Sung-Min Kim, Author at River Avenue Blues

A thank you to RAB, where it all started for me

April 29, 2019 by Sung-Min Kim

In January 2017, the Yankees were doing the “Winter Warm-Up” series to introduce newer players to the fanbase through sandwich workshops, surprising ticketholders, going to museums, etc. At one point, they also had a presser at the Yankee Stadium. I was informed of the opportunity to cover it for River Avenue Blues and simply took it. I had dreamed of being a part of the press corp at the Yankee Stadium someday and it was happening.

While I was soaking it all in in the Yankee Stadium hallways, all by myself, I saw Brian Cashman walking from a distance. I would recognize that face from just about anywhere. I was wearing a University of Maryland jacket at the time. Cashman, who also went to a school in Washington, DC area (Catholic University of America), saw that. He said, “Maryland, huh?” We had a little conversation about DC area, the winter weather, the Yankees, etc. At some point, he looked at the credential card hanging below my neck and said this:

“River Avenue Blues! Love the website. I read it all the time.”

I’m not going to sugarcoat that comment too much. It’s obviously a weighty praise especially given the context. What I want to emphasize here more is how a website created by fan bloggers – out of labor of love, nonetheless – became so developed and established enough to get first-hand praise from the general manager of the New York Yankees, earn a commercial spot at the YES Network, get funding to pay the writers, etc. It just goes to show us, while it may be daunting to start something from scratch, the persistence and the love for it can lead it to something so impactful. This not only goes for baseball blogs but also for pretty much everything in our lifetime.

It’s been awhile since I wrote on this website. A lot of things have happened to me for the past half a year or so. I got hired by FanGraphs, I joined Baseball Prospectus to occasionally write about Korean baseball, I contributed for The Athletic, etc. It’s not easy to openly admit this but things shifted a bit for me in terms of my career opportunity and priority – but I always had River Avenue Blues in the back of my mind, because for me, this is where it all started.

Truth be told, this website is the foundation for all of what I’ve been able to do in the baseball media. As it is the case for many that are trying to find a footing in an industry they’re trying to enter, there was a time where I couldn’t get any publication’s attention to save my life. I was contacting basically every blog’s emails to give them my hand. At some point, I got Jay Gordon’s attention and wrote about a few Korean players for River Avenue Blues. Jay and Mike got back to me a few months later and asked me if I wanted to be a contributor for the site starting the 2015 season. As someone who was trying to find a footing somewhere writing about something I love, it was an offer I couldn’t pass.

I was a reader before I was a writer. I can’t exactly pinpoint when I started to read RAB, but it was around 2007 or 2008. River Avenue Blues was my main reading spot for Yankees information along with LoHud Yankees Blog. I was in high school at the time and had no idea what I was going to do with my life, so I never really saw myself ever writing for the site. Flashforward to junior year in college, I declared journalism and *kind of* saw myself writing about baseball in future. I tried taking essential reporting and journalistic writing classes and it turned out I was pretty trash at that (at least back then). I ended up switching to broadcast journalism and took up internships in sports radio and television. I thought my future was in working the radio control board, editing soundbytes on Adobe Audition, cutting video files and putting captions, etc. It wasn’t glamorous, but I would have been more than okay going that path.

Even doing all that, there was always a thing in back of my mind that I yelled at me about baseball writing. I took one sports writing class – and I did pretty okay in it – but my connection to the industry was pretty lacking. I had no sports writing internship, my school newspaper’s sports section was quite filled up, etc. yes, these are bunch of excuses, but having been in the industry for a bit by now, I learned that these things matter. I got my foundation of all these through River Avenue Blues.

Writing for RAB was a trip – I got a lot of the “real life work experience” moments through my first several blog posts. I was sloppy, lacked attention to detail, attracted some critical comments, etc. I felt like a pitcher who just got called up from minors who was too amped up to find a strike zone. Usually, writers get yelled at by editors or other higher-ups for such mistakes. But RAB people have been very gracious – they always had my back, they allowed me to improve by my own and most importantly, they never hesitated to give me a confidence boost. So many times, I’ve seen a lot of my peers from school get burnt out in writing industry for various reasons. For me, however, it was all joy. The more I wrote for RAB, the more I was enthralled with baseball writing.

I know I talked a lot about myself and my experience of the website but it’s much moreso about guys like Mike, Ben, Joe, Jay, Betsy and others who have laid the foundation for River Avenue Blues to be such a big part of many Yankee fans’ online fandom. It’s also about people like Derek, Steven, Matt, Bobby, Katie, Domenic and Ashley who contributed their time and effort to also make this blog much moreso than just a blog. This site was a community: where anyone could come in and get their daily dose of the New York Yankees.

Yankee fans are lucky that there isn’t exactly a shortage of Yankees contents around the web, but I can’t help but feel like it will leave a huge void in my mind knowing that there won’t be any newer RAB posts starting April 30. At the same time, it is what it is. As Mike said, River Avenue Blues lived about a billion years old for blog standards, and it would not have been possible without the love of everyone – especially you, the readers – involved. Whoever you are, thank you for reading this blog post and this website. I hope you are having a nice day.

