The mental midgets strike

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Zack Greinke catches a breath on the Game Four mound Thursday night.

The news came forth toward the end of American League Championship Series Game Four. It’s further evidence that the Yankees themselves, even while imploding late in a game that ran away from them already, have more class than a few too many of their fans.

I don’t think you could find any fan base for any major league baseball team that lacks for a small but orally diarrhetic subset to whom no kind of abuse is off limits. But what a small pack of Yankee fans did to Astros righthander Zack Greinke before Game Four began Thursday night crossed several lines.

Greinke was having a pre-game warmup in the left field visitors bullpen with a police presence there already because of Game Three’s trash throwers from the right field stands. The small pack above the bullpen, who may or may not have been egged on by a particularly abusive pack of the Twitterpated, let him have it but good.

Not because he’s an Astro and thus the adversary for claiming the American League pennant. Not because his mission for the night was to keep every Yankee bat possible from wreaking havoc. No, these animals taunted Greinke over the very real anxiety disorder and degree of clinical depression with which he’s afflicted and the medications he is prescribed duly to control them.

Stupidity doesn’t begin to describe even a small group of subhumans who think the price of a ticket and a seat in the ballpark includes a license to abuse a still-young man verbally and violently over a mental illness he neither asked to bear nor lives without, whenever he does what those subhumans wouldn’t have even a tenth of the courage to do to earn his keep.

Greinke said after Game Four that he didn’t hear the nasty taunts. Maybe he didn’t. Pitchers are notorious for what the fictional Tiger pitcher Billy Chapel, played by Kevin Costner in the film For Love of the Game, called “clearing the mechanism,” blocking every sound from their heads other than that of their pitches hitting the catcher’s mitt when bats don’t hit their pitches.

But even if Greinke cleared his mechanism even preparing in the pre-game bullpen, it didn’t justify that kind of taunting.

Yankee Stadium security ejected one of the bastards post haste and warned each other to watch out for others. Greinke went to the mound and, except for a shaking first inning in which three consecutive walks produced a single Yankee run with the bases loaded, kept the Yankees at bay with no small help from the Yankees themselves, starting the Astros to an 8-3 win that puts them on the threshold of a World Series date with the Nationals.

And, personally, I hope the Astros get it.

Not because I hold any brief against the Yankees themselves. Not because I kid myself that the Yankees are the only baseball team with a subset of fans about whom “animals” may be speaking politely. (Hello, Phillies, Cubs, Dodgers, and Red Sox, for openers.) I hope the Astros get their date with the Nats because it’s the Yankees in the ALCS and I’m sick of re-learning how the Yankee fan subset can go from worse to intolerable every day.

And if I’m sick of it while not being a Yankee fan, I can only imagine how sick it makes the Yankees themselves feel.

The right field region louts throwing junk and debris onto the field over an overturned play at first base or cheering when Astros third baseman Alex Bregman was hit by a pitch in Game Three were mere louts. Greinke’s assailants could be tried by jury for impersonating human beings.

And it seems very safe to presume that not one of the animals would have accepted any challenge to do what Greinke does with 55,000+ right there in his office and a few million more eavesdropping next to television or radio sets. Not without running home to Mommy at the mere suggestion.

If you want to bark at me for being out of line, go ahead and bark. And go to hell while you’re at it. Because I happen to suffer an anxiety disorder with a degree of clinical depression myself. I’m also one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to practise my profession with an audience in my office or my daily toil broadcast on the national and international airwaves.

And I don’t care how much money Greinke earns to pitch baseballs every year. You don’t hammer someone dealing day in, day out with mental illness. You don’t reference the medications he is duly prescribed as though it indicates weakness or a character flaw. You don’t even hammer him over going by his middle name as if that suggests he’s a man of any disrepute.

It may be an exercise in futility to hope Justin Verlander and the Astros kick Yankee butt in Game Five. Based on what I saw in Game Four, the Yankees themselves may be more than capable of kicking Yankee butt. It was as if George Springer and Carlos Correa hitting three-run homers reminded them, “Hey! You can’t mop the floor with us like that! Only we can mop the floor with us like that!”

On Thursday night, the Yankees forgot how to pitch, how to hit, how to field, and how pathetic it looks to drag a veteran great out for a relief appearance for one last display for his longtime fans and have to lift him post haste because, bad as his knees became over the course of a great career, his shoulder decided to bark its resignation.

Thursday night’s Yankees performed the impossible: they made the 1962 Mets resemble a smoothly running vacuum cleaner sweeping and cleaning all in their path. The Yankees looked as though they plugged the hose into the blower, not the suction port.

Especially first baseman D.J. LeMahieu and second baseman Gleyber Torres, who suddenly seemed to think of ground balls as oncoming white tornados determined to throw them around like debris in the late innings.

Bregman’s leadoff bouncer in the top of the sixth bounced right up into and off LeMahieu as though trying to have him for dinner on the run, rolling toward the mound. That might have been no great shakes otherwise except that the Yankees’ starting pitcher, Masahiro Tanaka, happened to be nearer to first base covering on the play.

That play ended Tanaka’s rather gutsy evening’s work and began Chad Greene’s out of the bullpen. And one out and one base hit later, Correa sent Greene’s four-seamer right down the pipe right up and into the left field seats in a near-perfect impersonation of Springer’s bomb three innings earlier.

