Tag Archives: Houston Astros

It’s phun unless you’re a Padres fan

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Philadelphia Phillies

Rhys Hoskins (17) and the Phillies high, low, and any other five they can think of after waxing the Padres in NLCS Game Four . . .

After Saturday’s doings and undoings, the second-winningest regular season major league team is on the threshold of a potential World Series date with the eleventh-winningest regular season team. That’s about the full extent to which the Astros (the former) have anything in common with the Phillies (the latter).

Say what you will about Commissioner Rube Goldberg’s postseason array. I’ve said my share and then some. Permit me to share this, from an essay I wrote for the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America’s Here’s the Pitch newsletter, following the ends of each league’s wild card series:

Reviewing the 1948 national elections, for a spoken-word album hit called I Can Hear It Now, broadcast news titan Edward R. Murrow observed wryly that the people’s pulse was taken, they’d been told for whom they’d vote and by how many votes, “and, yet—it couldn’t hurt to watch the campaign, anyhow.” Postseason baseball this year is somewhat like that.

We haven’t been told unto death who’s going to claim the Promised Land and in how many games. (Yet.) And, it’s going to take a little bit longer thanks to a lot more artificially inflated competition this time around. But it couldn’t hurt to watch the games, anyhow.

That seems truer now, especially with regard to the National League Championship Series, in which the Phillies awoke Sunday morning one win shy of the aforesaid World Series date. It couldn’t hurt to watch them tangle with the Padres, also known as the tenth-winningest regular-season major league team, anyhow.

So far, it hasn’t hurt. Unless you’re a Padre fan.

Just when you think the Padres are going to piledrive the Phillies into the ground and back, these not-so-phutile Phillies find ways, means, and the moxie to overthrow the Padres and make it stick. For example, NLCS. Game Four Saturday night, overthrowing and thumping the Padres, 10-6.

The noise in San Diego’s Petco Park and Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park has been enough to make you think you’ve been time warped back to the peak of Beatlemania. The Phillies didn’t needed guitars, basses, and drums to do that. All they needed was to remind themselves—as first baseman Rhys Hoskins said they did, after the Padres jumped them for a four-run top of the first Saturday night—that they still had 27 outs with which to work.

Especially on a night manager Rob Thomson planned a bullpen game but had to be very careful not to let himself be forced into potential overwork assignments out of a couple of his bigger bullpen bulls, Seranthony Domínguez in particular. As things turned out, the Phillies didn’t need Sir Anthony to ride in, on his white horse or aboard any other means of transportation.

Thumping the Padres after getting thumped in the first inning can give you that kind of security entering Game Five, a game the Phillies expect Zack Wheeler—who manhandled the Padres over seven innings and one measly hit in Game One in San Diego—to start and mastermind. Facing that plus the Phillies’ all-and-a-little-of-everything bats might mean no more baseball in San Diego after Sunday afternoon.

But neither the Phillies nor the Padres, or anyone else in the ballpark or in front of a television set, expected that neither starting pitcher would get out of the first inning alive for the first time in postseason play since it happened to Guy Bush (Cubs) and Johnny Allen (Yankees)—on the day Iraq first became an independent nation. (Game Four, 1932 World Series, if you’re scoring at home.)

The Padres opened by making Phillies starter Bailey Falter live down to his surname, with Manny Machado hitting one into the left field seats with two outs, followed by a two-run double (Brandon Drury) and an RBI single (Ha-Seong Kim). Often as not that kind of opening inning endures. When the runs are scarce enough, as they’ve been this postseason for the most part, that kind of opening holds to the final curtain.

Then Hoskins smashed a two-run homer atop Kyle Schwarber’s leadoff single off Padres starter Mike Clevinger in the bottom of the first. After J.T. Realmuto walked to follow up, Bryce Harper yanked a double to deep right center field to send Realmuto home and yank the Phillies back to within a run. (Yes, that’s ten extra-base hits in ten postseason games this time around for him.)

Bryson Stott tied things at four with an RBI single in the bottom of the fourth. The bad news from there: Juan Soto, who’s been having his issues in the field this set and who hadn’t yet done much of the bombing for which he was known well enough when the Padres dealt for him big at the regular season trade deadline, finally struck big with a one-out, tie-breaking, two-run homer in the top of the fifth.