The Constant of the Rotation [2018 Season Review]

November 27, 2018 by Sung-Min Kim

The Yankees have had a decent amount of rotation changes from 2014 and on. One of the few constants, however, has been the presence of Masahiro Tanaka. Since signing with the Yankees in January 2014, you could count on Tanaka being in the rotation and turning in a solid season. In five seasons as a Yankee, Tanaka has compiled a 15.5 fWAR in 132 games started, which averages out to roughly ~3.1 fWAR season in 27 starts. He’s a type of pitcher that any team would want in their rotation.

2018 was no different. In 27 starts, Tanaka had a 12-6 record with a 3.75 ERA/4.01 FIP and a 2.7 fWAR. Looking at his numbers closer, he’s shown that he pretty much performed true to his style – high strikeouts (9.17 K/9), low walks (2.02 BB/9) and giving up home runs more than once in a start or so (1.44 HR/9). It’s perfectly fine for a No. 2-to-mid-rotation starter.

First Half

For the first 12 starts of the season, Tanaka was 7-2. That’s a pretty good win-loss record for that many appearances, right? The numbers beneath that surface wasn’t as good. In those 67.2 IP, Tanaka had a 4.79 ERA. While he struck out a good amount (65) and limited walks (18), the amount of home runs allowed (15) was the thorn in his side. He was allowing a dinger about every three innings. Basically, he was doing everything pretty well besides gopher balls, and that’s a biggie.

There is no way to sugar coat this: Tanaka was throwing pitches that were too hittable. One of the causes may be that the hitters weren’t chasing his offspeed pitches as much. In 2017, Tanaka was literally the best at it – hitters chases his pitches out of the zone 42.1% of the time. That is ahead of guys like Corey Kluber, Chris Sale, Max Scherzer, etc. This may have been the result of the Yankees’ anti-fastball philosophy. Tanaka doesn’t have a great fastball to begin with, so not only did he rely on his better pitches, but also he eliminated one of his weaknesses out of the equation.

Unfortunately, big league hitters are not suckers. The approach may work for awhile, but the teams keep tab on guys like Tanaka. They notice things and start adjusting accordingly. That may have caught up with him in early 2018, as teams just started chasing way less. It’s almost like he needed to change something up to get things going later in the season (this becomes important later).

Injury

After a less-than-ideal first half, Tanaka needed to turn his season around a bit. Against the Mets on June 8, Tanaka threw 5 brilliant innings, striking out 8, allowing only one hit (a home run) and a walk. There was a major problem though: Tanaka exited the game after the top of the sixth. Because it was a Mets home game, the Yankees had to abide by the NL rules and Tanaka had to hit for himself. It seemed like, right away, that Tanaka hurt his lower body tagging up from the third base on a sac fly. As soon as Tanaka did not return to the mound, Yankee fans’ mind flashed back to Chien-Ming Wang in 2008. Take a look.

Well, the good news was that Tanaka’s injury was not as bad as what Wang suffered. The bad news is that it was an injury – to both of his hamstrings. It’s a very Mets injury and of course, it happened in the Citi Field.

“I don’t think it’s anything special,” Tanaka said after the game. “I’ve been doing this since I was a little kid. It’s on me that I got hurt.”

Tanaka indeed was a position player (a catcher at one point, actually) and pitcher growing up, all the way through high school. But since being drafted into NPB, he’s not really had to do much hitting. From 2007 to 2018, he’s compiled only 70 plate appearances. I doubt he’s had to do baserunning training/drills as position players would. It sucks that he was thrown into a situation where he had to run more than what he’s usually asked to and got hurt. I’m not going to go full-force on “ban the DH” sentiment here since vast majority of AL pitchers who end up baserunning in NL field come out unscathed. It feels more like a thing that happened in unfortunate series.

Second Half Brilliance

A month after he was shelved, Tanaka returned to action on July 10 vs. the Orioles. While his first outing back was a dud (4.1 IP, 6 H, 3 ER), the rest of the season wasn’t. In the 14 starts after coming off the DL, Tanaka went 5-4 with a 3.02 ERA in 83.1 IP. Not only he kept striking out hitters (86) and limiting walks (16), he kept the ball in the yard (9 homers). There was a streak of four starts from August 27 to September 14 in which he did not allow a home run at all (with three of them at the Yankee Stadium for what it’s worth). So what changed?

Here is one noticeable thing: he threw more fastballs towards the end of the year. Here is his monthly fastball usage log from Brooks Baseball:

March: 16.9%
April: 21.9%
May: 20.3%
June: 16.9%
July 16.9%
August: 19.4%
September: 29.7%

The rate in September is almost as twice as much as that of March/June/July. September also happened to be the month where he marked a 2.79 ERA with only 2 home runs allowed in 29.0 IP. He threw less cutters, curveballs and sinkers, kept up with slider and splitter usage and bumped up the fastball frequency.