And all that was just the prelude to the Yankees’ eighth-inning version of Operation Dumbo Drop.

Bregman opened against Yankee reliever Adam Ottavino by taking a pitch over the heart of the plate and pumping it right down the left field line for a leadoff double. Yuli Gurriel then bounced one up the first base line. And that one decided LeMahieu must have been awful appetising two innings earlier, because it ate him up like dessert before bouncing away into right field, allowing Bregman to third.

That’s when Yankee manager Aaron Boone decided to get the hapless Ottavino out of there and bring CC Sabathia aboard for a possible final farewell. And Astros super-rook Yordan Alvarez decided to bounce one up to the second base side, where it hopped up off the grass and off the body of Torres, who’d approached the ball with thoughts of throwing home to nail Bregman.

There went those thoughts. The ball bounced away from Torres and Bregman could have bounced off the plate after scoring the seventh Astro run. Then Correa lined one clean to shallow right field and Aaron Judge caught it cleanly enough. Then Judge, who owns one of the best throwing arms in the league, made a fatal mistake.

He caught Alvarez dead to right near second and could taste the double play he would have consummated if his on-the-money throw to Torres didn’t bang in and out of Torres’s glove. Lucky for Torres and LeMahieu that the Astros only got a single run out of those mishaps.

Sabathia got pinch hitter Aledmys Diaz to fly out to short right but had to leave the game after falling behind Springer on 2-1 when his shoulder flared up. Jonathan Loaisiga got Springer to foul out, which is just about how Sabathia must have felt leaving the mound as he did.

Maybe the only reason the boo birds weren’t so loud in the top of the ninth is because a reported 75 percent of the Game Four crowd had left Yankee Stadium by then. Altuve opened with a weak grounder to second that somehow, some way, rolled under Torres’s glove into right center, enabling the Astros’ second baseman to make second unmolested.

Michael Brantley then hit a jam shot bloop single to shallow left, scoring Altuve with the eighth Astro run. It could have been nine after what was ruled a wild pitch but should have been ruled a passed ball on mal-positioned Yankee catcher Gary Sanchez let Brantley have second on the house with Bregman at the plate. There went the temporary cred Sanchez snatched with his two-run homer in the bottom of the sixth.

Bregman walked, but Gurriel popped out to Gregorius at short and, with Tyler Lyons entering to pitch for the Yankees, Alvarez and Correa struck out in succession to end that threat. All other things considered, the Yankees were probably lucky to escape with what remained of their Game Four lives.

And, for all intent and purpose, the game, after Astros reliever Roberto Osuna shook off a two-out walk to get Torres to fly out to right on the first pitch.

Did you know the Yankees had the game’s first lead thanks to that bases-loaded walk to Brett Gardner in the bottom of the first? I had a hard time remembering, too, after the shenanigans that followed in due course. Especially because the Yankees had the ducks on the pond three times all game long and cashed in only that lone run.

Especially after learning of the abuse thrown at Greinke pre-game. He may be too proud to say that it cut him to his soul enough to walk three in the first and surrender that run, but there isn’t a jury on earth who’d rule him unjustified.

And Greinke more or less settled down from there, before he was lifted with first and second in the fifth. He proved a better man than that small group of Yankee Stadium yahoos who thought taunting his illness, his medication, his mother, and his preferred manner of address was acceptable opposing-ballpark behaviour.

Maybe the least offensive spewings from that left field stands subset involved hammering Greinke concurrently—the louse!—for choosing to go by his middle name instead of his proper given name.

So much for the reputedly overly knowledgeable Yankee fan, who forgot if he really knew about the righthanded pitcher named Selva Lewis Burdette, Jr., once a Yankee prospect, who beat the Yankees three times to help the then-Milwaukee Braves win the 1957 World Series.

Or, about the Hall of Fame relief pitcher named James Hoyt Wilhelm, master of the hydra-headed knuckleball, who was once made a starting pitcher, and who just so happened to throw a 1959 no-hitter at the Yankees in the silks of the Orioles.

Or, about the Hall of Fame Yankee first baseman who considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth when forced to retire thanks to the fatal disease that has since borne his name. Well, part of his name, anyway: Henry Louis Gehrig.

Not to mention, about such Hall of Famers as George Thomas Seaver, Lynn Nolan Ryan, and George Kenneth Griffey, Jr. About a longtime Astro great and one-time Yankee named William Lance Berkman. About a Hall of Fame-bound, postseason-haunted Dodger pitcher named Edward Clayton Kershaw.

Not to mention such recent baseball notables as LeRoy Timothy Lincecum, Luis Dustin Pedroia, Ivan Carlos Beltran, D’Vaughn Juan Pierre, Guilleard Alfonso Soriano, Stefan Andrew McCutchen, Augusto Elvis Andrus, and Thompson Nicholas Swisher.

All of that can be dismissed as purely getting your dumb on. (Do those left field bullpen bastards also love the music of the Beatles, whose bassist and co-chief songwriter happened to be named James Paul McCartney?) Taunting Donald Zachary Greinke for his too-real anxiety disorder and clinical depression can’t be and shouldn’t be dismissed that readily.