Leave it to Hoskins to see and raise in the bottom of the inning. With one out, one aboard, and Padres lefthander Sean Manaea left in inexplicably to face the righthanded Hoskins, in Manaea’s first postseason appearance following a season in which he’d lost his slot in the starting rotation, Padres manager Bob Melvin didn’t even think about one of his bullet-firing bullpen bulls and left Manaea in to face the consequences.

“I was going to try to get him one time around the lineup,” said Melvin, who’d also managed Manaea in Oakland including the lefthander’s 2018 no-hitter. “I thought his stuff was better. He had 95. He had swings and misses when he got into the zone, but he couldn’t locate it.”

The consequences came when Hoskins hit a hanging sinker over the left center field fence, followed by Realmuto wringing out another walk and Harper drilling another RBI double, this time into left center, and the Phillies re-took a lead they wouldn’t surrender. With or without a fight.

“We knew with a bullpen game, the possibility of multiple guys having to be put in positions that they’re not used to being in, that we were going to have to slug,” said Hoskins postgame. “We did that tonight.”

Harper’s double finally prodded Melvin to get Manaea the hell out of there, in favour of Luis García—most assuredly not the Astros’ righthander who combined to shut the Mariners out, sweeping their American League division series. But Nick Castellanos greeted García with a first-pitch, opposite-field RBI single. Welcome to the party.

The Schwarbinator did García worse with two out in the next inning, beginning the Phillies’ insurance purchase with a launch over the center field fence. Mammoth enough, but not quite that close to the absolute nuke he detonated in Game One in San Diego. Steven Wilson took over the mound for the Padres for the bottom of the seventh, and Realmuto overtook him leading off, sending a 1-1 slider that hung up enough for the Phillies catcher to hang it a few rows into the left field seats.

The only thing quiet about Game Four from there was the play on the field, both sides’ bullpens keeping each other’s bats from getting any more obnoxious. The Citizens Bank audience was just as noisy the rest of the way as they’d been when the Phillies picked up, dusted off, and started their return from the living dead in the bottom of the first.

Compared to all that, the Astros waxing the Yankees in the Bronx, 5-0, in their own American League Championship Series Game Three was about as thrilling as a seaweed salad. Even the reminder that the Astros have never lost a postseason game when scoring five runs or more seemed a big case of big deal.

From Hall of Famer-to-be Justin Verlander in Game One through Cristian Javier keeping them quiet in Game Three, the Astros have gotten just enough at the plate. They even accept Yankee gifts, such as a grave misread between Aaron Judge and Harrison Bader playing a first-inning pop that was followed at once by Chas McCormick bouncing a two-run homer off the top of the right field fence, into the seats, and off Yankee ace Gerrit Cole while he was at it.

That plus the rest of the game reminded one and all that, by hook or crook, the Astros fear no team. Certainly not the Yankees, whom they beat in seven in the 2017 ALCS and six in the 2019 ALCS. Maybe not even if these Yankees could send Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, and the 2014 edition of Madison Bumgarner up against them. Maybe.

The odds don’t favour the Yankees Sunday night, either. They’ve scored (count ’em) four runs all ALCS long so far. Their ALCS OPS is eleven points lower than the Astros’ ALCS slugging percentage alone. If these Yankees can’t hit in this ALCS—it seems their season-long dependency on record-breaking but now-slumping Judge has begun to slice their own baloney—the flip side is that these Astros can pitch as well as they hit.

If the Empire Emeritus gets waxed in Game Four in front of their home audience, the noise might be as loud as Philadelphia but it won’t be the kind the Yankees want recorded for posterity. (Especially not involving free agent-to-be Judge’s potential final game as a Yankee.)

The Phillies have the opposite problem. The Game Five noise in the Bank may reach the Omega Quadrant if they beat the Padres Sunday afternoon. Unlike the Astros and the Yankees, you can call both the Phillies and the Padres many things, but boring isn’t one of them. Whatever Philadelphia’s noise ordinances are, you won’t find one cop alive willing to enforce them.

Dangerous curves

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Anthony Rizzo

Anthony Rizzo’s Game One home run is the only Yankee run to come home off a fastball so far this ALCS. The Astros are breaking them—a diet of breaking balls they can’t seem to hit, that is.