My theory? Maybe he was going against what the book had on him. I’m sure Tanaka was aware that opponents knew he had offered a steady diet of breaking stuff. At some point, that can become predictable, getting opposing batters to sit on non-straight pitches. However, he chose to keep up with slider and splitter because, frankly, those are two that he just can’t do without. They also happen to be the only two pitches that’s rated positively on FanGraphs pitch values.

So while he continued using his best pitches, Tanaka decided to turn heads by attacking hitters with fastball. His fastball isn’t really anything to write home about so I’m guessing the league could catch up to up, in which case he can tweak his approach again. It may not be an ideal outcome, but all big league pitchers go through it.

Postseason

Tanaka had such a strong postseason last year that he became a realistic candidate for a one-game AL Wild Card Game vs. Oakland. He and J.A. Happ were the two sturdiest starting pitchers going into the postseason, so most guessed that it would be one of those two (spoiler: it wasn’t). If one would weigh a pitcher’s postseason/big game history, Tanaka would be an easy choice. The man’s pitched big games all his life. In 2006, before getting drafted by the Rakuten Golden Eagles, Tanaka led his high school team to the Koshien Finals with his bat and arm. He won the 2009 World Baseball Classic gold medal with Team Japan. He had that legendary 2013 Japan Series where he closed out the title game with a save one day after throwing a 160-pitch complete game. With the Yankees, he had thrown 25 innings in the postseason with only 4 runs allowed. I’m not a huge “postseason genes” guy, but if I were, Tanaka would be someone I’d definitely give the tag.

That being said, the Yankees went with their best starting pitcher in the past two seasons for the AL Wild Card game (it’s Luis Severino, btw). Because they won that and made it to the ALDS, Tanaka was slated to make at least one start in the postseason. He got the call to pitch against the Red Sox in the Game 2 of the ALDS.

Against the eventual World Champions, Tanaka held on his own. He pitched five innings, allowed only a run and struck out four. He earned the win and that would be the only win the Yankees would earn in that series. That was the last outing for Tanaka in 2018. Let’s hope he gets more postseason starts in 2019.

What’s Next?

It is a very sure thing: Tanaka will be a Yankee for at least two more years. In the winter of 2017-18, Tanaka chose to stay in New York by exercising a three-year, $67 million option. This was an ultimate win-win move. The Yankees retained a reliable starter for three more years, and Tanaka got to escape what it turned out to be a hellish offseason for free agents. I’m not sure if he would have suffered the same fate as that of Alex Cobb or Yu Darvish, but making ends meet very early in the winter turned out to be a good decision.

The Arrival of a Highly-Touted Second Baseman [2018 Season Review]

November 15, 2018 by Sung-Min Kim

Prior to the 2018 season, Yankee fans had a lot to look forward to and one of them was the arrival of Gleyber Torres. The Yankees acquired Torres from the Cubs in the 2016 Aroldis Chapman trade along with Billy McKinney, Rashad Crawford and Adam Warren. Torres, who had been touted as a top talent since being in the IFA pool as a teenager, was the obvious crown jewel of the return. He was regarded as a top 50-ish prospect in all of baseball at the time, but the stock skyrocketed during the 2016 Arizona Fall League when he was named the league MVP after hitting .403 as a 19-year old (also happened to be the youngest of the bunch, which is cool).

Torres entered the 2017 season as the easy consensus number one prospect in the system. He started the year in Double-A and earned a call-up to Triple-A mid-season. People speculated that he could make the majors by the end of the season. Unfortunately, his year was cut short when he injured the non-throwing elbow on a slide home. The Yankees and the fans had to wait through another winter to see Torres in the majors.

All in all, after a slightly delayed start, Torres had a fine debut season, hitting .271/.340/.480 with 24 home runs in 484 PA’s, good for a 120 wRC+ and a 1.9 fWAR. A 21-year old 2nd baseman hitting 20% better than the league average in his first ML season? I’ll take it. His performance earned him a third place in the AL Rookie of the Year voting as well.

A Torrid Start

Many hoped that Torres would make the roster right out of camp. However, two things got in the way. First off, he did not do well in ST. In 13 Grapefruit League games, Torres hit .219 with ten strikeouts. He hadn’t hit live pitching since last June so some rust was expected, and the Yankees probably wanted him to get some reps in Triple-A before making the majors.

Another reason – probably a bigger one – was service time. A short stint in the beginning of the year meant that the Yankees would control him until 2024. Teams manipulate service time all the time – the Cubs with Kris Bryant, the Blue Jays with Vladimir Guerrero Jr., so on. Anyways, the hope for the Yankees was that Torres would shake off the rust and play well enough in April to justify a call-up (*cough* right as the cutoff date for service time extends *cough).

And it happened just like that. Torres hit .347/.393/.510 in 14 games in Triple-A. The Yankees called him up on April 21 and Torres made the ML debut the next day vs. Toronto. He went 0-for-4 with a strikeout and a GIDP. What took place for the next 33 games, however, was quite magical. From April 23 to June 1, Torres was one of the best players in the majors, hitting .342/.397/.623 with 9 home runs in 33 games. The absolute highlight of his young career came vs. the Indians on May 6:

From June to July, Torres cooled off a bit, but his numbers were still pretty great at the All Star Break: .294/.350/.555 with 15 home runs, which is good for a 143 wRC+. His overall first half performance was good enough to get an All-Star nod. However, because he was in the disabled list at the time (hip injury), Torres was not eligible to play in the Midsummer Classic.