One of the Twitterpated had the audacity to tweet that Greinke’s sympathisers are too much “mental midgets” to handle New York. This native to the Bronx—a very different Bronx, in which you were taught respect and punished for taunting the afflicted—would suggest such a Twitter twit is too much of a mental midget to handle a man with Greinke’s unpretentious courage.

I don’t envy the Yankees as a team and an organisation for having to contend with such grotesquery. It’s not their fault that they have a subset of fans who need trainers more than ALCS tickets. But let’s go, Astros.

Some Yankee fans travel first crass

Posted on October 15, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Gerrit Cole was less than his best in Game Three but he let them beat themselves. And enough Yankee fans were worse.

There are reasons why people who don’t live in New York can’t let themselves root for or at least like the Yankees. Even in a season during which the Yankees gave major lessons in survival despite attrition and, like the Astros and maybe more so, won over 100 regular season games despite almost as many Yankees in the infirmary as on the field or at the plate.

A lot of those reasons have to do with a few too many of their fans, unfortunately.

When not behaving as though the Yankees are entitled, mind you to be in the World Series every season on earth, a few too many Yankee fans behave like spoiled brats when things don’t go the Yankees’ way in a game. The look is bad enough if it happens in the regular season. In the postseason it goes from bad enough to downright disgrace.

And there are also times when they do it when one of the other guys suffers a misfortune not of his own making, too.

Edwin Encarnacion looked to have it beaten at first base when his eighth-inning slow grounder was picked by Astros third baseman Alex Bregman but thrown a little off, enough for first baseman Yuli Gurriel to have to reach and bring a sweep tag around Encarnacion’s shoulder area.

Every known video replay showed Gurriel nailed that awkward sweep tag. The Astros called for a review and the original safe call was overturned. The Yankee Stadium faithful in the right field area began throwing debris on the field, though none of it got anywhere near Astros right fielder Josh Reddick.

And they went from bad to worse in the top of the ninth, when Yankee reliever Luis Cessa, turning in a solid turn of work in a lost cause, threw a fastball that ran in on and hit Bregman. There was very audible cheering over that one, too.

That’s the way to travel first crass.

“Stuff like that doesn’t belong in baseball,” Reddick said after the Astros banked the 4-1 Game Three win that put them ahead 2-1 in the American League Championship Series Tuesday afternoon.

Reddick, whose second inning launch into the right field seats provided the second Astro run, spoke specifially about trashing the right field area but he could have been talking about the cheers when Bregman got plunked, too.

Listen up, you creatures in the Yankee Stadium right field area. You want to get indignant? I’ll give you several reasons having nothing to do with an overturned call at first base or an unintentional hit by a pitch.

How about your heroes being unable to lay a glove on Gerrit Cole on a day Cole pitched like anything but the virtuoso of earlier in the postseason? When he could have been had but it turned out to be the Yankees who were had?

How about your heroes loading the pillows on Cole with two out in the bottom of the first, after Jose Altuve hit Luis Severino’s first one-out pitch to him into the left field seats in the top of the inning, and Didi Gregorius grounding out weakly enough to second base?

How about three more first-and-second situations for the Yankees ending with a swinging strikeout (Aaron Judge), a fly out to center field (D.J. LaMahieu), and a fly out to right? (Gregorius.)

How about Adam Ottavino leading Zach Britton with first and third, the Yankees getting rid of George Springer in a rundown down the third base line leaving second and third, and then Britton puking the bed with a run-allowing wild pitch and a sacrifice fly to put the final two Astro runs on the board in the seventh?

How about the Yankees going 0-for-6 with runners on second or better and leaving nine men on base all game long?

How about having Cole vulnerable for a change with more walks than strikeouts at one point but the Yankees still unable to touch him if they’d borrowed one of Cardinal pitching coach Mike Maddux’s drivers to swing?

How about the Yankees having nothing to say to the Astro bullpen other than Gleyber Torres hitting a too-little/too-late solo shot into the right field seats in the bottom of the eighth? Oh, yes. You were still a little too busy throwing debris into right field when Torres nailed a Joe Smith sinker that didn’t quite sink enough.

About the only time you really behaved yourselves was when plate umpire Jeff Nelson had to leave the game, after all, an inning after he took a foul off his mask in the and ended up suffering a concussion, prompting Kerwin Danley to move from second base to the plate and no ump in left field the rest of the game.

All you did for yourselves otherwise, you yahoos in the right field region, was make yourselves look ridiculous while the Yankees let even a not-so-sharp Cole still make them look ridiculous. And you made the Astros, who have class to burn as it is, look that much classier while you were at it.

Listen up. I was born in the Bronx. By right I should have been a Yankee fan. But even then Yankee fan entitlement was a stomach turner, no matter how admirable a lot of Yankees happened to be. Even in those imperial years, even to a six year old kid who decided to plight his troth to an infant troupe known as the Mets, in what was left of the Polo Grounds, and who seemed more human than the larger-than-life Bombers.

I cringed during the 1973 National League Championship Series when Pete Rose and Bud Harrelson tangled after a nasty play at second base, the benches and bullpens emptied, and the Shea Stadium crowd let their worst come forward, throwing garbage on the field, until several Mets and the Shea Stadium scoreboard operator begged them to knock it off.

