Shreve shuts the door
A layman would call what Chasen Shreve found before him in the seventh inning a real fixerupper. Yeah, the Yankees lefty reliever inherited a mess.
The Twins already had put a run across against Chad Green to cut the Yankees lead to 6-4 and had the bases loaded with one out. The lefty-hitting Logan Morrison, off to a slow start but a dangerous, capable sort — with 38 homers last year — awaited.
So the Yankees countered with the lefty Shreve and he struck out Morrison on four pitches, using a swinging-strike splitter to get the inning’s second out.
Then Robbie Grossman popped foul and the Yankees defense, which on the kindest of days could be called suspect this season, arose. Tyler Austin made a terrific sliding catch down the right-field line in foul territory to snuff the threat.
“Huge,” was manager Aaron Boone’s description of Shreve’s contribution to the Yankees’ ultimate 7-4 victory over the Twins at a foggy Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night.
Two batters, two outs. Three runners, three stranded. Not a bad six-pitch night’s work.
“I was just trying to get them to chase my splitter,” said Shreve, whose ninth appearance of the season, covering 10 ¹/3 innings, left him with 14 strikeouts and lowered his ERA to 0.87. “When hitters are struggling, they’re more likely to chase pitches out of the zone. The splitter is my out pitch, so I’m going to stick with that.”
And there were no complaints with the sticking, the delivering. And definitely not the result from Boone.
“Shreve, we had to lean on him in a high-leverage spot,” said Boone. “He came in and got strike one which sets up everything for him.”
And while it was just two outs, they were, well, huge. Boone wanted to avoid overextending Green and he admitted he didn’t want to use the next guy, David Robertson, “for any length there.”
And Shreve was ready on all fronts.
“I feel good. My arm feels strong,” he said.
Can’t argue with the two-batter results.