A Disappointing Second Half

There comes a time in most young ML players’ careers where they struggle. That is to be expected, especially in the case of a 21-year old infielder playing in a different position than what he’s used to.

From August 1 to the end of the regular season, Torres hit .254/.335/.420 with 9 HRs in 54 games. That includes a brutal 22-game stretch in August where he only hit .205 with 3 extra base hits in 95 PAs. What happened? As far as we know, it was just a plain slump, which may be the easiest explanation. All players go through it. As for a young guy like Torres, who breezed through the minors, one can press himself too much in the majors and get into a mental funk.

Another theory is that his hip problem bothered him throughout the second half. I don’t know (yet) if there’s any quote from Torres himself that denies the notion of being affected by injuries, but if there is, I would take it with a grain of salt. A baseball season is a pretty long one. One can get a banged up from playing a single game. Over time, players develop bruises, sore spots, nagging pains, etc. they just don’t talk about it. it’s possible that the pain affected his play, but not big enough to stop him from the action.

Besides, the Yankees had some key injuries during his slump (most notably Aaron Judge and Didi Gregorius), which emphasized the importance of Torres’s role in the team. There *was* a game late in the season where he was scratched from the lineup for “hip tightness.” Totally just speculating here but I wouldn’t be surprised if hip problem was a factor in his second-half slump.

Ironing Out Some Issues

As it is for most young players, Torres is far from being a complete player. Dude has a lot of tools and he forecasts to be a pretty good ML player long-term. However, at this moment, he does have a few things to work on. First off, he has made some careless errors. Scouts have praised Torres’s fielding tools for awhile and he’s flashed it in the bigs. However, he’s shown dumb errors like this:

It is as routine as it gets, but Torres missed it on a simple glove-t0-hand transfer. Because it is so routine, Torres didn’t bother paying attention to the slight details, which cost the Yankees an out or two here. The good news is that stuff like this is fixable. Unlike Miguel Andujar, whose defensive downfall is from his lack of range, the fix on Torres is mental. The time and potential is on his side.

While fielding percentage doesn’t hold much weight anymore, it tells a little bit of story. Torres had a .970 fielding percentage with 17 errors total. That ranks 18th out of 19 second basemen with qualifying amount of playing time. Fangraphs has his defense metrics at -7.9, which is still not great.

There’s another weakness to his game. Few weeks ago, Mike looked at Torres’s baserunning. The gist is that Torres has been way shy in trying for third base when advancing from first on a single. That’s another correctable thing that could improve with time. One last thing I’ve noticed is his plate discipline. Take a look at his numbers (top) compared to the league average (bottom):

As you can see, Torres swings at more pitches outside of the zone (while making less contact of them than league average) and makes much less contact in general than league average. His walk numbers also dropped a bit as he came to the majors. Plate discipline was not really something that’s been deemed as his weakness in his scouting reports and this is probably from facing Major League pitchers rather than minor league ones. I won’t panic over a 21-year old guy not picking up ML pitches well. It is something I would monitor though, just to see how he progresses.

What’s Next?

At this very moment, the Yankee infield is in a bit of a funky position. Gregorius is going to miss a chunk of the season thanks to Tommy John Surgery. With one year of control left, that puts some uncertainty in his Yankee future. As for Andujar, we don’t know if the team will stick him on third long-term. Heck, they are doing due diligence on Manny Machado, who could play shortstop or third. Depends on what happens, I think there’s a slight chance that the Yankees slide Torres back to short, but ultimately, he probably stays on second base – and will do so for a long time.

We saw both strong and weak sides of Torres’s game in 2018. It feels like a broken record saying this but he’s a young guy who will probably get better with more experience. Improvements are never a guarantee but Torres seems to be one of the surer cases where you can bank on him being in pinstripes for years to come.

Yankees 9, Rays 2: Big seven-run inning and Sevy’s solid outing drive Yankees to their 97th win

September 25, 2018 by Sung-Min Kim

The Yankees now have 97 wins for the season. That ties 2011 for their most since 2009, and we still have five more games to go. It’s remarkable to think that this could be the winningest team since the latest championship considering not a lot of things clicked in the cylinder this year. Anyways, just like last night, it was a relatively easy one. The offense set the tone in the third by pushing across 7 runs off the Rays bullpen. Luis Severino had a good outing – not necessarily classic Severino one – that gave enough reasons to be optimistic moving forward. The Yankees’ magic number for clinching the home spot for the AL Wild Card game is now at three.