I watched on television when heartsick Senators fans, knowing their team was about to be absconded to Texas, couldn’t let the Second Nats finish the home season-ending win, highlighted when big Frank Howard himself hit one out midway through, and couldn’t let Joe Grzenda pitch to Yankee second baseman Horace Clarke to finish saving it for Paul Lindblad, bursting the dam rioting on the field, forcing a forfeit to the Yankees as the final act of Washington baseball for three decades plus.

I still remember Indians fans bombed out of their trees on Ten Cent Beer Night turning old Muncipal Stadium into a lunatic asylum on the field, which gave sick new meaning to the old park’s nickname as the Mistake on the Lake.

I still remember White Sox fans going from silly to surrealistically stupid practically blowing up old Comiskey Park on Disco Demolition Night. At least Second Nats fans had a legitimate reason to be heartsick on the last home date in 1971.

And yes, I know you’re not exactly the only fans on the planet who’ve turned into wild animals in the stands when things don’t go your way. (Hello, Phillies fans. Hello, Red Sox fans. Among others.) But nobody else’s fans have done that this postseason. Even those few miscreants running over Clayton Kershaw’s jerseys in the Dodger Stadium parking lot waited until after Game Five of the division series to get their spoiled brats on.

Go ahead and boo when the other guys knock your guys’ blocks off from the plate. Go ahead and boo when they pitch your guys’ ears off or just leave them looking foolish at the plate when the opportunities knock multiple times. Go ahead and boo when the close calls don’t go your guys’ ways, go ahead and boo when your number one rival turns you aside when you least expect it.

But knock it the hell off with the trash tossing and with cheering when the other guy gets hit by a pitch when your pitcher had no intention of even trying to brush him back.

Listen up one more time, you right field area creatures. You’ve got a gorgeous successor park to the old classic Yankee Stadium, and you’ve got a team that actually showed tremendous grace under unconscionable medical pressure this year. But you jerks need either a good fanning—or an animal trainer.

The Carlos Correa Show

Posted on October 14, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Carlos Correa wants to feel and hear the noise after winning Game Two with one pitch and one swing in the bottom of the eleventh Sunday night.

Under most circumstances these days it takes something dramatic to upstage Justin Verlander even on a modestly effective night for him. And on a night the Astros needed it, in Game Two of the American League Championship Series, they got something dramatic—from a guy whose season was rudely interrupted by two trips to the injured list.

Carlos Correa wasn’t even cleared to play coming off back soreness that began in August until just about the last minute before the Astros’ arduous division series against the Rays. And earlier in the season the rib fracture he incurred undergoing a home massage made him an unfortunate butt of some rather unfortunate tacky jokes.

But they’re not joking after Correa’s Game Two performances. First, he stopped the Yankees from a third run in the top of the sixth with some shortstop acrobatics. Then, he hit a leadoff home run off reliever J.A. Happ in the bottom of the eleventh to win the game, 3-2. Thirteen times on the season the Astros won by walkoff. This one was the most important. Certainly the most satisfying.

“Going into that last inning, I thought, ‘I got this’,” Correa told a reporter after the game. “I felt like I got this. And I had the right approach against him. I’ve been successful against him going the other way. And that’s what I tried to do. I saw a good pitch down the middle, and I drove the other way.”

He had this, all right. The Carlos Correa Show was practically responsible all by itself for sending the ALCS to Yankee Stadium even up.

Don’t get me wrong, Verlander was as handy and dandy as the evening was long, even if he wasn’t the virtuoso he’d been in the first division series game. And the Astros matched the Yankees grind for grind again.

The future Hall of Famer endured five Yankee hits including a mammoth two-run homer by Aaron Judge in the top of the fourth that put the Yankees ahead briefly, while striking out seven against two walks in six and two-thirds innings’ work. It wasn’t vintage Verlander but it was enough to keep the Astros alive and split.

Even though he and they needed Correa to channel his inner Karl Wallenda two innings after Judge got the gift that usually fails to stop giving, a hanging slider that hung just enough for the Leaning Tower of the South Bronx to hang it far over the center field fence.

Yankee outfielder Brett Gardner fired a liner toward second base that took a tweener hop as Astros second baseman Jose Altuve took a stab at it. Correa from shortstop saw in a split second that Altuve had no chance on a play that tough with the ball squirting off from Altuve’s right, and with D.J. LaMahieu hitting the afterburners around third.

Correa ran over and grabbed the ball with his throwing hand and threw as perfect a strike home as you could pray to see—and Astroworld prayed hard for it. Prayers answered. LaMahieu was a dead pigeon by several feet despite his slide home. One step or inch off on either end of that play and a third Yankee run would have scored and Correa’s eleventh-hour, eleventh-inning bomb wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

The tall shortstop whose second-inning double sent Alex Bregman home with the first Astro run of the game in the first place knew only too well what that odd hop away from Altuve meant.

“As an infielder, I know how tough it is to catch a ball that’s a line drive right at you in between,” he said. “So as soon as I knew that it was going to crash in between, I was creeping over. When it hit him, and I saw the ball go my way, I just went after it. And I grabbed it, and when I looked up and I saw he was sending the runner, I thought, ‘Oh, I got this guy.’ So I threw him out. I don’t know why he sent him, but thank you.”

