had seen the kind of stick the Yankees have. We had seen a good bullpen get better at the trade deadline because Cashman got Robertson and Kahnle from the White Sox. Now they had played their way to Cleveland with home runs, and with that bullpen.
The Yankees hadn’t won a playoff game in five years. Hadn’t ever won a postseason game in which their starter only lasted a third of an inning. They won Tuesday night, after it looked like they might lose early. They go to
Cleveland. Back on the board in October.