LUKE'S ON A POWER TRIP
Voit stays hot, clubs his first triple just when Bombers need it most
Turns out the legend of Luke Voit wasn’t a one-month wonder.
The calendar flipped to October, the pressure turned up to full blast, and Voit was still Voit Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium.
The first baseman was quiet in his first two at-bats before cracking a two-run triple — the first of his career — in the sixth inning to give the Yankees some more breathing room in their 7-2 disposal of the A’s in the AL wild-card game.
“How crazy is this?” a champagnedrenched Voit said. “I’m just a Missouri boy, never thought I’d be playing for the Yankees and now I’m playing on the center stage of the world. I’m having the time of my life and taking no regrets.”
Voit put together a strong at-bat against the A’s hard-throwing closer Blake Treinen, fouling off four pitches before pouncing on a slider on the ninth pitch he saw to make it a 5-0 lead.
Right after the ball left his bat, Voit did his home-run hop and pointed skyward, trotting down the first-base line looking like he thought the ball was gone. But as it clanked off the right-field wall, out of the reach of a leaping Stephen Piscotty, Voit got on his horse rounding first and still slid into third base with time to spare.
“I knew he throws 100, which is sick,” said Voit, who was making his playoff debut. “I kept trying to push him out, push him out and he kept coming in, so I was trying to foul off. I knew eventually he was going to go to his slider and luckily he hung one. I thought I hit it out. Giancarlo [Stanton] showed me how to hit it out, he hit it a mile.”
Soon after the deafening “Luuuke!”chants had died down — which Voit said were “on steroids” compared to the regular season — Didi Gregorius hit a fly ball to left field, allowing Voit to tag up and gallop home, just narrowly avoiding catcher Jonathan Lucroy’s tag to make it 6-0.
“Holy cow, man, I was so gassed,” Voit said. “I didn’t think I was going to make it home on that sac fly by Didi. Man, I just love this team.”
Voit wasn’t entirely clean in the field, as his errant throw in the third inning wiped out a potential double play, but he made up for it with his bat.
Tripling was about the only thing Voit hadn’t done in September, when he built on a strong last week of August and completely took over the starting first base job, so much that Greg Bird wasn’t even on the 25-man roster Wednesday night.
“We want Boston,” the former Cardinal said. “We can’t wait till Friday starts because it’s going to be a fun series.”