He’ll have Verlander’s eternal gratitude for the play. “The second I saw him come over and make a clean catch of the ball and come up and ready to throw, honestly, I thought he was out,” Verlander said after the game. “It went from ‘Crap!’ to ‘We got this guy. We got an extra out!’ It was just incredible.”

“That’s not going to get talked about,” said Astros center fielder George Springer, “but that’s an unbelievable play.”

Why did Yankee third base coach Phil Nevin send LaMahieu even knowing Correa has a shotgun arm, throwing angles be damned? Yankee manager Aaron Boone answered: “I thought it skipped off [Altuve] further . . . I was an absolute send from where I was standing. Great heads up play by Correa, to be in that position . . . I had no issue with the play at all.”

No arguing with that thinking. Boone saw the chance to re-take the lead after Springer, perhaps beginning to re-awaken from a postseason slumber, greeted Yankee reliever Adam Ottavino in fresh relief of Chad Green by hitting Ottavino’s first pitch of the gig, a hanging slider, over the left center field fence in the bottom of the fifth

Yankee third baseman Gio Urshela almost equaled Correa in the Wallenda department in the bottom of the sixth, when Yuli Gurriel ripped a leadoff liner up the third base line that had extra bases stamped on the meat of the ball. Urshela leaped like an elevator to catch it before hitting the dirt like the elevator’s cables were snapped.

“Complete grind from both teams,” Springer said in a postgame field interview. “It’s fun, but it’s a little nerve-wracking. That’s a great team over there. And they play really, really well at home. So for us to get this one after a tough game [Saturday] night was obviously big for us.”

The Yankees had to turn Game Two into a bullpen game when starting pitcher James Paxton began well but ran into command issues too early for the Yankees’ comfort. He’d shaken off a leadoff walk to Springer in the first by luring Michael Brantley into dialing Area Code 4-6-3 before Altuve lined out sharply to Yankee shortstop Didi Gregorius.

But Correa punctured him in the second and—after striking Springer out swinging to open—Brantly and Altuve singled back-to-back.

Green came in and rid himself of Bregman (line out to left) and Yordan Alvarez (pop out to shortstop) quickly enough, then zipped through a 1-2-3 fourth including striking Correa out on a slightly elevated fastball. He opened the fourth striking out pinch-hitter Kyle Tucker before Boone reached for Ottavino and Springer finally reached for the stars, or at least the rear end of the park.

From there Ottavino and six Yankee relievers—including CC Sabathia, of all people, getting Brantley to ground out to short to open the tenth before yielding to Jonathan Loaisiga—kept the Astros hitless and scoreless through five and two-thirds innings. The Astro bullpen was no slouch department, either, keeping the Yankees scoreless and limited to one measly hit and a quartet of walks that proved harmless, after all.

“Our bullpen was nasty,” Correa said. “Gave us a chance to win the game.”

“It was a struggle tonight,” said Boone. “They’re tough to score runs off, especially on a night when Verlander is out there.”

Happ saved Loaisiga’s bacon after two one-out walks in the bottom of the tenth with a swinging strikeout (Altuve) and a fly out to left (Gurriel). Then, opening the bottom of the eleventh, he threw Correa a first-pitch fastball. What Correa called down the middle actually sailed in a little up and a little away.

And just like that it sailed a lot out, about eight rows or so into the right field seats. Sending him, too, past Lance Berkman as the Astros’ all-time post-season RBI man with 27 while he was at it.

“Just back and forth—the two best ballclubs in the game,” said Judge. “I wish we could have come away with two here, but now time to regroup and get ready for Tuesday.”

Correa was 3-for-22 in the postseason until he teed off, but he said he felt confident enough before the game over feeling his swing return that he was sure he’d hit one out in Game Two. The only thing he couldn’t or wouldn’t predict was when. But his newly-returned timing couldn’t have picked better timing.

Neither could his reaction after he hit the final blast. Put this into the next “Let the Kids Play!” promo post haste. And, eat your heart out, Jose Bautista.

Correa stepped out of the box quietly. He dropped his bat almost like he was dropping a toothpick, as Yankee catcher Gary Sanchez accepted fate and began walking away just as quietly. Then Correa brought his hand to his ear, holding it there a few steps up the first base line, as though asking the crowd to let him come on and feel the noise.

And as he made his way down the third base line, he hoisted his batting helmet in his hands like a basketballer about to make the three-point shot. Except no three-point shot—not even Robert Horry’s buzzer-beater to win Game Four of the NBA’s Western Conference finals for the Los Angeles Lakers in 2002—was ever quite this emphatic.

“It’s been a tough road this year but I’m finally here,” said Correa. Astroworld probably said “Thank God!”

“They threw the first punch”

Posted on October 13, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Gleyber Torres, making Zack Greinke’s and the Astros’ Game One life miserable . . .

It was supposed to be a treat watching the Astros and the Yankees, mostly recovered from their regular season’s medical challenges. If you could say a pair of 100+ game winners were lucky to be there after they fought injury bugs as arduously as they fought field opponents, the Astros and the Yankees were just that.

