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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Oct 6, 2021 10:14:42 GMT -5
Pete Abraham @peteabe · 3h Wildest dreams indeed. Getting to cover games like that is such a privilege. Let’s do it again Airplane BOSRightwards arrowTPA
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Oct 6, 2021 10:20:47 GMT -5
Nine thoughts on the Red Sox’ convincing win over the Yankees in the Wild Card Game By Chad Finn Globe Staff,Updated October 6, 2021, 23 minutes ago
Playing nine innings (wild-card edition) while wondering if Bucky Dent will ever see the Yankees beat the Red Sox in a big game again …
1. No matter what happens the rest of his career — or, for that matter, the remainder of the four-year, $68 million contract signed before the 2019 season, which once looked like a mistake and now looks like a bargain — one thing is certain about Nate Eovaldi’s future.
Whenever he returns to Fenway Park, whether it’s for another team someday or as a retired ballplayer waving from a luxury box while his highlights play on the big screen, he is going to get a hero’s welcome, every single time. Eovaldi already owned a secure place in Red Sox lore with his staff-saving six-inning, 97-pitch effort in relief on one day’s rest in Game 3 of the 2018 World Series. But he added to that legacy Tuesday night, and in victory this time, pitching 5⅓ superb, almost entirely suspense-free innings in the Red Sox’ 6-2 win. Eovaldi delivered a masterclass in power-pitching, throwing untouchable 99 mile-per-hour darts, grunting with each pitch like fellow Alvin, Texas, native Nolan Ryan, and basically doing what Gerrit Cole was supposed to do for the Yankees but most certainly did not.
2. Xander Bogaerts is about as dependable as a ballplayer gets, which is why it was so concerning that he couldn’t seem to dig himself out of a late-season ditch. Bogaerts hit .255 with just eight homers and a .761 OPS in the season’s second half. He got hot at the beginning of September, but struggled over the last two weeks, hitting .216 with one homer in the final 11 games.
He shed all of his recent struggles in his first at-bat against Cole, the Yankees’ hard-throwing starter and Cy Young candidate, crushing a tone-setting two-run homer in the bottom of the first. Bogaerts’s blast was a message to Cole that Red Sox were not going to go quietly. Instead, it was Cole who went quietly, and quickly, lasting just two-plus innings, or as long as Roger Clemens did in the “Where is Roger?” Game 3 of the 1999 ALCS.
3. Kyle Schwarber was the second Sox hitter to take Cole deep, clobbering a 435-foot blast leading off the third that may well have landed in someone’s ice cream helmet in the concession line beneath the bleachers. Schwarber entered the game with six homers and a .981 OPS in 24 postseason games, and his homer Tuesday was his second playoff homer off Cole, the first coming in the 2015 NL wild card game when he was a Cub, Cole was a Pirate, and we were all so much younger then.
It did not go unnoticed that Schwarber (the then-injury hitter the Red Sox acquired at the trade deadline) and the Yankees’ Anthony Rizzo (the hitter and defensive whiz most Red Sox fans wanted at the deadline) both homered Tuesday. But Schwarber plays on. I think that means the Sox won the trade deadline, right?
4. The only moments of true uh-oh tension showed up in the top of the sixth, when with one out, Anthony Rizzo clubbed Eovaldi’s 68th pitch for a solo home run, cutting the Red Sox lead to 3-1. Asking this often flammable Red Sox bullpen to get 11 outs seemed like a lot, but Cora did not hesitate in pulling Eovaldi after 71 pitches, fearing that Yankee familiarity would bring success the third time around the order. (Opposing batters hit .281 with a .780 OPS against Eovaldi the third time they faced him in a game this season.)
When Cora signaled to the bullpen for Ryan Brasier, I fired off a quick Twitter poll giving readers five minutes to answer whether it was the right or wrong move. Seventy-nine percent of you Negative Nomars voted wrong … and you were wrong. Brasier, Tanner Houck, Hansel Robles, and Garett Whitlock combined to allow just two hits and one run in relief.
5. The excellent relief work was a surprise, but not the biggest one of the night. A defensive play possibly saving their season? Now that was a surprise, given that the Red Sox probably fielded their worst defensive team since 1996 this season.
It happened in that same sixth inning, when Giancarlo Stanton cranked a wall-assaulting liner with Aaron Judge on first. Judge, who is much faster than a ballplayer his size should be allowed to be, turned the corner at third as Xander Bogaerts collected Kike Hernández’s one-hopped throw. Wheeling and firing home almost casually — Bogaerts’s throw was as smooth as that viral Trea Turner slide from a few weeks back — he nailed Judge by less than an arm’s length. If Derek Jeter had made a similar play, there would have been poems written about it by the seventh-inning stretch. I say it was the Red Sox’ best and most important defensive play of the season.