I don’t have a dog in the American League Championship Series hunt. I tend to admire individual Yankees and Astros and not to root for either team. As a personal preference, and in spite of Commissioner Rube Goldberg’s less-than-the-very-best-people postseason construction, the National League Championship Series tangling between the Phillies and the Padres is just a little more fun.

Not just yes but hell yes: I enjoyed seeing Aaron Judge smashing a 62-year-old American League single-season home run record. I enjoy every time I watched mighty mite Jose Altuve at the plate, especially knowing Altuve really was one of the few Astros who actually didn’t want any Astro Intelligence Agency-pilfered signs banged his way when he was at the plate.

And it’s still a kick seeing Justin Verlander defy his age (he’s Jack Benny’s age at this writing), pitching into the Cy Young Award conversation this season, then opening this ALCS by turning the far younger Yankees into his personal lab experiments in Game One. That, folks, is what a Hall of Famer does when he’s staring into Yankee eyes from the mound.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking merely that the Astros hit better than the Yankees to take their 2-0 ALCS advantage. The Astros can hit. They’ve been able to hit like F-15s or Stealth bombers since the first time they dispatched the Yankees from a postseason five years ago. Even the best pitchers in the business know they’re in for a fight when someone in Astro silks checks in at the plate

(Want to know one reason why Astrogate and the team’s largely, apologetically non-apologetic replies pissed people outside Houston off? Because we knew good and damn well they didn’t need an illegally installed closed-circuit television network and a front-office-down intelligence agency’s black-bag job stealing signs to do it. Those teams and this Astro team could turn seaweed into base hits and clumps of weeds into interstellar orbiting satellites.)

But here’s a bulletin for you. These Astros are also pitching the Yankees to death. That formidable Yankee offense has been manna to an Astro pitching staff whose mantra seems to be not just throw your best stuff as often as you can throw it but, also, those guys are vulnerable to curves, whether they’re on beautiful women or on the pitches coming out of your hands.

Several analyses I’ve seen indicate that this year’s Yankees will turn fastballs into powder but breaking balls will turn them to jelly by comparison. They hit .252/.357/.482 when seeing fastballs coming up to the plate but .221/.282/.401 when seeing breakers, whether curve balls, sliders, cutters, or changeups.

Don’t be shocked if there’s a sign in the Yankee Stadium home clubhouse before Game Three, a yellow diamond sign advising, “Dangerous curves ahead.”

Verlander threw breakers over half the time in Game One. Framber Valdez barely showed them any heat in Game Two; his repertoire for the evening consisted almost entirely of either “Dead Man’s Curve” or “Slip Slidin’ Away.” His relief (Brayan Abreu, Ryan Pressly) threw a combined 41 pitches and 36 were breaking balls. (Pressly threw 21 breakers including changeups out of 22 pitches closing the game out.)

The Yankees scored twice in each game. You’d think they’d catch the hints. Both RBI hits in Game Two (both in the fourth inning, too) came when the batters (Anthony Rizzo, run-scoring ground out; Gleyber Torres, beating out an infield grounder for a base hit) put breaking balls into play. In Game One, one of the two Yankee runs came likewise: Harrison Bader hitting a slider over the left center field fence in the top of the second.

Rizzo caught hold of a rising full-count fastball in the top of the eighth and pulled it into the right field seats. That’s only one of the four Yankee runs in the ALCS so far coming when the batter got himself a fastball to hit, and only one of the three Yankee plate appearances resulting in a run coming home involved contact with a breaking ball—and two of those came on contact soft enough.

Unless they want to see nothing but a diet of breakers—and unless that generous menu portion of breaking balls starts taking tolls on even well-seasoned Astro arms—the Yankees’ survival in this ALCS just may depend long term on whether they quit offering at every one thrown their way, force the Astros to show them the heat that matters most to them, or figure how to make contact with the breakers that can begin by getting more balls past the infield.

If they don’t, all these Astros have to do to keep these Yankees from doing damage is to send Jayne Mansfield’s corpse into their sights.

The valiant but vanquished Mariners

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Jeremy Peña

The Mariners fought the Astros off long and luminously in their ALDS Game Three, but Astros rookie Jeremy Peña brought the fight near to the end with his eighteen-inning, scoreless tie-breaking bomb that proved the end of the Mariners’ season.

