Yankees Game 1 Win A Revenge Of The Damned
The Major League Baseball postseason is made for unlikely heroes. Yankees lore is rife with them, with Don Larsen, Brian Doyle, Jim Leyritz, and a pinch hitter named Aaron Boone among the many who stepped up in the biggest moments to shine under the brightest of spotlights.
While their contributions to the Bronx Bombers’ nail-biting 6-5 victory over Kansas City in Saturday night’s Game 1 of the American League Division Series at Yankees Stadium weren’t of the above’s magnitude, two of the most denigrated men wearing pinstripes this season were primarily responsible for at least saving this one day.
Outside of injured first baseman DJ LeMahieu, if you asked Yankees fans which players they’d least want to see in a clutch spot, they’d probably point to leftfielder Alex Verdugo and relief pitcher Clay Holmes. Both players struggled mightily in the regular season’s second half, with Holmes losing his closer’s job to Luke Weaver and fans clamoring for Boone, now the Yankees skipper, to do the same with Verdugo, who needed to fight off rookie Jasson Dominguez in September to earn a spot in the Game 1 lineup.
Yet it was Holmes who came on in the sixth inning to calm a frantic back-and-forth affair after Tim Hill coughed up a 4-3 Yankees lead. Holmes got five huge outs, which set the stage for Verdugo, who reached base on three of four appearances, to score the tying run on catcher Austin Wells’ single and then deliver the winning hit an inning later with an opposite field liner that fell in front of Royals leftfielder MJ Melendez. Verdugo also made a sliding catch along the left field line with two and two outs in the fourth inning to get erratic starter Gerrit Cole out of a jam.
Verdugo’s approach at the plate on Saturday was notable, for he went the other way on both of his hits. His tendency—as it with many hitters in today’s game that celebrates exit velocity and launch angle above other metrics—is to pull everything, which, as Baseball-Reference.com king Larry Fleisher of Forbes reported, led to 81 ground ball outs or double plays to second base this season.
During Holmes’ slump that saw him blow an MLB-most 13 saves, 10 of which came during a horrid three-month stretch after June 12, apologists pointed to how he was often the victim of bad luck from soft contact. Well, outside of one infield hit, the Royals, who put more balls in play than any other AL team this season, found Yankees’ gloves off Holmes’ offerings on Saturday despite him falling behind on four of the six hitters he faced. None were more important than when star shortstop Bobby Witt grounded out to third to leave two men stranded to end the sixth inning.
Who knows, maybe Verdugo and Holmes just needed new roles to succeed. Boone batting Verdugo in the middle of the order for 84 games should have been sponsored by the old Saturday Night Live spoof “Bad Idea Jeans.” Per Baseball Reference, he hit a solid .292 with a .374 OBP over the 44 games in the 7-through-9 slots this season. And Holmes, who was lights out for the first month-and-a-half of the season, might regain his confidence in lower-leverage situations.
It certainly was the right call to give Weaver the ball thereafter. After he finished the Game 1 job by striking out three in 1.1 perfect innings, Yankees fans were allowed to exhale, for this was a crucial game given the pitching matchups that lay ahead.
Then again, the playoffs are made for surprises. You can barely go an inning where the announcers didn’t mention how everybody starts the postseason with a clean slate. That goes for the fan idols like Aaron Judge as well as the damned like Verdugo and Holmes.