6. If Stanton played for the Red Sox, as some of us may have pondered as a possibility in years past, he’d hit something like .389 with, oh, seven homers and 100 absolutely crushed singles at Fenway every year.
He launched a rocket off the wall in the first inning as well, one sent ESPN play-by-play voice Matt Vasgersian into Overdramatic And Almost Immediately Regrettable Home Run Call Mode. “Oh, he got another one!” said Vasgersian, referencing Stanton’s home-run assault at Fenway the last time the Yankees were in town. “He got another one! … No, it’s off the monster.” Stanton ended up with a majestic single. To be fair, it did look like Stanton annihilated the baseball into a fine powder.
7. I think we all knew, or at least most of us, that when the Red Sox drafted Garrett Whitlock from the Yankees in the Rule 5 draft that the young righthander with the Tommy John surgery scar on his elbow would be closing out the Wild Card Game against his former organization come October. Oh, and we also knew, without a doubt, that he would have long since won Red Sox fans’ trust and be the obvious, comforting choice to do it. Yep, all knew it. Pretty obvious.
Whitlock gave up a cheapie solo homer to Stanton in the Pesky Pole neighborhood to make it 6-2 – the Yankees slugger probably deserved that one – and allowed a long fly ball to Joey Gallo, but closed it out with only a slight hint of drama.
8. Little-known unwritten rule about baseball and 1970s middle infielders: Ever since October 1978, the presence of Jerry Remy at Fenway fully negates the presence of Bucky Dent. Go look it up; I bet it’s explained on Fangraphs somewhere.
It was heartwarming to see Remy, absent from NESN’s Red Sox broadcasts since early August as he battles cancer, throw out the first pitch, then embrace Dennis Eckersley, his longtime teammate on the Red Sox and at NESN. Besides collective well-wishes for Remdawg, I suspect everyone watching shared another thought at that moment: What I would give to hear these two call this game rather than A-Rod.
9. Well, you know what they say, at least in the Yankees broadcast booth: You can’t predict baseball, Suzyn. Which is why baseball is so damn irresistible, especially this time of year, and sometimes — often — in spite of itself.
Between the we-can-all-move-on-now happy catharsis of Tom Brady’s return to Foxborough and now this, a Yankee Elimination Party that confirms beyond a doubt that this Red Sox season is a success, it has been a satisfying couple of days in Boston sports. Not sure about you, but I’m going to sit back and rehash this game, over and over again, right up until the next one is due to begin.
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Oct 6, 2021 13:20:11 GMT -5
Red Sox Stats @redsoxstats · 5h Since 2001 - baseball's age of enlightenment - Cashman has spent about $4.4 Billion on Yankees' payrolls to win 1 championship 13 seasons ago.
The Yankees entered the year with a collection of talent that rivaled the Dodgers. Overwhelming AL favorites. But they didn't fortify like the Red Sox in 2018 - instead they maneuvered to get under the luxury tax before giving up a bunch of good prospects at the deadline. Sad.
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Oct 6, 2021 13:32:47 GMT -5
The latest Red Sox trick is their best one yet: Slaying the win-now Yankees Four years ago, the Yankees seemed on the rise. Now what?
By Jon Couture October 6, 2021 | 1:02 PM
COMMENTARY
Making declarative statements off a scant nine innings is a recipe for disaster, even if they end seasons and define our cherished narratives. Consider the moment we’ll remember above all from Tuesday’s showpiece American League Wild Card Game.
If Giancarlo Stanton doesn’t crush his sixth-inning missile off Ryan Brasier all those 114.9 miles per hour, one of the 12 hardest hit balls at Fenway Park all season, it doesn’t clamber past Alex Verdugo to Kiké Hernández quite as fast. Delaying his pirouette heave to Xander Bogaerts, delaying the shortstop’s easy relay home, likely giving Aaron Judge enough time to beat Kevin Plawecki’s tag and get New York within one . . . Advertisement:
“That’s baseball, Suzyn,” John Sterling once noted in one of his observations he didn’t “see wrong.”
Thus, Tuesday, justly or not, was the momentum of two organizations continuing forward. The “work in progress” Red Sox go deeper into an October they were never supposed to sniff, and the “World Series or bust” Yankees go home again to marvel how it all went wrong.
“The league has closed the gap on us. We’ve got to get better in every aspect,” said Yankees manager Aaron Boone postgame, the fourth and final season of his contract, and New York’s 12th season since its 2009 title, over with a 6-2 Sox victory.