Didn’t the Astros fight like six parts street gang and half a dozen parts cheetahs on speed to get their postseason home field advantage, going 12-2 to finish the season to nail down the point? Didn’t they look just that much better than the 6-8 finishing Yankees when the postseason began?

And hadn’t they survived an unexpectedly arduous division series with the upstart Rays—forcing them to open with Zack Greinke instead of Justin Verlander or Gerrit Cole—to get to the American League Championship Series in the first place? While the Yankees turned out to have it so painfully simple sweeping the suddenly somnambulent Twins to get there that you could be forgiven for suggesting the Yankees might be just a little vulnerable?

There went those ideas in Game One Saturday night.

The Yankees were good on the road this year(.568 winning percentage) but they weren’t supposed to be able to handle the Astros there. They played each other seven times on the regular season with the Astros sweeping the Yankees in three in Minute Maid Park. But somebody forgot to remind the Yankees as they opened the ALCS.

At least, somebody forgot to remind Yankee second baseman Gleyber Torres. The Yankees shut the Astros out 7-0 in Game One and Torres was practically their one-man demolition operation. The Astros’ long term survival may now depend on how well they can keep Torres from even thinking about seeing and raising from Game Two forward.

Nobody’s going to accuse the Astros of being on the ropes after a Game One loss. The Yankees won’t be foolish enough to level that charge. Not even when they punctured the Astros’s hard won, hard desired home field advantage.

“We’ve been in the situation before,” said Astros second baseman Jose Altuve after the game, referring to 2017, when the Astros were down 3-2 in that ALCS but won. “Tomorrow we have Justin, we all know how good we feel about him, so it’s just one game, it’s a seven game series, so we still have a lot of baseball to play.”

With Verlander to start Game Two and Cole to start Game Three, everyone in Astroworld should be feeling good again. No matter how good these Yankees are at finding and exploiting even the tiniest rupture in the other guys’ armour.

“They played a great game,” said Astros shortstop Carlos Correa, “a near perfect game.”

But who the hell is Gleyber Torres? Oh, yeah—he’s the guy who became a Yankee when they traded Aroldis Chapman to the Cubs in the middle of 2016. But now he’s the youngest Yankee ever to drive in five in a single postseason game. And his clutch hit reputation is beginning to fan out beyond the Bronx.

You expected trouble going in with the Aaron Judges, Giancarlo Stantons, D.J. LaMahieus, Edwin Encarnacions, and Brett Gardners. The last one from whom you expected any pinstriped lip, never mind bat, is a kid middle infielder who may have hit the most quiet 38 regular season home runs of the year.

Outside New York, Torres isn’t exactly the Yankees’ biggest star yet. But on a night when Yankee starter Masahiro Tanaka was as untouchable as he was very touchable in the regular season, and Greinke proved vulnerable enough if not quite the pinata the Rays made out of him in the division series, Torres became the last guy the Astros wanted to see at the plate. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

“Man, they’re going to be telling stories about that kid for a while,” said Judge after the game. “He’s going to be a Yankee great, I know it. He just comes to work every single day. He’s always got a smile on his face. No situation is too big. I’ll see him in the box, bases loaded, big situation and he’ll give us a little smile in the dugout like he knows he’s going to go up there and do his job.”

At first it looked as though Tanaka and Greinke would turn Game One into a pitching clinic, if not quite the ones put on by Nationals pitchers Anibal Sanchez and Max Scherzer in the first two National League Championship Series games. Tanaka looked as untouchable as he normally does against the postseason Astros, and Greinke looked nothing like the guy who’d been humiliated at the hands and tails of the Rays.

“I thought Zack did a good job giving us a chance to win,” said Astros third baseman Alex Bregman, “and we just didn’t do anything offensively.”

“When you’re facing really good pitching, it makes hitting even harder,” said mostly struggling Astros center fielder George Springer, their 2017 World Series MVP but hitting a buck twenty in this postseason to date. “Hitting’s hard. But that being said, we’re a good team, and we understand that, so we’ve got to grind and string together some at-bats and we’ll see what happens.”

As the top of the fourth began each side had one base hit apiece and they’d both been negated by inning-ending double plays. Then LaMahieu opened the Yankee fourth with a base hit and swiped second while Judge struck out swinging on one of Grienke’s nastier sliders of the night. Up stepped Torres, whom Greinke struck out swinging to end the first. And he drove one to the back of left center bounding off the fence to score LaMahieu with the game’s first run.

Torres and Greinke squared off again in the sixth after Judge led off flying out to Astros center fielder George Springer. Once again Greinke’s first service looked just too good to Torres. This one got hammered into the middle of the Crawford Boxes.

And after a six-pitch, full count, wrestling strikeout to Encarnacion, Greinke battled Giancarlo Stanton—who’d only gotten to play eighteen regular season games thanks to two trips to the injured list—and, after wriggling his way to a full count after opening 0-2, Stanton nailed a fastball just under the middle of the plate and sent it into the Astros’ bullpen behind the right center field fence.

An inning later, Torres was in the middle of it yet again. With two outs, Yankee shortstop Didi Gregorius, LaMahieu, and Judge singled back-to-back-to-back, all into right field, off Astros reliever Ryan Pressly, before Torres sent the first pair home with a bloop single to center and helped himself to second when Springer threw in futilely toward the plate.