Maybe nobody really expected the Mariners to get to their first postseason since the wake of the 9/11 atrocities in the first place. Maybe nobody really expected them to stay there when they up and bumped the Blue Jays to one side in a wild card series.

But they did.

Maybe nobody expected them to survive against the American League West ogres from Houston. Even if they made a reasonable enough-all-things-considered 7-12 showing against them on the regular season. Even if they’d beaten the Astros two out of three in two first-half sets.

They didn’t.

But a three-game sweep out of their division series still stings, no matter how valiant the Mariners effort was. Even if the series was as close as a closed clothespin, the Mariners compelling the Astros to win the first two games by comeback.

Mariners fans and just about everyone else couldn’t possibly have been surprised that Yordan Alvarez was the bombardier who flattened the Mariners in Games One and Two, first with that jolting three-run homer to turn a 7-5 lead into an 8-7 Game One win in the bottom of the ninth, then with a just-as-jolting two-run homer in the Game Two bottom of the sixth.

But going long distance two games’ worth in Game Three to see it end via Astro rookie Jeremy Peña’s leadoff bomb off Penn Murfee, after Luis (Rock-a-Bye) Garcia held them at bay over four relief innings with only one measurable threat against him, had to sting soul deep.

After a marathon exhibition of run prevention—the 42 combined strikeouts (20 by Astro batters, 22 by Mariners batters) set a postseason record; the Astros going 11-for-63 and the Mariners going 7-for-60 all night, it couldn’t feel otherwise.

“It’s kind of what we’re accustomed to, playing those tight games and finding a way,” said Mariners manager Scott Servais postgame Saturday night. “I mean, that is a big league game, with the pitching and defense that was fired out there. We just weren’t able to put anything together.”

“This at-bat,” Pena said, after his homer broke the foot-thick ice at last, “was not going to be possible if our pitching staff didn’t keep us in the ballgame. They dominated all game. Their pitching staff dominated all game.”

Sometimes you had to think what was wrong with these Astros—if they were going to prevail anyway against the Seattle upstarts, how the hell could they not have just done it in the regulation nine? Didn’t they want to avoid wheeling Justin Verlander to the mound in a Game Four if they could help it?

Now, of course, Verlander and Framber Valdez can have a little extra rest/rejuvenate time before opening the Astros’ unprecedented-in-the-divisional-play-era sixth consecutive American League Championship Series. They won’t know their opponent until things are settled between the Guardians and the Yankees in New York Monday night.

But how could these Astros, whose stocks in trade include becoming the biggest pains in the ass in the AL West with runners in scoring position, do worse with RISP (0-for-11) than the Mariners (0-for-8) did all night long?

How could Kyle Tucker and Jose Altuve hitting back-to-back one-out singles and pulling off a double-steal in the top of the second end with Mariners starting pitcher George Kirby striking Chas McCormick out to strand them?

How could Kirby plunk two Astros in the top of the third—Alvarez leading off, Trey Mancini to set up ducks on the pond—and escape with his life after McCormick’s deep fly to center was run down and hauled down by Julio Rodríguez?

How could the Astros plant first and second on Kirby with one out in the top of the seventh—and strand them by way of Christian Vazquez flying out to center and Altuve striking out?

How did Mariners reliever (and erstwhile Rays bullpen bull) Diego Castillo slither out of second and third and one out in the top of the ninth by striking Vazquez and Altuve out back-to-back swinging?

How did six Mariners out of the bullpen keep the Astros hitless from the tenth through the fifteenth, with their only baserunner of the span coming when Paul Sewald plunked McCormick to open the the top of the twelfth?

And how did Murfee save Matthew Boyd’s bones midway through the top of the sixteenth, after Boyd surrendered a base hit (Alex Bregman) and a walk (Kyle Tucker) following a leadoff fly out? Murfee got Yuli Gurriel to line out to fairly deep right center and Aledmys Diaz to pop out beyond first base in foul ground.

The longer this one went, the more improbably it continued to look. And not one muscle in T-Mobile Park dared obey any Mariner fans’ thoughts of making for the exits.