The seven-run third

The Yankees pretty much put the game away in the third with a big, seven-run inning against the Rays:

Here are a few notes:

All the good rallies start with the soft-hitting defensive shortstop. To lead off the inning, Adeiny Hechavarria got a fastball low inside corner and golfed it just above the left field fence for a solo homer. A backup shortstop breathing life into the offense is pretty cool, but how about John Sterling’s call?
The beat didn’t stop there. Brett Gardner followed it up with a triple down the first base line and Andrew McCutchen walked to put runners on corners. Up came Aaron Judge and he hit the hardest liner (109.0 mph) of the inning … which was caught by the pitcher Jake Faria. And thank God, because it was going straight to the pitcher’s head and his glove happened to be at the right position to catch it on fly. It’s cool when Aaron Judge is able to drive runs in, but, in that moment, you gotta be glad for Faria being able to protect himself. Kevin Cash decided that that would be it for the Rays starting pitcher and put in Andrew Kittredge.
The Rays went on to pitch to Luke Voit. The beefy first baseman made them pay by lining a double down the line to score two more. After intentionally walking Giancarlo Stanton, Cash put in Jalen Beeks, a pitcher they brought in for the Nathan Eovaldi trade with the Red Sox. With bases loaded, Neil Walker drew a walk to push another run across, and Miguel Andujar followed it up with a sac fly to make it 4-0.
Think the Yanks were done there? The ninth batter of the inning, Gary Sanchez, who had been struggling prior to tonight, got a hold of Beeks’ 92 mph fastball down the zone and drove it out of the park for a three-run home run. Boy, did Sanchez need that. He also had the best offensive night in many moons, and we’ll get into that later.

Severino’s night

I’ll count this one as a good night for Luis Severino. He had one dicey inning where he allowed two runs (could have been three if it weren’t for the Rays’ blunder decision to send Ji-Man Choi to home that resulted in an easy out) but there were a lot of positives.

Well, a big chunk of that is that he was missing bats. He got 17 whiffs (fourth-highest of the season) out of 97 pitches and got 7 strike outs in 5 innings. Eleven swings and misses were from his heater, which is always a positive. As it is true for many pitchers, Severino needs his fastball to be effective to have a successful outing. Remember when he had a terrible stretch mid-season? His fastball, despite having that velocity, wasn’t really missing bats.

Cause for concern? He did lose the command for a hot second in the third. He started the inning by allowing a double to deep right to Joey Wendle. On the next pitch, Sevy plunked Tommy Pham on the elbow. He followed it up by walking Ji-Man Choi on five pitches. Brandon Lowe, who had a 3-for-3 night, squared up on a fastball middle-middle for a two-RBI double. The Rays gave Yanks a free out by waving Choi home for an easy out. C.J. Cron lined out to Hechavarria for the second out and Kevin Kiermaier grounded out to end the frame. There were some hard-hit balls in the inning and Sevy ran into some luck to close it out, but you do have to consider that even the hot pitchers run into a bad short stretch once in awhile. The rest of the outing was good enough to give Severino some benefit of the doubt.

Even though Severino doesn’t look like his first-half dominant self, there are reasons to believe in him in a postseason start, especially given the turnaround he’s had in his previous seven starts. For the Yankees’ sake, let’s hope it’s a trend.

The rest of the game

The Yankees tacked on two more runs for rest of the night. In the fifth, Stanton led off with a frozen-rope double (112.2 mph) down the left field line. Walker’s ground out advanced him to third but Andujar failed to drive him in by popping out to catcher. Don’t worry, here comes Gary Sanchez. The Yankee catcher pulled a single to left for his fourth RBI of the night. All in all, Sanchez went 2-for-4 with a walk and 4 RBI’s, which is… definitely more like it. Believe it or not, it’s his first game in more than three months in which he drove in more than two runs. Given on the caliber of hitter he can be, that really tells you what kind of year he’s had. I’m not saying it will be, but hopefully, tonight can serve as some kind of turnaround for his season.

In the ninth, Miguel Andujar went deep against our old friend Vidal Nuno. That’s his 26th homer of the year and the kid just continues to rake. After tonight, the Yankee third baseman has a .298/.329/.525 line with 71 total extra base hits. He may win the Rookie of the Year, he may not, but looking at the bigger picture, the Yankee fans got to be excited about how his hitting prowess will develop over the years.

On the pitching side, Tommy Kahnle, Stephen Tarpley and Domingo German kept the Rays scoreless for the last 4 IP of the game. Not the names that Boone would use in close game situations, but he had to feel good after seeing what they offered tonight. It seems that, Tarpley in particular, has impressed Boone enough to consider him in the “conversation” for the postseason roster.

Box score, highlights, standings and WPA

Here’s tonight’s box score, video highlights, updated standings and WPA.

Source: FanGraphs

The series continues tomorrow. Masahiro Tanaka will be on the mound against the Rays opener Ryne Stanek. 7:10 pm EST start, so it’s the same drill as today.

Yankees 4, Rays 1: Sometimes, throwing eight pitchers out there works

September 24, 2018 by Sung-Min Kim

In the battle of the opener vs. opener strategy, the Yankees came out victorious in the first game of the series at the Trop. They not only won the game, but also the magic number for clinching the top Wild Card spot is down to four, and they knocked the Rays out of the playoff race. We will be watching the A’s vs. Mariners score, but for tonight, the Yankees did what they could control: win a ballgame.