It was the kind of night on which Torres even making an out proved productive enough. With reliever Bryan Abreu on the mound for the top of the ninth Yankee third baseman Gio Urshela hit the first pitch of the inning, a slightly hanging slider, into the right field seats. Then with one out LaMahieu walked, Judge singled him to third, and—with the Astro infield drawn in just enough—Torres whacked a grounder to an oncoming shortstop Carlos Correa.

The good news: Correa pounced on the run to throw Torres out handily enough. The bad news: LaMahieu got such an excellent jump off third he could score the seventh Yankee run without fear even with Correa all over the Torres grounder well onto the infield grass.

The Astros hurt themselves when it was still a one-run game, though. In the bottom of the fifth, Bregman, their no-questions-asked MVP candidate, worked Tanaka for a leadoff walk and Yordan Alvarez, their probable no-questions-asked Rookie of the Year, slashed a line drive to right.

As Bregman led a little too far off first, as in more than half way to second, obviously thinking of third base as his immediate destination, Judge ran to snare Alvarez’s rope. Then the tall Yankee with the toothy grin of a kid a third his age fired in to first. Bregman slipped running back to the pillow but it almost wouldn’t have mattered since he’d had a bigger lead than the law allowed in the first place.

Was Judge catching Alvarez’s liner a guarantee? Fifty-fifty at best. But he has one of the better throwing arms among American League right fielders and with Bregman that far off the pillow, slip back or no, Bregman was dead meat.

It negated the spectacular theft Bregman committed in the top of the third, when he took a spinning leap behind third with his glove arm up like the Statue of Liberty to turn Urshela’s nasty line drive, which probably would have gone further up the line for extra bases, into a nasty out.

Tanaka can’t beat the Astros in the regular season, but in the postseason he looks like an ogre against them, taking a 2.00 lifetime postseason ERA against them into Game Two. He worked the corners like a craftsman and left the usually smart hitting Astros looking half lost at the plate.

“He was throwing the ball really good today,” said Altuve. “He was hitting spots with the slider, split, and fastball. He makes it out pretty good. You have to tip your hat to that. He got a late break, normally you can see the spin, but we couldn’t see anything.”

When they got into the Yankees’ effective bullpen, they actually pried a couple of base hits out of Adam Ottavino, back-to-back singles by Michael Brantley and Altuve, but Ottavino lured Bregman into dialing an inning-ending Area Code 6-4-3.

The Astros bullpen is usually one of the league’s best, too, but Pressly didn’t look comfortable in his turn and Abreu’s inexperience was exploited a little too readily. Especially against a Yankee team who—knowing Verlander and Cole awaited them in Games Two and Three—treated Game One like a must-win contest.

“They threw the first punch in Game One,” said Astros manager A.J. Hinch. “We get to the next day. We can punch right back tomorrow. I don’t think they’re going to be too comfortable tomorrow coming to the ballpark thinking they’ve got an easy game ahead of themselves.”

Verlander gives the Astros a far above average chance to punch back in Game Two. The last thing they want is going to the south Bronx in the hole. The Yankees have ways of burying people once they’re in holes against them. One of them is a 22-year-old second baseman who prefers hitting with men on base and has the numbers to prove it so far.

“The way he’s able to get to all kinds of pitches on different planes is impressive,” said Yankee relief pitcher Zach Britton, who worked a near-spotless eighth (one walk, two punchouts) Saturday night.

“As a pitcher, you know you have to executive every single pitch throughout an at-bat or you know he’s going to beat you,” Britton continued. “That’s where the bat-to-ball skill comes in. It’s crazy. You just don’t see it in such a young player.”

You do now.

The survival of the unfittest

Posted on September 20, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, no Yankee was injured during the making of this division-clinching celebration.

Future baseball trivia contests should feature this question: “Name the team that won the 2019 American League East despite making a M*A*S*H triage seem like a day camp’s first aid station.” Then, they should add, “P.S. Name the American League’s 2019 Manager of the Year—according to major league baseball and the American Red Cross.”

Aaron Boone must have days when he thinks he’s not a major league manager but the hapless chief administrator of an overworked urgent care clinic. The Broken Bombers must have days when they think the umpire isn’t going to start a game hollering “Play ball!” but pulling out a bugle to sound sick call.

They locked down the American League East Thursday night with their 100th win, beating the hapless, Mike Trout-less Angels 9-1 at home in St. Elsewhere, Yankee Stadium. And they still had twelve players—not including the apparently terminally hapless Jacoby Ellsbury—either on the injured list or listed day-to-day with one or another ailment.

“Nothing has got in their way,” said Boone after the game. “Whatever has come adversity-wise, they faced it and powered right through it.” As almost usual, Boone deflected most attention toward his players, rather modestly for the first manager to win 100 games in each of his first two seasons on the job.

Nobody else has done that. Not John McGraw. Not Connie Mack. Not Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy, or Casey Stengel. Not Walter Alston, Earl Weaver, Sparky Anderson, Davey Johnson, Tony LaRussa, Bobby Cox, or Terry Francona. The man who once broke Boston hearts by nailing the 2003 American League pennant with an eleventh-inning home run in the old Yankee Stadium sits alone with those C-notes.

