Chapman may have found his dominant form
HOW will this game, one of the craziest these 2017 Yankees have played, be remembered? For Brett Gardner’s 11th-inning home run that gave his team a walkoff, 6-5 victory over the pesky Rays on Thursday night at Yankee Stadium?
For the ensuing celebration that inadvertently turned violent, leaving Aaron Judge with a chipped tooth?
For the Rays’ botched shift on Gary Sanchez’s two-out grounder in the bottom of the ninth, turning what should have been the game-ending out into the game-tying RBI?
We’ll need time to pass for historians to render their final verdict. For the moment, though? In importance, if not necessarily drama, nothing could match the two dominant innings clocked by winning pitcher Aroldis Chapman.
For if Chapman has returned to being the guy the Yankees traded to the Cubs a year ago, then the Yankees’ bullpen transforms from impressively deep to scary good. And Chapman looked like that guy, following a long stretch of looking nothing like him.
“He was really, really sharp tonight. I would say it’s the best I’ve seen him all season,” Sanchez said through an interpreter. “He was commanding the fastball. His changeup was good. And the life on his slider was very good as well.”
Said recent Yankees arrival Todd Frazier, who played with Chapman in Cincinnati from 2011 through 2015: “You feel pretty good when you’re at third base over there [playing behind Chapman].”
The hulking lefty needed just 19 pitches to record six outs, four of them by strikeout; only three of those pitches were balls. He struck out the side in the 11th, his final pitch a 102mph fastball that Peter Bourjos swung through. Chapman recorded seven swings and misses altogether.
Considering that Chapman’s biggest issues since coming off the disabled list (for an ailing left shoulder) were command and the ability to miss bats, this went down as a big night for him.
“When I’ve seen Chappy really, really good, he’s had that slider,” man- ager Joe Girardi said. “And he had it tonight.”
Girardi, however, nearly bullpenned this one into a loss. In the fifth, with one out and the Yankees leading by a run, and with Rays on first and second and Trevor Plouffe due up, the manager lifted his veteran starter CC Sabathia at a reasonable pitch count of 86. Sabathia looked extremely unhappy to get the hook, and Chad Green entered and promptly surrendered a two-run double to pinch-hitter Brad Miller, putting the Rays on top by a 4-3 count.
Even when you disagree with him, as I did here, Girardi usually offers a good explanation. This time, he said he thought Sabathia’s release point had dropped and his stuff consequently diminished.
Said Sabathia afterward: “He’s the manager. That’s what he gets paid to do. It worked out for us.”
It worked out because, after Green gave up another run in the sixth on Corey Dickerson’s solo homer, the Yankees’ bullpen shut it down, with Tommy Kahnle, Dellin Betances and Adam Warren putting up zeroes before Chapman took his turn in the 10th.
The Yankees are working to acquire another starting pitcher by Monday’s non-waivers trade deadline, yet they know they’ll be relying on their bullpen, which general manager Brian Cashman reinforced last week with the acquisitions of Kahnle and David Robertson from the White Sox. Girardi will be encouraged to act aggressively.
The bullpen becomes a far greater weapon if Chapman has worked through his troubles. If these Yankees can’t match last year’s spectacular trio of Betances, Andrew Miller and Chapman, then the exchange of Green, Kahnle, Robertson and Warren for Miller gives Girardi more bullets and the ability to mix and match more liberally.
If this Yankees season is to prove truly memorable, the best path to such joy goes through an elite Chapman. The Yankees gladly welcomed back that guy on Thursday, and they hope he won’t go anywhere.