Sox punch ticket to meeting with Astros
RED SOX 4, YANKEES 3
As one Boston Red Sox pitcher after another mowed down the New York Yankees on Tuesday night, the realization slowly settled across an increasingly silent Yankee Stadium: None of it mattered. The Red Sox were about to dance across the infield and spray Champagne in the visitors’ clubhouse for the second time in three weeks, and it wasn’t going to make a lick of difference when Aaron Boone lifted his starting pitcher or how the Yankees chose to deploy their bullpen or how many home runs they had hit in the regular season.
None of it was going to matter because the Yankees’ history-making lineup, in the second week of October, had suddenly stopped hitting, and it was because of that, not to mention the Red Sox pitchers who shut them down, that the Yankees lost the American League Division Series to their archrivals.
The Red Sox earned a trip to the AL Championship Series with a 4-3 victory in Game 4 of the ALDS, out-pitching, out-hitting and out-managing the Yankees across 36 innings. Tuesday night’s clincher featured five solid innings by starter Rick Porcello, three perfect innings from three setup men — including ace Chris Sale in an eighth-inning cameo — and a harrowing ninth from closer Craig Kimbrel, who needed a breath of wind at the outfield wall, a clutch pitch or three and an anticlimactic replay review to secure a messy save.
Boston will host the Houston A st rosin Game 1 of the ALCS on Saturday night at Fenway Park.
In the last gasp of the Yankees’ season, against Kimbrel in the ninth, the Yankees, trailing by three, loaded the bases with one out on a single and a pair of walks, then scored a gift run when Kimbrel hit Neil Walker on the top of the foot with a slider. But as a crowd of 49,641 stood and begged for a come back, and with the go-ahead run at first, Gary Sanchez’s high, towering blast to left fell just shy of the wall, a sacrifice fly that pulled the Yankees within one.
With two outs, Gleyber Torres grounded out weakly to third, the throw beating him by a half-step, an outcome that was confirmed on replay review, forcing the Red Sox to delay their wild, teeming celebration at the centre of the infield.
And so, four games between the Red Sox and Yankees in October, the first meeting of 100-win teams in the history of the Division Series, told us pretty much the same thing 162 games from April to September did: that the difference between the teams was the matter of a few runs here or there (well, with the exception of Game 3’s blowout), that the Yankees had the superior bullpen and the Red Sox the superior rotation, and that, overall, the Red Sox were just a little bit better.
After hitting a record 267 home runs this season, the Yankees failed to hit any in Games 3 and 4, thus dropping their record to 10-23 this year, regular and postseason combined, when going homerless.
Simply put, they depended on their ability to hit the ball out of the park, and when they didn’t do it, they weren’t built to manufacture runs in other ways.