The runs

The Yankees got on board against the second Rays pitcher Hunter Wood. With one out in the third, Andrew McCutchen got a fastball right down the middle and crushed it over the left field fence. Wood had fed him nothing but a steady diet of fastballs and he got a perfect mistake pitch. 1-0 Yankees.

93 up in the zone. Big league hitters can crush that.

Heading into the bottom of the fourth, the Yankees lifted Aaron Hicks for Brett Gardner in center field. Uh oh. The Yankees have Didi Gregorius out (for now) with an injury and, because we are nearing the postseason, any sign of injury is a much bigger deal than usual. It turned out that Hicks has a tight left hamstring, so let’s hope it’s precautionary.

In a better news, Gardner was involved in a two-run rally in the fifth. With two outs, Aaron Judge worked a walk and advanced to second on a wild pitch. Gardner got a hold of Ryan Yarbrough sinker low in the zone for an RBI single to make it 2-0 Yanks. Giancarlo Stanton followed it up with a double to deep left, scoring Gardner from first to make it a two-run lead. Stanton did get thrown out at third trying to stretch it into a triple, but the damage was done.

The Bombers added another against Yarbrough in the seventh. With one out, McCutchen and Judge hit back-to-back doubles to put another one on board. This has been repeated in the website, but adding McCutchen has been such a good move for the lineup. We’ve known his pedigree of being a good hitter with the Pirates, but at the leadoff spot, McCutchen has seen tons of pitches. Tonight alone, he saw 34 of them in 5 plate appearances (6.8 pitches per PA), which is insane. Add his ability to see pitches with, well, Aaron Judge, who seems to be in full-count in any given at bat. The Yankees will hope that those two will be catalysts in elevating pitch counts in the postseason.

The pitchers

The Yankees used 8 pitchers total tonight, which, I guess, was expected using the opener strategy. Here is the list:

Jonathan Holder (1st inning) – Stephen Tarpley (2nd inning) – Sonny Gray (3rd and 4th innings) – Chad Green (5th inning) – David Robertson (6th inning) – Aroldis Chapman (7th inning) – Dellin Betances (8th inning) – Zach Britton (9th inning)

Here are some notes:

I have no idea how Stephen Tarpley will develop as a major league pitcher. He doesn’t have the high relief pitching prospect pedigree that guys like Chapman or Robertson did. However, he has chance to be useful. There’s always a spot in bullpen for guys that live off a sinker-slider combo. Since is ML debut earlier this month, when he allowed three earned runs against the Tigers, Tarpley has yet to allow another. Tonight’s outing may have been the crispest, as the lefty pitched a three-up, three-down inning with a strikeout.
How about the late inning guys? Green, Robertson, Chapman, Betances and Britton combined for 5 no-hit innings with 9 strikeouts. That’s the kind of collaborative effort that the Yankees hoped for when they assembled this group. I would imagine that they will run these arms frequently during the postseason (assuming they win the AL Wild Card game as well).
Regarding Aroldis Chapman – eye test-wise, his command looked better than that of his previous outings after coming off the DL. The problem is velocity. It’s weird to be concerned about a guy who topped out at 98.1 mph in an outing, but he did average at 97 mph tonight, which is a tick or two below his usual. He did get two swinging strikeouts on sliders, which is a positive for the Yanks. Earlier this season when Chapman was doing well, he was able to command his slider in the zone or to induce whiffs, regardless of how his fastball fared. It would be a boon for the back of the bullpen if he can jack his fastball velocity closer to 100 and be able to use his slider the way he did tonight.
Zach Britton looks really good. I think there’s a possibility that the Yankees assign closing jobs by committee in the playoffs, but Britton has made a solid case to pitch in more save situations. In 9 September appearances, Britton has allowed zero earned runs and zero walks. The further removed he is from the Achilles surgery, the better he looks.
Now, enjoy this catch by Gardner that saved two runs for the Yankees in the sixth.

Box score, highlights, standings and WPA

Here’s tonight’s box score, video highlights, updated standings and WPA.

Source: FanGraphs

The series at Trop continues tomorrow at 7:10 pm EST. Luis Severino will be on the mound for the Yankees against Jake Faria.

Red Sox 11, Yankees 6: Stanton’s slam not enough, Red Sox clinch it in Bronx

September 21, 2018 by Sung-Min Kim

The Yankees, after all, lost a game in this series and let the Red Sox celebrate the division title in Bronx. It happens. Another noteworthy thing that happened in the past three games is that they took two out of the three from the hottest team in baseball this year. A sweep would have been nicer, though. Oh well. The Yankees also set two home run records but that feels like a footnote now. The Yankees had a 6-4 lead after the fourth, but the Sox offense struck back against the bullpen and then more.

Early in the game

The Red Sox got it started with their very first batter of the game. Mookie Betts got a hold of Masahiro Tanaka’s fastball and hit a leadoff double that hit the top of the left field wall. Andrew Benintendi grounded out to advance Betts to third. The Yankees brought the infield in to face J.D. Martinez and it didn’t work, as he singled through the middle for an RBI single. 1-0 Red Sox. Tanaka got out of the inning without further damage, but not before the Red Sox top hitters made him throw 31 pitches. The Yankee hitters responded by making Eduardo Rodriguez throw 29 pitches, but failed to push a run across.

