NO BLANKIN’ WAY!
YANKS FALL TO RAYS, WASTE TANAKA’S GEM
Friday night wasn’t a complete loss.
Masahiro Tanaka looked like his October version, tossing five shutout innings to give the Yankees’ struggling starting rotation a needed boost.
That’s the extent of the positives.
The Yankees’ usual potent bats couldn’t solve the Rays’ deep bullpen, Mike Tauchman committed a key base-running blunder to negate a rare rally and Adam Ottavino’s eighth-inning wildness contributed to a 1-0 setback to open this four-game series at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“Overall, we just didn’t have great at-bats. Kind of disappointing,” a clearly frustrated DJ LeMahieu said over Zoom following the Yankees’ third loss in four games. “I don’t think it’s acceptable. We’re too good of a team for that.”
The Yankees managed just two hits and went homerless for the first time this season. Chaz Roe went the final six outs for the victory and retired the Yankees in order in the ninth. Gleyber Torres made the final out, flying out to shallow center field, and is in the midst of an 0-for-24 slump. He’s not the only Yankee struggling. Giancarlo Stanton is 2-for-21 going back to the end of July, Aaron Hicks is hitting .188 on the young season and Gary Sanchez struck out in the biggest at-bat of the game, going down on three pitches with the bases loaded in the seventh inning.
“I expect us to come out with a lot of energy [Saturday], play good baseball and get back to being ourselves,” LeMahieu said.
Ottavino walked two of the first three hitters he faced, and his wild pitch, enabling the eventual gamewinning run to advance to third, set the stage for Michael Perez’s sacrifice fly. It was a frustrating inning for the right-hander, who started the frame by just missing with a 3-2 slider to Yoshitomo Tsutsugo. After walking Kevin Kiermaier on four pitches with one out, and issuing a wild pitch, he got too much of the plate with a slider against Perez. Looking back, he kicked himself for not throwing a fastball up in the zone.
“We kind of secondguessed ourselves there and paid the price,” Ottavino said.
After starting 8-1, the Yankees have hit somewhat of a rough patch, losing two of their last three games against the Phillies in Philadelphia and falling on Friday night. This time, though, starting pitching wasn’t the problem, as it had been of late.
In his second outing of the year, Tanaka was brilliant, retiring the final 13 batters he faces and 15 of 16 overall. Only Yandy Diaz reached against the righthander with a first-inning single. Of his 59 pitches, 44 were for strikes. He was frequently ahead, striking out five and not walking a batter in the five-inning, onehitter.
“The whole ballpark knows what he’s trying to do. We certainly do. But that just speaks to his stuff. It’s really good stuff,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “He can locate off-speed pitches as well as anybody that we face, right at the bottom [of the strike zone]. He really teeters that fine line, is it a ball or do I swing at this? We saw him locked in. He was locked in. We’ve seen it before out of him.”
The Yankees did have chances. In the seventh, they loaded the bases without a hit, but Sanchez struck out on three pitches, continuing his shaky start to the season. In the eighth, Tauchman led off with a double, but he was thrown out trying to advance to third on a LeMahieu groundout to shortstop, short-circuiting a possible rally. Boone didn’t criticize Tauchman for the base-running mistake, because the ball was hit basically at him. Neither did LeMahieu, who faulted himself for not hitting the ball to the right side to get him over to third.
“I just didn’t do a very good job right there,” he said.