The Mariners proved just as good at leaving runners for dead as the Astros until the eighteenth. They stranded Cal Raleigh on third in the second, Ty France on first in the third, J.P. Crawford on first in the fifth, Rodríguez on second (a two-out double) in the eighth, Eugenio Suarez (leadoff single) and Mitch Haniger (one-out plunk) in the ninth, France (two-out walk, then stealing second) on second in the thirteenth, Haniger on first in the fourteenth, and Carlos Santana (two-out single; to second on a wild pitch) on second in the seventeenth.

This game threatened to end as a classic case of long-term, non-constructive abandonment against both side. (For the first time in his major league life Altuve took an 0-for-8 collar, big enough to fit Secretariat.) It only began with Astros starter Lance McCullers, Jr. pitching two-hit, six-inning shutout ball, and Mariners rook Kirby plus his defense keeping the Astros at bay for seven innings despite six hits and five walks.

Raleigh, the Mariners catcher, played all eighteen innings with a thumb fracture and a torn ligament or two that he’s dealth with for over a month. Some call it toughness. Others might call it foolishness.

He had a Clete Boyer kind of regular season at the plate: 27 home runs (leading all Show catchers) plus 20 doubles but a .284 on-base percentage. He clinched the Mariners’ postseason trip in the first place with a game-winning home run; he scored what proved the game-winning run that pushed the Blue Jays out of the postseason.

The league-average Mariners backstop who handled his pitchers well enough to help them deliver a collective 3.30 ERA on the season struck out three times in six plate appearances Saturday night, batted only once with a man in scoring position, in the bottom of the ninth, and hit into a force out.

At last Raleigh will be able to visit a hand specialist and get that paw repaired. Who knows what further damage catching two games’ worth without a break might have done? The spirit may be willing but more often than not all or part of the body can be defiant. Which reminds me that Rodríguez’s late-season back injury needs to be pondered more thoroughly, too—did he feel lingering after-effects the rest of the way?

But Peña turned on Murfee’s full-count fastball almost down the central pipe and sent it over the left center field fence and turned all eyes upon him. Peña, the rookie who slotted in at shortstop for the departed Carlos Correa. And, earned no less than his manager Dusty Baker’s lasting respect.

“You could tell by his brightness in his eyes and his alertness on the field,” Baker said postgame, “that he wasn’t scared and he wasn’t fazed by this. Boy, he’s been a godsend to us, especially since we lost Carlos, because this could have been a disastrous situation had he not performed the way he has.”

It proved a disastrous situation for the Mariners in the end. They’re likely to remain competitive with a few patches to sew and gaps to fill during their off-season. But nobody can accuse them of going down without one of the grandest and longest fights in postseason history, either. Be proud, Seattle. There was honour to spare in this defeat.

Nuke box music

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Yordan Alvarez home run

Artist’s rendition of the nuke Yordan Alvarez dropped—covering Texas, half of Oklahoma, and a third of the Gulf of Mexico; and, enabling the Astros to take ALDS Game One. (Kidding . . . kind of . . .)

The one man in Astros silks nobody wants to face in the bottom of the ninth with men on base stepped in with two out in the bottom of the ninth in Minute Maid Park Tuesday afternoon. This lefthanded swinger had first and second and one out. He had a lefthanded pitcher to face on the mound.

It didn’t matter to Yordan Alvarez. But it came to matter phenomenally to the Mariners, who came into the half inning having seen an early 7-3 lead cut down to 7-5. And it came to matter even more to Robbie Ray, the defending Cy Young Award winner who usually starts but was brought in now for the lefty-lefty gambit.

First, Alvarez fouled off a sinker that arrived a little outside and just under the middle of the plate. Then, Ray threw him a second sinker, just under the middle of the plate but a little inside. In other words, right into one of Alvarez’s wheelhouse spots.

The two-out mushroom cloud from the warhead that won American League division series Game One for the Astros spread its umbrella over all Texas, half of Oklahoma, and maybe a third of the Gulf of Mexico. The Mariners might have sung a sailor’s lament, but the Astros probably thought it was the sweetest nuke box music this side of heaven.

We fear no team, the Mariners all but said entering this set, after a regular season surprise of finishing second to the Astros in the American League West, then sweeping the  Blue Jays out in a wild card series. They may fear no team, but they wouldn’t be the only ones to determine a little fear of Alvarez might be gentler upon their health. Short and long term.

