I wish there were fewer of these games this year. They’re not fun to talk about, you kind of just want to get the bones down into our CMS and be done with it. If I could, I would keep this extremely snappy because there’s just not that much to say. The Yankee offense stunk again, Gerrit Cole was good but not great, and George Lombard Jr. committed his daily error. Yet the rigors of the writing process demand I find some things to analyze, even if that’s really the story of the game. The Yankees go into a big
series with Boston with very little momentum, dropping tonight’s series finale with the Astros 5-1.
Here’s the thing about baseball: one or two pitches completely changes how we see a night. Cole was dominant for five innings and a bit. He struck out the first two men he faced in the game, and those are brand names in Jeremy Peña and Yordan Alvarez. Cole did allow a run in the third, on a bleeder that just stayed fair for Isaac Paredes, but he once again looked like the Gerrit Cole.
And then the first pitch that changed the way we see the night came, a 3-2 curveball to Daulton Varsho and a big-league take:
We use the phrase “tip your cap” a bit too much, but there’s not much else you can do. That is a great pitch, and Varsho should have whiffed and the inning should have been over. Instead, runner at first, two out, and out came the second pitch that defined the evening:
This is a bad pitch, and Christian Walker hit it just over the right field wall to make it 3-0. That’s Cole’s night, three earned runs across six innings, the first time in six starts he’s allowed that many runs. It’s not a bad start, that pitch to Walker doesn’t erase the very good pitch he threw to freeze Yordan in the first inning, and the fault of this game sits with the offense not Cole. Still, it has to leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Then again, it can’t be any worse than the taste the offense left. After three games in a row where it seemed like the Yankees were finally turning things around, they fell before the powerful right arm of…well, Hayden Wesneski. The lineup was stacked with lefties specifically to target Wesneski’s hittable fastball, and the seven lefties went 3-for-22 on the night. Ben Rice did his job, with a pair of hits including the hardest-hit ball of the night, and Jazz Chisholm Jr. tried his best to make something happen reaching twice himself.
Indeed, maybe Jazz’s adventure in the third is best illustrative of the Yankee offensive struggles tonight. His single didn’t even leave the infield, but speed is a part of his game and there he was on first all the same. Austin Wells, who theoretically has lefty power, is then frozen on a sweeper over the middle of the plate while Chisholm takes second.
It’s not great but hey, the runner was moved over. José Caballero grounds out weakly, Trent Grisham pops out, threat ended. Amusingly this would be repeated almost exactly in the fifth — Jazz walks, steals second, Wells strikes out, Caballero flies out this time, and Grisham strikes out, threat ended. We’ve given Jazz his fair share of grief this year but at least he wasn’t the problem tonight.
The one run the Yankees did score came on a sac fly, not exactly the most dynamic way to plate a run. Ben Rice ended Wesneski’s night with a leadoff double in the sixth, looking to respond after Walker’s home run. Two fly outs brought Rice in but that felt more like a rally-ender than a rally-starter. George Lombard Jr. did give us one nice moment on a triple right off the part of an ad that said “FOR TRIPLE” after Rice was plated:
And Spencer Jones quickly popped out to foul territory to remove that threat.
We did get Lombard’s now-daily error, his sixth straight game with one, in a fun little play that gave Houston an insurance run they didn’t actually need:
It says something about this team that TWO errors were made on this play, but I will give Lombard a bit of a break, as Caballero can’t be cutting in front of the shortstop like that. As was discussed in the PSA Slack, this error streak has coincided with Ryan McMahon’s IL stint, and Caballero is just a little too … much sometimes.
This one stunk, and it doesn’t get any easier with this weekend’s big four-game set with the Red Sox looming. The Astros are a shell of the mighty figure they used to be, not quite the pedestal and trunkless legs from Ozymandias but far closer to that than the king of kings. They came into the Bronx and acted like the dynasty again, and the Yankees looked impotent two nights out of three. They cannot afford to do that against Boston, who could leapfrog them in the standings with another showing like the Fenway mop that resurrected their season.
Southpaw Patrick Sandoval will pitch for the Red Sox, while Cam Schlittler gets the ball to open that series tomorrow, in perhaps his highest-pressure start since the Wild Card outing that made him famous. First pitch is at 7:15pm.
Box Score
