AND POOF! A’S YANKED OUT OF POSTSEASON
A’s bullpenning undone by Yankees’ pinstriping
NEW YORK >> A trendy new stat let fans know just how hard Aaron Judge hit his cataclysmic home run against the A’s on Wednesday night.
The ball left Judge’s bat with an exit velocity of 116.1 mph, the hardest-hit postseason home run since Statcast began tracking such things in 2015. That mark stood until the eighth, when Giancarlo Stanton smoked one with an exit velocity of 117.4 mph.
The A’s exit velocity from the playoffs was just as rapid. With a 7-2 loss to the New York Yankees in the American League wild-card game, poof, they were gone. Just like that.
A’s third baseman Matt Chapman, one of the A’s rising young stars, vowed that things will be different soon.
“I think everybody is motivated to get back to work,” he said before the sweat was dry in the A’s clubhouse. “We’re going to come back next season with this experience under our belt. We have some confidence.”
The A’s attacked Wednesday with an unusual pitching strategy. Rather than handing the ball to a traditional starting pitcher, they unleashed a series of short relievers.
The A’s call this strategy bullpenning.
But it was no match for pinstriping.
The Yankees — the damned Yankees with their $179.6 million payroll and gargantuan sluggers and packed house of 49,620 fans — will advance to
play the Boston Red Sox and their $228.4 million payroll in the A.L. division series.
So overmatched were the A’s on Wednesday that by the sixth inning, fans at Yankee Stadium had seen enough of the preliminaries and started chanting: “We want Bos-ton! We want Bost-ton.”
The A’s, with their $80.3 million, payroll … well, they ought to have this part down by now.
This marked their eighth consecutive loss in a winner-take-all playoff game, a new major league record for postseason heartbreak. (The Cleveland Indians have an active streak of seven straight winner-takeall defeats).
Manager Bob Melvin had time only for a brief speech to his team before meeting the press. But, like Chapman, he was already thinking about 2019.
“I told them I was proud of them and hopefully this is just the start for us,” Melvin said. “We felt like with the group we have here together that we’re going to keep getting better each and every year.”
This time, the plucky band from Oakland was ousted essentially two batters into the Yankees lineup. Andrew McCutchen walked, then Judge, all 6 foot 7, 282 pounds of him, unleashed a home run that established it was a night for the big boys. As a painful side note, the A’s drafted Judge the 31st round of the 2010, but he chose to go to Fresno State instead.
Without him, the A’s, with their dinky payroll, underdog vibe and underappreciated talent, suddenly looked as overmatched as a No. 16 seed during March Madness.
Their bullpenning trick kept them in the game until they pulled one too many rabbits out of the hat.
They trailed just 2-0 when Melvin summoned Fernando Rodney, the fourth pitcher of the day, for the bottom of the sixth.
Rodney, one of the few players on the roster with significant playoff experience, struggled. He surrendered an opposite-field double to Judge down the right-field line then a double to Aaron Hicks to make it 3-0.
After a wild pitch sent Hicks to third with nobody out, Melvin made the extraordinary move of summoning All-Star closer Blake Treinen into a desperately bleak situation. Treinen’s usual job is to protect the ninth inning; this time it was to prevent a middle-inning from totally unraveling.
But Treinen, whose 0.78 ERA was the lowest in major league history for pitchers with at least 80 innings, struggled, under the circumstances. After allowing only seven earned runs all season he gave up three in 2.0 innings Wednesday.
“We just have to get our best in there at that time,” Melvin said of the move.” “The (relievers) knew everything was kind of up for grabs tonight depending on what the situation of the game was.”
The final blow against Treinen came from Stanton, the kind of player the A’s could never afford: He’s playing on a 13-year, $325 million contract.
Stanton’s 443-foot homer made it 7-2. And the Yankees, who saved their lateinning relievers for the late innings, held on to improve to 7-0 at Yankee Stadium over the past two postseasons.
In the subdued clubhouse later, the A’s sounded bummed. But not crushed.
“I’m excited that we made the playoffs. It’s something we all wanted to do,” Chapman said. “We were able to accomplish that with a lot of young guys and a low payroll, so I think that the sky is the limit for our team and I think everybody is motivated to get back to work.”
Jonathan Lucroy, the kind of sage veteran catcher you see in baseball movies, also has hope.
“It’s important for the young guys to get a taste of what that was like,” he said, “because that’s what playoff baseball is like, especially here in a good environments. It’s one of the toughest environment in the league.
“We just couldn’t get that big knock.”
As a result, there’s still a big knock on the A’s modern postseason resume. The last time they won a winner-take-all postseason game was Game 7 of the 1973 World Series.
“We’re going to get better each and every year,” Melvin said. “Unfortunately, it’s disappointing right now but we have to keep our heads up.”