Mariners manager Scott Servais had no reason to fear Ray faltering against a lefthanded hitter, since he kept them to a .212/.260/.347 slash line and a .647 OPS on the regular season. When his ninth-inning man Paul Sewald got a quick ground out to open but plunked rookie pinch-hitter David Hensley on a full count, then struck Jose Altuve out before Jeremy Peña singled, Servais went to the percentages.

He wasn’t going to let his righthander who’d already been bopped for the two-run homer by Alex Bregman that pulled the Astros back to within a pair an inning earlier stick around to incur further disaster. But as the mushroom cloud dissipated, the skipper was left to shake it off, remind himself it’s a best-of-five, and wait till Game Two for vengeance.

Servais may have forgotten the percentage that might have reminded him Alvarez is almost as deadly against lefthanded pitching as he is against righthanded pitching. He might have hit 17 more home runs against the starboard side, but his OPS against the port side is a deadly enough .947, and his on-base percentage is eight points higher.

Not to mention his Real Batting Average (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances) against the port side (.651) is only 62 points lower than against the starboard—and would be a career year for a lot of batters no matter what side.

The data tells you what’s been. It only suggests what might be. But Alvarez’s data suggestion should have alerted Servais that, as tenacious a competitor as Ray is—and this was only the seventh relief appearance of Ray’s major league career—there was at least a 50-50 chance that Ray confronting Alvarez might not end well for his team.

Alvarez also started the Houston scoring with a two-run double in the third, cutting the early 4-0 Seattle lead exactly in half. Only nobody’s going to remember that cruise missile as vividly as they’re going to remember that ninth-inning hydrogen bomb.

Yordan Alvarez

Very well, this is the real look of Alvarez bombing the Mariners away Tuesday . . .

He didn’t just nuke the Mariners at Game One’s eleventh hour. He bombed his way into the history books. He’s only the second man in postseason history—after Kirk Gibson (Game One, 1988 World Series)—to walk it off with a home run when his team was down to their final out of the game. It was also the first postseason game-ending bomb hit with the bombardier’s team in a multiple-run deficit.

Alvarez also reminded the Mariners it’s not wise to assume that getting the early drop on a future Hall of Famer means it’s going to finish in their favour. The Mariners thumped Justin Verlander—who’d pitched a comeback season that has him in the Cy Young Award conversation—for six runs on ten hits in the first four innings, including a two-run double by Julio Rodríguez in the second and a solo blast by J.P. Crawford in the fourth.

Verlander’s final four batters faced, in fact, hit for the reverse cycle: Crawford’s homer plus Rodríguez’s immediate triple, Ty France’s immediate RBI double, and Eugenio Suárez’s single—that might have been an RBI job itself but for France being thrown out at the plate.

Yuli Gurriel cut another Mariners lead in half with his fourth inning solo launch, leaving the score 6-3, before Eugenio Suárez made it 7-3 with his own solo but Bregman—with Alvarez aboard on a one-out single— took hold of a Sewald sinker that didn’t sink quite far enough down and sent it over the left center field fence in the bottom of the eighth.

One inning later, Alvarez trained his bomb sight, pushed the button, and put a finish to one of the Astros’ more dubious streaks: until Tuesday, they’d been 0-48 in postseason play when they entered the ninth trailling by two runs or more.

It didn’t necessarily have to take the most monstrous home run hit in Minute Maid Park since now-retired, Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols’s ICBM in the 2005 National League Championship Series. (The ancient days, before the Astros were the team to be named later in the deal making a National League franchise out of the Brewers.)

But it didn’t exactly hurt, unless you wore a Mariners uniform. And in that moment the number on Alvarez’s Astros uniform looked huge considering a little piece of baseball history involving that number. 44.

Two relief tales from . . .

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Two relief pitchers will miss postseason time thanks to circumstances unrelated to play on the field. One will miss the rest of his team’s postseason, however long it lasts, thanks to a self-inflicted injury. The other will miss his team’s postseason and say goodbye to that team. Neither man’s postseason had to end this way.

