The team did hire hitting coach Dillon Lawson and his“ hit strikes hard” philosophy, and in an effort to improve upon their 11.1% swinging strike percentage in 2021 they jettisoned all-or-nothing swinger Gary Sanchez, and eventually Joey Gallo too. If you watched their efforts in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series against Houston, you might think...
Remember at the end of last year’s stunted Yankee postseason run when general manager Brian Cashman said they’d focus on getting more contact-oriented?
The team did hire hitting coach Dillon Lawson and his “hit strikes hard” philosophy, and in an effort to improve upon their 11.1% swinging strike percentage in 2021 (which was actually below the league average of 11.3%) they jettisoned all-or-nothing swinger Gary Sanchez, and eventually Joey Gallo too. But the difference was negligible. The 2022 Yankees turned that 11.1% percentage into …11.0%. An improvement, technically, but not a truly noticeable one. If you watched their efforts in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series against Houston, you might think the Yankees were actually trying to whiff as much as possible.
There’s way too much swing and miss in these Yankees, especially with runners in scoring position, where they’ve been abysmal all postseason. This is not a huge departure from how they operated in the regular season, but the fact that nobody seems to deviate from their approach and try to shorten up for a base hit in RBI opportunities is equal parts inexplicable and maddening, especially after just seeing how effective it was for the Guardians in pushing the Yankees to the brink during the previous round.
Trying to overhaul an entire season of offensive strategy for a seven-game series is reactionary and the Yankees should not all of a sudden try to become a different team, but it’s clear that some minor tweaks need to be made if they’re going to crack the Astros’ dam. The Yankees struck out 17 times in Game 1 while the Astros only did twice, marking the greatest discrepancy in a postseason game in major league history. Yes, the Astros were starting Justin Verlander, who now owns the record for most career strikeouts in the postseason. But the Bombers’ 27 empty hacks on Wednesday against Verlander and the Astros’ bullpen wasn’t a huge difference from their 23 on Tuesday against Cleveland.
The Yankees’ hitters are doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Except instead of it being over five games with an AL Central squad, now it’s against the team with Major League Baseball’s best pitching. A few things need to change between the ears, and there’s a few ideas for tangible changes as well, mainly moving Josh Donaldson down from the fifth spot in the lineup or potentially out of the starting nine altogether. Donaldson is now 4-for-19 in the postseason (.211), but more importantly, he has left nine runners on base and driven in none.
Game 1 was probably never one the Yankees were going to win anyway, as they were popping champagne and trying to board a flight from New York to Houston less than 24 hours before the game began. They also had Jameson Taillon making his first start in over two weeks, opposed by one of the greatest pitchers of all time.
Taillon is a regular season pitcher. That’s not to say anything about his mental fortitude in big games, but his stuff is not going to blow through any postseason lineup, and on Wednesday he faced 20 Houston hitters without fanning any of them. His main utility is to round out a rotation, not to be a guy that carves through a postseason game. That’s a job for Luis Severino, Gerrit Cole and Nestor Cortes Jr, who should line up for the next three, but now the Yankees are in an 0-1 hole before any of them could pitch. The only people they have to blame for that situation is themselves, as taking care of Cleveland earlier would have left the rotation in much better shape for the ALCS. Taillon vs. Verlander was a bad matchup for the Yankees right from the get go, and as Verlander settled in throughout his six innings, the Yankees chances of stealing the game slipped away with each K.
While Taillon was solid in his 4.1 frames, holding the AL’s top seed to one run and four hits, his night should have been over when he got nine-hitter Martin Maldonado to ground out and end the fourth inning. Instead, manager Aaron Boone sent him back out for the fifth in an attempt to go through the top of Houston’s fearsome lineup for a third time.
Like most pitchers, Taillon gets increasingly worse each time he sees a hitter. During the regular season, Taillon had a .653 opponents’ OPS during his first tour of the lineup. The second time, that number went to .705 and the third time it climbed to .803, which was essentially Bo Bichette and Matt Olson’s 2022 OPS. When Jeremy Pena laced a predictable one-out double in his third at-bat, Boone finally decided to get Taillon, but not for who you’d expect.
Clarke Schmidt is a nice pitcher who may very well end up being a significant part of the Yankees’ future. He is also someone who had made just two professional relief appearances prior to last year. During this postseason he’s now been asked to close a game in Cleveland — didn’t work — and come in mid-inning to face Alex Bregman with two runners on (Yordan Alvarez was wisely intentionally walked). The Bregman plate appearance did end in a walk to load the bases before Schmidt coaxed an enormous double play from Kyle Tucker, giving Boone a brief shred of validation.
But these have been two huge asks of the kid who was pitching for the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders two months ago. If the Yankees are insistent on still using a long reliever in this Schmidt role, it can’t hurt to give Domingo German — who Boone oddly said after the game hasn’t pitched because there hasn’t been a good opportunity — a look, especially because in the next inning, Schmidt allowed two home runs that sealed things up for Houston.
Why Boone brought Schmidt back out for that doomed sixth inning — particularly over a rested Lou Trivino, who was acquired for exact situations like that — is beyond explanation. Conventional thinking would have had Trivino start the fifth against the top of the order, then give Schmidt the weaker hitters later. The very fact that Schmidt has been such a major character in this production also highlights how big the losses of Michael King, Chad Green, Ron Marinaccio, Zack Britton and Scott Effross are.
Say what you want about Aroldis Chapman too (and you should, he quite literally quit on his team), but a left-hander with a 98 mile per hour fastball would be a nice option to have in this series against Alvarez and Tucker. During the regular season, Chapman faced 45 left-handed batters and only allowed one extra base hit. He chose not to be with the team, though, and he also is certainly not the only hole in this roster that’s trying to solve the Astros puzzle yet again.
To put the whole thing together, the players on the field and the man at the head of the dugout simply have to be better.
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