The Yankees picked up their fourth consecutive series win, taking the first two games from the Rangers at Globe Life Field. The offense may have gotten on the plane back to New York early as they got shut out by Nathan Eovaldi in the series finale, but they can still be proud of a 7-2 showing on the road trip. All three games in Arlington turned into tense affairs, including on Tuesday night with Fernando Cruz on in relief.
We join Cruz facing former Yankees farmhand Ezequiel Duran in a high leverage
jam in the bottom of the eighth. There are runners on first and second after he surrendered a Josh Jung single and Corey Seager walk to open the frame. However, he’s gotten two outs on a force out by Joc Pederson followed by a strikeout of Jake Burger to put him three strikes away from escaping this sticky situation.
After giving up the Jung single on a first-pitch four-seamer, it appeared that Cruz resolved to only throw his splitter for the rest of the inning.
This one is a doozy, looking like a low strike out of Cruz’s hand before falling off the table. He makes Duran look silly on a pitch that bounces just beyond home plate, the hitter clearly not expecting something off-speed to start the AB.
After Cruz induces such a wild swing and miss, Austin Wells sets a target in the exact same location looking to see if they can extract the same result.
I’m not certain that Cruz intended to throw this pitch here for a called strike — in fact as the age-old mantra “see it low, let it go; see it high, let it fly,” tells us, you generally do not want to throw your splitter up in the zone because those pitches can get launched a mile. However, it achieved the desired result, Duran giving up early on a pitch that looks high above the zone only for the late downward tilt to nip the top edge of the zone for the strike looking. The added bonus of landing your offspeed in the zone for a called strike is changing the hitter’s eye level, opening a lot more opportunity later in the AB for chase out of the zone.
Cruz immediately has the count leverage firmly in his favor, 0-2, and is just a strike away from escaping the jam unscathed. Duran has already shown a willingness to chase the splitter below the zone — Cruz just needs to execute a similar pitch to the first one he threw.
Cruz executes his pitch to the spot he intends, Duran just does a good job to adjust his bat-path mid-swing to spoil the splitter foul. If we’re being nitpicky, Cruz would ideally like this pitch about six inches lower in a location where Duran cannot make contact, but there was no harm done as the count remains 0-2.
It must be obvious to Duran at this point that Cruz is going to keep spamming splitters until he gets the out or Duran gets on base. It’s one thing knowing what pitch is coming, but Cruz’s splitter is so nasty with such late and abrupt downward movement that you’d be hard-pressed to do damage even knowing that it is coming.
Cruz rips off an absolute beauty of a splitter to finish off the AB. The pitch is on the bottom edge of the zone so Duran has to swing, but he’s nowhere close to making contact, whiffing to strand the base runners at first and second.
Here’s the full sequence:
While the approach of throwing 16 straight splitters after the Jung leadoff single worked for Cruz in this case, you’d feel a lot more comfortable if Cruz had at least one more pitch that he trusted. The four-seamer is getting clobbered so far this season so you would think Cruz is the ideal candidate to incorporate the sinker that is doing the rounds across almost the entire Yankees pitching room. He’s never really trusted his slider in his two seasons in pinstripes despite the pitch exhibiting the eighth-most horizontal break vs. average of any slider in MLB. I feel that establishing a comfort level with one or both of those pitches can give Cruz another weapon while also increasing the effectiveness of the splitter.
The Yankees bullpen outside of Tim Hill has not done much to inspire a ton of confidence through the first month of games. Jake Bird throws too many of his breaking balls down the middle, you can reliably pencil Camilo Doval to give up a homer every appearance, and even David Bednar is an exhausting, edge-of-disaster experience closing out games. Cruz walks entirely too many batters (almost 18-percent!) to feel comfortable as the designated setup man. But if he can find another pitch he can reliably throw for strikes without getting crushed to set up the splitter, I’d feel a lot better about him in the eighth inning.