Astros reliever Phil Maton broke a bone in his right pinkie after his appearance in the team’s final regular season game. He’d surrendered two hits plus the only two runs the Phillies scored in that finale, and he was unamused, understandably. What wasn’t so understandable was Maton punching his locker in frustration.

Lockers aren’t any more forgiving that outfield walls or pitchers’ mounds when it comes to human flesh and bone piledriving into them. It doesn’t matter whether the flesh and bone combination is 20, 22, or 29 years old, the latter being Maton’s age. Those stiff, hard, stationary structures can do more damage to their attackers than Muhammad Ali did to his when answering a right cross.

Yankees reliever Aroldis Chapman had annoyed his team already with an injury from a tattoo he acquired, costing him almost a month’s worth of time over August and September, never mind that prudence and his team overseers probably couldn’t convince him to wait until winter vacation to think about another work of body art.

But Chapman’s decline this season prompted his replacement as the Yankees’ closer and, apparently, didn’t sit well with the howitzer, either. Thus did he fume about his demotion until Friday last, when the Yankees conducted a team workout preparing for the division series with what proved to be the Guardians. (Their first place finish rewarded the Yankees with a wild card series bye under the new, dubious postseason system.)

Chapman had told the team he’d be there. Until he wasn’t. To put things kindly, Yankee general manager Brian Cashman was far less amused than was Maton to have handed the Phillies a pair of hits and runs:

It was surprising at first, a little shocking, but after the shock wore off, when you add everything up, it’s not surprising. There’s some questions about whether he’s been in all-in or not for a little while. He’s maintained verbally that he’s in, but at times, actions don’t match those words.

Maton knew at once he’d been a damn fool. “It was a short-sighted move,” he told the press after that game, “and, ultimately, it was selfish. It’s one of those things that I hope doesn’t affect our team moving forward.”

He may be fortunate that the Astros have someone to step in. The Astros may be more fortunate. Bryan Abreu’s fielding-independent pitching rate for 2022 is 2.12, against Maton’s 4.33 FIP. It won’t parole Maton from the Dumbass Zone just because his absence may actually have done the Astros a small favour.

Cashman merely fined Chapman for his absence. He left the roster decision up to manager Aaron Boone. Boone wasted very little time in removing Chapman, despite the Yankee bullpen overall being in questionable enough shape as it was before it lost stretch-drive comer Scott Effross to forthcoming Tommy John surgery.

“I think he questioned whether or not he was going to be on the roster or not,” the manager told a reporter. “But he needed to be here . . . I think there’s a chance he absolutely could have been [on the roster]. We’re still actually getting ready to start those conversations now. He may have been. It’s a moot point now.”

The Yankees told Chapman—whose once-vaunted fastball still had the speed of light but wasn’t exactly invulnerable any longer, not with his 2022 marks of a 4.46 ERA and a 4.57 FIP—to go home to Florida for the division series.

That’s the official word. Unofficially, the word comes forth that, in effect, they’ve told him they’re not terribly inclined to think about bringing him back after he hits free agency this winter. Not with Clay Holmes having emerged as an All-Star reliever and the Yankees’ number one closing option.

It may be lucky for Maton that the Astros may not be injured (oops) by his absence as their postseason gets underway. (The AL West ogres, too, earned a round-one bye under the new system and will tangle with the pleasantly surprising Mariners in their division series.) They can absorb his D.Z. moment and hope he’s learned or re-learned something about self-control.

It’s anything but lucky for Chapman that the Yankees would have needed him to stay all in and step up as big as he could with most of the Yankee pen now in shambles. Holmes (shoulder strain) and Wandy Peralta (a back issues) are back for the division series, but Zack Britton (arm fatigue), Chad Green (Tommy John surgery), Michael King (elbow fracture), and Ron Marinaccio (shin injury) aren’t.

Chapman isn’t any D.Z. non-entity, of course. Not with his domestic violence history that caused enough people to question why the Yankees traded for him (from the Reds), traded him away (to the Cubs, for key contributor Gleyber Torres), then re-signed him in the first place, all within the same year.

When a howitzer that can fire 100+ mph shells gets a pass from domestic violence but finally runs around over an injury from an elective act and, then, shenks a team workout atop a questionable attitude as they prepare for a postseason, something seems badly imbalanced there. It might begin with a 34-year-old who still displays often enough the mind of a four-year-old.