POWER SAVERS
Late blasts from McCann, Castro, Beltran turn shutout into victory
When Alex Rodriguez struck out for the second out of the seventh inning Monday night, the Yankees’ chances seemed about what they look like for the rest of the season: DOA.
After all, Angels righthander Matt Shoemaker was working on a shutout and had retired 15-of-16, and the Yankees looked baffled against him and his splitter all night.
But two swings of the bat changed the outlook, as Brian McCann and Starlin Castro tied the game at 2-2 with back-to-back homers.
An inning later, Carlos Beltran made the comeback pay off with a two-out, threerun homer off reliever Jose Alvarez to send the Yankees to victory.
“That’s not the plan,” Beltran said of waiting around for late-inning long-ball magic. “The plan is to have good at-bats from hopefully everyone in the lineup [and] not go out there and try to hit homers. That’s a terrible plan. Today it worked out for us.”
Hey, when you’re trying to scratch your way back to relevance, you’ll take anything you can get.
“These a re important games,” Joe Girardi said before the game. “For us, we were at .500, now we’re below .500 again. We need to get back and get over [.500]. This is an important week.”
The seven-game homestand opened with a stunning turnaround for the Yankees (27-30) to take advantage of another solid outing by Masahiro Tanaka, who has allowed two or fewer earned runs in 10 of his 12 starts this season.
Even without his best stuff, Tanaka limited the Angels to a pair of runs over seven innings before departing for Andrew Miller.
Miller (3-0) came in to strike out the side in the eighth, ending the inning with whiffs of Mike Trout and Albert Pujols. Miller’s inning turned out to be crucial.
Just as important — and certainly unexpected — was the sudden awakening of the offense.
McCann ne a rly homered on a 3-1 pitch that just went foul before turning on a full-count fastball on the next pitch for his eighth that finally got the Yankees on the board.
Castro followed with a homer to the second deck in left to tie the game.
Then, with two outs in the eighth, Jacoby Ellsbury and Brett Gardner came up with singles to put runners on the corners and end Shoemaker’s night.
Beltran made them pay, hitting an opposite-f ield homer to right for the Yankees’ first lead of the game.
“I wasn’t thinking homer,” Beltran said. “I was think- ing more [about a] base hit to right field. I guess I was able to barrel the ball well. I knew I hit it well, but it was high, so I didn’t know if the right fielder would be able to make a play. It was fun to see the ball leave the ballpark and give us the lead like that.”
And it was enough for Aroldis Chapman, who rebounded from his first blown save with the Yankees and pitched the ninth for his 10th save.
Girardi thought about where the Yankees would be without Beltran and his 14 homers.
“We’d be in pretty bad shape,” the manager said. “We’d be lot of games down under .500.”
Because there have been too few nights like Monday, they are still three games below .500 as they search for more consistency from the offense.
“This is kind of what we imagined when we put it together,’’ Girardi said of the lineup. “There’s power in this offense. It hasn’t come out in the way it’s capable of, but tonight was kind of a reminder of what they can do — and they can do it quickly.”