Boston did more damage in the second. Rafael Devers and Blake Swihart led off the inning with a single each. Tanaka bounced back by grounding out Jackie Bradley Jr. and striking out Christian Vazquez. Up came Mookie Betts, who is a huge thorn in the side for pitchers regardless of the situation. In a 0-2 count, after discussing it with Gary Sanchez, Tanaka threw a fastball on the low outside corner and Betts didn’t miss any of it. He lined the pitch into the center for a two-RBI single to add to their lead. 3-0 Sox.

The Bombers jumped on Rodriguez for two runs in the bottom of the inning. It came from a bat of none other than Luke Voit, who’s been literally one of the best hitters in the majors in the past 30 days. With Sanchez on first, Voit hit a Rodriguez fastball down the middle over the center field fence for a two-run homer. I don’t know if the league will figure him out or not, but man, he is so fun to watch *and* has provided a much-needed solution to the first baseman problem. It only took Giovanny Gallegos and Chasen Shreve.

With the Voit homer, the Yankees have 12 players with 1o or more home runs in a season, which is a Major League record. They also have 246 big flies this season, which is a franchise record. Pretty cool, huh? This is the dingerest season in the franchise history full of dinger hitters. That’s also coming with Sanchez banged up and struggling for most of the season, Aaron Judge injured for about two months, Giancarlo Stanton going through slumps here and there, etc. Imagine how it could have been had they been healthier.

The Grand Slam

The philosophy is to keep piling on baserunners and push for the runners to score. The Yankees had their share of baserunners for the first three innings – eight, to be precise – and managed to score only two. In the fourth, however, they brought in four with a Giancarlo Stanton granny. E-Rod started the inning by retiring Voit and Gleyber Torres. Then his command hit a snag. Andrew McCutchen, Judge and Aaron Hicks all worked a to load the bases and Alex Cora pulled the lefty out of the game. It wasn’t clear that Rodriguez was going deep into the outing either, as he had accumulated upwards of 80 pitches before the frame started.

In came Heath Hembree, facing Giancarlo Stanton. Stanton took the first pitch fastball for a strike. Hembree responded with a slider outside but Stanton didn’t miss any of it. His swing looked like a flick of the wrist with his arm extended, but that was a good enough. He made contact, and the ball sailed over the right field fence for a grand slam. 6-4 Yankees.

Looking back, that was certainly a big moment. But the Red Sox do have a formidable offense that you couldn’t help but feel it nagging in the back of the head that the game is far from over. Had the Yankees held the lead for the rest of it, it would have been something iconic for rest of the year, and something we’d look back for next few years (a la Mark Teixeira grand slam in late 2016 vs. Boston).

In the following frame, Tanaka continued to struggle. Betts doubled to lead it off and Benintendi singled to put runners on corners with J.D. Martinez due up. With 83 pitches thrown in four innings, Boone decided not to take any more risks with Tanaka and went to the bullpen. David Robertson induced a run-scoring double play to erased the baserunners and kept the Yankees’ one-run lead heading into the bottom of fifth. What happened after that… wasn’t pretty.

The Bullpen War Lost

After both Tanaka and Rodriguez got knocked out of the game, it was up to the both teams’ bullpen to hold each other’s offense. Unfortunately for the Yanks, it was the Red Sox that did it better.

Things got off to a decent start. After Robertson got out of the fifth with only one inherited runner scored, Chad Green took over in the sixth and struck out the side. However, in the seventh, he allowed a second-deck home run to Jackie Bradley Jr. for a tie game and a single to Christian Vazquez. Boone went to the bullpen and brought in Dellin Betances. He struck out Betts but Benintendi followed it up with a double to put two runners in scoring position. The Yankees opted to intentionally walk J.D. Martinez, which, even in hindsight, is what I would have done. Basically, better not to pitch to the literal scariest power hitter in the league in a crucial situation and hope for the best.

Up came Xander Bogaerts. Betances got the Sox shortstop to the 1-2 count and threw him a curveball. Bogaerts hit it deep into the center enough to score a run. Hicks, instead of trying for home, unleashed a laser to third to keep Benintendi at third. The ball bounced in front of Miguel Andujar, went past his glove and into the seats. That blunder allowed Benintendi to advance to home for a 8-6 Sox lead. Usually, the pitcher should be backing up the infielder receiving the throw from outfield, but Betances was caught in between home and third. To be fair, I don’t think Betances (as tall as he is) can defend this hop.

For the record, no, I don’t think there was anything wrong with what Boone did. It was simply the matter of putting your best relievers out there and them getting it done. Robertson/Green/Betances are capable of shutting down many lineups but they simply failed. Nothing much you can do as a manager when that’s the case.

On the other side, the Red Sox brought in the knuckleballer Steven Wright. As the famed hitting coach Charley Lau once said, there’s not a lot of ways to hit that pitch. Wright took the field from the fifth to seventh and yielded only one baserunner (Didi single in the seventh).

