Undeniably, the worst set of performances from which to pick a Player of the Game for the Yankees comes from their ALDS Game 1 loss to the Blue Jays, New York taken to the woodshed in a 10-1 loss to the Blue Jays.
In case you didn’t follow this game too closely, it followed the weird path of being close for a large portion of it, without it feeling particularly so, given the Yankees’ complete inability to capitalize on any threat offensively. It wasn’t until the seventh inning that Toronto made it a blowout, and an individual who helped in keeping this one close for as long as it did was the right-hander Camilo Doval.
Doval was one of the many Yankee relievers whose name got called as Luis Gil proved not to have much of a leash, pulled after allowing a pair of solo shots in the first couple of innings. Aaron Boone decided to manage with more urgency than what you might normally see in Game 1, and a byproduct of that decision was the need to use Doval for multiple innings, something he’s able to do, but that his tenure in pinstripes has mostly advised against.
After Tim Hill held the Yankees’ deficit at two runs through four, Doval came in to start a clean fifth inning with the top of the order set to hit. It’s no secret that the Yankees have adjusted Doval’s arsenal to have him throw more cutters than he was used to in San Francisco. Doval’s game plan was rather simple in just attacking the zone with both cutters and sliders at a zone rate above his season average. While he didn’t generate much swing and miss action, he got the Jays to put the ball in play early and in the right spots.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who went deep to break a homerless drought in the first, was kept off the bases only once in this game, and it came in his at-bat against Doval. Now, we shouldn’t go overboard here because Doval fed him a hittable slider and got away with it. But in a game where choosing aspects to be optimistic about requires a whole lot of goodwill, you can’t really argue with the results. Doval came in to keep a close game from spiraling, and he did that by retiring all six batters he faced.
Adding to the impressiveness of Doval’s performance, he needed far fewer pitches than one might normally expect to complete two full innings, averaging 10 pitches per frame. For what became such a blowout, the Yankees ultimately used more important relievers than they would have liked, yet Doval kept the situation from getting even worse, covering two innings and himself only having tossed just 20 pitches. That will keep Doval in play for today’s Game 2. Although the expectation is of a lengthy performance from the ever-reliable Max Fried, the availability of any reliever who has inspired even the slightest bit of confidence as of late is invaluable. After all, it was this bullpen, through the performance of Luke Weaver, Fernando Cruz, and Paul Blackburn, that let the game get out of hand in the late innings, from a close loss to a blowout defeat.
