Hold on tight, roller-coaster ride not over
DAMN Yankees. While I’m not quite old enough to have attended the 1955 Broadway opening of the musical with that title, I’m pretty sure it was the fans of other teams that used that adjective to describe the ball club from The Bronx, right?
All these years later, baseball’s most famous franchise now turns its own supporters profane in early October.
Yup, the 2021 Yankees honored the circuitous path that brought them here, falling short Friday night to a Rays group only half-trying, 4-3 at
Yankee Stadium, following a furious ninth-inning rally, which allowed the Red Sox and Blue Jays to pick up ground on them in the frenetic American League wild-card race. They did catch a late break, though, when the Mariners lost late to the Angels in Seattle, 2-1, to ensure that, even in the worst-case scenario, they’d play a tiebreaker on Monday (which means that Gerrit Cole almost certainly won’t pitch Sunday on short rest).
“That time of the year,” Aaron Boone said. “Tough one right there. We’ve got to turn the page quickly and get after it tomorrow.”
As in so many contests this season, especially the earlier ones, the Yankees’ hitters ultimately failed to support their pitchers. Boone used many of his better relief arms to keep the deficit at 2-1, until the dam broke with Domingo German (pitching for the first time since July 31) and Albert Abreu pairing to give up a pair of insurance runs in the top of the ninth inning. German walked two guys and Abreu served up a two-run single to stud rookie Wander Franco.
No, I don’t think Boone should’ve used Chad Green or Aroldis Chapman in a trailing situation, not after both pitched Thursday and with a cushion in the standings. The lefty Lucas Luetge, rather than the righthander Abreu, against Randy Arozarena and Franco, or simply to start the ninth? Sure, maybe. In any case, those misfires made it tougher to mount a final comeback, and credit to the Yankees, they came close. They plated two in he ninth and put the tying run on second base with one out before Tampa Bay’s Andrew Kittredge struck out Gary Sanchez (pinch-hitting for Kyle Higashioka) and Rougned Odor (filling in at third base for the unavailable DJ LeMahieu, yeesh) to disappoint the announced crowd of 41,469.
With the Rays established as the AL’s top seed and unable to gain World Series home-field leverage over any National League entity, their only competitive motivation came from honoring the Yankees’ plight.
Tampa Bay manager Kevin Cash said, before the game: “I don’t foresee us managing really any differently. We will watch our pitcher workloads. We’re certainly not going to run our position players into the ground. Brandon [Lowe] is off today, he’ll be right back in there [Saturday]. But you want to respect the game, that’s for sure. We’re going to respect the game, the situation, the magnitude of what’s at stake for all of these teams.”
The key sentence there proved not to be his first, but his second. Cash watched his pitcher workloads. Starter Shane McClanahan, likely to be in the team’s playoff rotation, threw five innings and 84 pitches in his prior start, Sept. 25 against the Marlins. This time, he lasted only three innings and 43 pitches despite a perfectly competent performance.
Yet emblematic always of these Rays, and occasionally these Yankees, the conga line of four Tampa Bay relievers excelled to protect the tiny (for most of the game) lead constructed against Yankees starter and loser Nestor Cortes Jr. Consequently, the Yankees’ wild-card lead grew tinier.
So we arrive at one more character test for a Yankees group that has taken so many and has put its fan base through the wringer in a way few highly competitive teams we’ve ever seen have done.
“We control our own destiny,” Joey Gallo said, an accurate statement that surely won’t reassure you.
Is your blood pressure climbing? Can’t sleep? Welcome to Yankees fandom in 2021. They get you going in good times and bad. Are you damned if you give up on them, or damned if you don’t? They’ll keep us guessing, it appears, until the last pitch.