The Red Sox iced it – both the game and their champagne – with Aroldis Chapman on the mound. Chapman, understandably rusty after his first appearance since August 21 (so, about a month), allowed Devers and Bradley Jr. to reach with a single and walk respectively. However, he did strike out Sandy Leon and lined out Steve Pearce to become an out away from getting out of it with a two-run deficit. Mookie Betts said not so fast. He took a 84 mph slider inside – one of the worst from Chapman – and deposited it into the left field seats for a 11-6 Red Sox lead. The score stayed that way for good. Ryan Brasier and Craig Kimbrel shut down the Yankee offense for the rest of it to win the game and clinch the AL East.

Box score, highlights, standings and WPA

Here’s tonight’s game’s box score, video highlights, updated standings and the WPA.

Source: FanGraphs

Time to secure the top Wild Card spot. The Yankees will welcome the Orioles for the weekend for the final regular season series at the Boogie Down. Longtime Yankee CC Sabathia will take the mound against the former Yankee farmhand Yefry Ramirez.

Yankees 4, Rays 0: Tanaka’s three-hit shutout nets a win in the Trop

July 24, 2018 by Sung-Min Kim Leave a Comment

That’s more like it. The Yankees had a relatively stress-free one tonight as they finally won a damn game at Tropicana Field. With a complete game shutout, Masahiro Tanaka turned in the best start of the season. The offense wasn’t necessarily lights out, but they did score a few runs. To put it simple: it was all Tanaka for the Yankees tonight (Wait… you say the Yankees traded for Zach Britton?).

The runs

A pair of singles – from Brett Gardner and Aaron Judge – got the Yankees cooking from the get-go in the first inning. Giancarlo Stanton struck out swinging but the runners advanced to second and third on the wild pitch. Didi Gregorius’s groundout scored Gardner from third, and Yanks took a 1-0 lead. The bats were quiet for the next three innings against Yonny Chirinos, going three up, three down in all of them.

In the fifth, however, they tacked on another run. Brandon Drury reached base with one out with a (painful) hit-by-pitch. Neil Walker followed it up with a single to right, putting the runners on corners. The Yankees placed Tyler Wade on the third for ailing Drury and he scored on Austin Romine’s RBI groundout.

Romine drove another run in in the seventh. Miguel Andujar singled to lead off and Greg Bird hit double to put both of them in the scoring position. Remember when catwalk was a huge nuisance for the Yanks a month ago? This time, Bird’s flyball hit the railing and dropped in between the two Rays fielders, enabling Bird to get a wacky double. After Chirinos struck out Wade swinging, they intentionally walked Neil Walker (!) to load the bases (for a righty-on-righty matchup, obviously). Romine drove the first pitch he saw towards the right field for a sac fly. 3-0 Yanks.

But wait, the Yanks aren’t done yet! In the ninth, against the Rays reliever Chih-Wei Hu, they scored on a familiar formula: a rally from the bottom of the order. Andujar scorched a ground-rule double to lead off and scored three batters later with a Neil Walker RBI single. There were no flashy dingers or sexy barrage of runs tonight, but that’ll do. On the other side of the game, Tanaka was pitching an absolute gem.

Tanaka Tuesday

Not only it was his longest start of the year, it was also his first scoreless strt of 2018. Tonight’s Tanaka reminded me of the 2016 Tanaka: didn’t beat them with velocity (averaged 91.1 mph with fastball), but located pitches very well and induced a tons of grounders (16 groundballs vs. 2 flyballs). Here’s how the pitch chart looked:

There are significant amount of pitches down the zone and that’s nothing new from Tanaka. His splitter was an absolute money, inducing 10 whiffs out of 39 pitches. He also used his slider to get swinging strikes (5 whiffs) and called strikes (8 of them). His other pitches weren’t as overwhelming – notably fastball – but that’s to be expected. What we saw tonight was vintage Masahiro Tanaka that kept the hitters off-balance with two of his best pitches and get easy outs. His ERA went from 4.54 to 4.09 in a game while sporting a 92 K/23 BB ratio in 92.1 IP. Suddenly, his season went from mediocre to… decent? I’d say decent.

Leftovers

As aforementioned, the bats didn’t have as much of a significant night. The top four of the order (Gardy, Judge, Stanton, Didi) went for a combined 2-for-16. If the game were much closer, that would have been a problem, but thanks to Tanaka’s effort, we can easily overlook it.

Actually, the next four (Andujar, Bird, Drury/Wade, Walker) had a pretty strong game, going for a combined 6-for-14 with a walk from Walker. Well, can’t say Drury had a good one. He exited the game after being hit by the pitch from Chirinos. While the x-rays turned out negative, you gotta feel for the guy.

Box score, highlights, standings and WPA

Here’s tonight’s box score, video highlights, updated standings and WPA.

Source: FanGraphs

We got a 12pm day game tomorrow. Yes, 12pm. Luis Cessa will be on the mound against the former Yankee Nathan Eovaldi. For now, enjoy this win and the Zach Britton trade frenzy.