Boone may not be one of the game’s premier tacticians or strategists, but maybe he doesn’t have to be for now. Just sending a Yankee team to the field every day in spite of the ceaseless call of calamity was probably enough for the 46-year-old skipper. That and a few tranquilisers.

There’s no truth to any speculation that Johns Hopkins is negotiating for the rights to present the Yankees as medical school exhibits yet. But don’t be shocked if the talks begin any time soon.

Only the Astros among the American League’s powerhouses had an injury overload anywhere near the one that accompanied the Yankees this year. They were episodes of Bones, House, Private Practise, Grey’s Anatomy, E.R., Chicago Hope, Medical Center, and Marcus Welby, M.D. on any given day of the week. Their bangs, bruises, and batterings got so profound so often that Yankee fans could have been forgiven if they felt compelled to claim the New England Journal of Medicine as this year’s Yankee yearbook.

There may not be a baseball team alive that figured out ways to win 100 regular season games and counting despite putting every New York area emergency room on double red alert. And it didn’t seem like any single Yankee faction becoming so injury prone. The 2019 injury bug did the equal-opportunity Yankee panky.

About the only Yankees on or near the field who didn’t have dates with the doctors were the bat and ball boys and girls. Boone was probably ready more than once a week to decide whether he needed an internist on call—or Frasier.

And when the Yankees closed out the Angels Thursday night they didn’t dare dogpile, chest bump, forearm bump, fist bump, jersey strip, or anything else to which celebrating baseball players take these days when celebrating arduous wins or even divisional clinches. With their luck, five Yankees might have ended up in traction.

“We’re just trying to avoid injuries,” deadpanned second baseman D.J. LaMahieu, whose three-run homer with two out in the bottom of the third began the Thursday night thrashing. All things considered, it’s a wonder making that comment didn’t instigate a case of lockjaw.

“There’s a couple guys that are irreplaceable here,” said catcher Austin Romine in April, little knowing he’d have to step in bigger for Gary Sanchez who just went down with a tight groin and could be gone until the postseason rounds, “but we’ve got to find a way to do it. We’re still winning games. We’ve got guys stepping up left and right.” Careful. With the Yankees’ luck, one of them is liable to twist an ankle on the landing.

Guys stepping up left and right? The Yankees practically led the league in reaching down and finding help on the farm, lots of it, enough to make you wonder—even allowing their seemingly infinite financial resources—why other teams who aren’t as financially strapped as they let you believe can’t figure out as well as the Yankees how to re-tool on the fly without tanking and within in far less extreme circumstances.

That should be good enough to earn longtime general manager Brian Cashman consideration as baseball’s Executive of the Year. Whether he gets it from the game or from the American Medical Association probably doesn’t matter.

They’ve used 53 different players and sent thirty to the injured list this year, the latter being the most for any team since 2004. And they couldn’t even win Thursday night without more medical emergencies preceding it.

Relief pitcher Dellin Betances was barely back from shoulder and lat muscle issues that kept him drydocked until Sunday—when he faced two Blue Jays in the bottom of the fourth and struck them both out . . . then somehow incurred a partial Achilles tendon tear doing the happy dance after the second punchout. Surgery he won’t need. But his season ended before it began even partially.

And Aaron Judge is being watched day-to-day after Hizzoner landed hard on his right shoulder Wednesday night trying for a diving catch.

The Yankees already had to live a lot of the season without Judge, Betances, Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Hicks, Miguel Andjuar, Didi Gregorius, Giancarlo Stanton, Jake Barrett, and Greg Bird. Among others. They’ll have to live the rest of the season and postseason without David Hale, Jonathan Holder, and Mike Tauchman. Possibly among others. Tauchman went from an obscure spring acquisition from the Rockies to a co-household name with Gio Urshela—until he, too, pulled up injured with a likely season-ending calf strain.

They’ve managed to comport themselves like overly seasoned professionals in spite of the still-preponderant youth of the team. (Their average age: 28.) But it wasn’t easy this year. Even the most stoic professional can get frazzled when reporting to work the next day to discover yet another colleague in need of major repairs.

And you’d have to be either ignorant or a pure Yankee hater not to appreciate an irony in this year’s AL East conquest. The last time the Yankees won the division, Hall of Famer in waiting Derek Jeter wrecked his ankle in the twelfth inning of what turned into a sweep out of their 2012 division series by the Tigers. They wouldn’t be human if they didn’t have even a tiny similar fear of even a hint of similar calamity awaiting them this time.

It may rankle Yankee fans that their heroes have only one 21st Century World Series ring to the rival Red Sox’s four. But they shouldn’t be too hard on the Yankees if they don’t quite make it back to the Promised Land this time around. If baseball’s cliches include that great or even persevering teams become the forgotten men once they don’t reach the Promised Land, these Yankees have a chance to stand it on its own head.

Just pray, while you toast the Yankees’ season long witness to survival of the unfittest, that doing it doesn’t tear another Yankee muscle, fracture another Yankee bone, tear another Yankee Achilles, strain another Yankee lat. Or, send even their uncannily resilient manager to the E.R. If not the psychiatrist’s couch.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

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