THAT WAS SAVAGE
Hitters, not bullpen moves, failed for Boone in Game 2
From the airwaves of Twitter, to the blare of talk radio, to the shores of Tripoli, Yankee legions were sounding off all day Monday over Aaron Boone’s seemingly manic bullpen managing in Game 2 of the ALCS. Ordinarily, as a self-avowed staunch critic of analytics, I, too, would be joining that chorus. I’ll pipe up against one of Boone’s eight pitching changes, removing Chad Green for Adam Ottavino with one out and no one on in the fifth. But running through eight relievers in what looked to be yet another constant search for the one guy who didn’t have it was not what lost the ballgame for the Yankees, even if, in J.A. Happ, Boone did ultimately find that one guy.
He had succeeded earlier in that quest when he removed Green — who’d retired all six batters he faced from the third to the fifth including a strikeout of pinch-hitter Kyle Tucker, his final batter — and replaced him with Ottavino to face George Springer. Why? Because Springer was 0-for-4 with three strikeouts against Ottavino, suggesting this was a much better matchup than Green-Springer. This is the problem with analytics: They don’t take into account the situation or the human element.
The fact was — and still is — Ottavino has not been pitching well for weeks now, allowing 13 baserunners in six innings in this postseason. Which is why no one should have been surprised when he hung a slider to Springer and it was deposited it over the left-center field fence to tie the score, 2-2. When a manager is at the behest of the analytics crew upstairs, he doesn’t get to manage with his gut. Did Boone really think the struggling Ottavino was the better option than Green, who was dominating the Astros hitters, in that spot?
And yet, remarkably, through all his bullpen maneuverings — beginning with removing starter James Paxton after he’d recorded all of seven outs — when it came to one out in the eighth inning, Boone had his Astros’ counterpart, A.J. Hinch, the ultimate analytics man, right where he wanted him. First of all, Justin Verlander was out of the game. The Yankees achieved their primary goal when Hinch pulled his ace after Cameron Maybin walked with two outs in the seventh. The score was still 2-2, and now Hinch was going on his own “search” by removing reliever Will Harris after committing the unpardonable sin of pitching around and walking Aaron Judge. Harris had only struck out Didi Gregorius to end the seventh and DJ LeMahieu to start the eighth, but Hinch chose to bring in his closer, Roberto Osuna, an inning earlier than he was supposed to be in the game.
Certainly, if you’d have asked Boone before the game how he’d feel to be tied 2-2 in the eighth, with Verlander out of the game, he’d say: “Pretty damn good.” With the exception of Ottavino, his multiple relievers had done the job, and now the Yankees were into the Astros’ vastly inferior bullpen.
So it wasn’t Boone’s incessant quick hooks that lost the game. It was the Yankee hitters who failed him in the end, especially Edwin Encarnacion, who has suddenly looked all of his 36 years in this series (0-for-10, six strikeouts). But there’s plenty of blame to go around the offense, which managed just six hits, including five singles, and failed to score off Joe Smith, Ryan Pressly and John James — the dregs of the Astro bullpen — in the 10th inning.
(A quick shout-out to the scouts on both clubs who devised the reports on Encarnacion and the Astros’ Yordan Alvarez, both of whom had scorched in the division series but have looked hopeless in this one.)
Game 2 was there for the Yankees to win, to go back to New York with a hammerlock on this series. No one would care that they suffered yet another freak muscle injury when Giancarlo Stanton reported a strained quad and will likely be of no use to them for the rest of the series. They may still very well win this series, but things like the Stanton injury bother me, just like Masahiro Tanaka earning $22 million a year and telling Boone he’d had it after 68 pitches in Game 1 because “they were stressful pitches”.
This is what the game — and especially the pitching — has come to.