We’ve lived Boston’s unexpected road to the Wild Card Game, and how it was gravy before Nate Eovaldi threw a pitch. The Yankees weren’t supposed to be here, either. They were the de facto favorites of an AL lacking powerhouses, tabbed for high-90s wins and ascendant seasons for Gerrit Cole, Stanton, Judge, Aroldis Chapman, Sanchez, Gleyber Torres, DJ LeMahieu …
Tuesday was a failure from go, because their time was now. It has been for years, as spending big at the deadline for limited engagements with Anthony Rizzo, Joey Gallo, and Clay Holmes further reinforced.
It got them nine more innings and two more days. And now, it gets them the crisis we know too well. Spying what looks like a dead end cresting the horizon, and wondering what’s next.
“The Yankees are sort of at a point like we had,” 1990s Cleveland general manager John Hart told the New York Post back in March, when the drought was just 11 seasons. “You realize you have to break through.”
They needed Tuesday more than the hosts, and they played like it. Tabbed road favorites with their $324 million ace Cole and a rested, tested bullpen in line, their uber-patient lineup didn’t draw a single walk to impatient Boston’s seven. (Eovaldi didn’t so much as run a three-ball count.) Cole got six outs, hanging a changeup that Bogaerts pulverized for the first righty homer on the pitch all year, elevating a fastball that the patient Kyle Schwarber left the zone to smash 435 feet.
“Just a couple big mistakes,” Cole told reporters. “Sick to my stomach.”
Red Sox fans were surely sick to theirs at various points, too scarred from win-or-go-homes that got away. (Alex Cora declared it the most uncomfortable game to manage in his career.) But when the moment arrived, Bogaerts and his teammates applied the pressure. And the big-money visitors wilted.
The Red Sox won it with outfield defense. With 11 outs from a bullpen array — Ryan Brasier, Tanner Houck, Hansel Robles, and Garrett Whitlock — that reads like a dare. The seemingly weekly “my bad” chest pat from Verdugo came after Boston’s only multi-hit night, and three RBIs.
“From the very first pitch, the whole team had a plan,” Verdugo said on NESN. “That’s just how you play, from pitch one to the last pitch. Energy, everything. It was amazing.”
Is it ever. We’re not a year removed from Chaim Bloom christening the season with the inspiring, “What we’re going through now is very painful . . . you have to be willing to do some things that don’t get you pats on the back when you do them.”
He threaded a needle I don’t even think he was trying to thread. Dismantled the Benintendi-Betts-Bradley homegrown outfield. Didn’t buy big over the winter after as desolate a season as we’ve seen in a decade. Didn’t overspend at the deadline; heck, he was barely allowed to spend. It is, and I suspect Bloom would tell you this himself, at minimum a bit of a fluke.
The Red Sox in the last eight all the same. It is a moment to savor for myriad reasons, but the Yankees remind of a prominent one.
Four years ago, Joe Girardi’s last team got within a game of the World Series with a club that felt on the rise. New York took its medicine, at least as much as the Yankees ever do, and reset.
To Judge, who won Rookie of the Year. To Luis Severino. Chad Green. Greg Bird. Torres. Sanchez. The plan was coming together ahead of schedule.
The plan never looked better. The base Brian Cashman built faltered in too many places, and the big-money supplements were the wrong ones, leaving a home-run-or-bust glacier that the Rays, Red Sox, and others ran circles around in 2021.
Baseball’s not always fair: Ask the Dodgers and their 106 wins, staring down a one-and-done in the National League Wild Card Game on Wednesday. Ask the Nationals, right alongside them as a team that felt like it would similarly never get that breakthrough.
Those, however, are problems for another day in Boston. Today will soon roll into Thursday, the Rays, and whipped cream on the gravy that is primetime, big-time baseball landing back in our laps so soon.
“Sometimes it looks horrible, but 93 times this year, it hasn’t looked horrible,” Cora told reporters, “so we’re going to keep rolling.”
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Oct 6, 2021 16:53:39 GMT -5
Bill Koch @billkoch25 · 11m From the email inbox -- Tuesday's #RedSox-Yankees game was the most-watched #MLB game on ESPN platforms since 1998.
Telecast averaged 7.7M viewers and peaked at 8.4M viewers. Boston market delivered a 19.8 rating -- highest for a Red Sox game on ESPN since 2009.
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Oct 6, 2021 20:58:41 GMT -5
Bryan Hoch @bryanhoch · 5h Aaron Boone: "The league has closed the gap on us. We've got to get better in every aspect."
Lou Merloni @loumerloni · 5h Closed the Gap? When was the last time the Yankees won a World Series? I read that as a shot at Cashman. Guys like Judge, JDLM, Rizzo, Gallo, etc., are who they are. It's like the RS with Bogaerts, Devers, Renfroe, etc. They are unlikely to get any better at this point. The only way to get better is to have better personnel.
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Oct 6, 2021 21:03:03 GMT -5
One more thing I know there are flashier , better defensive, outspoken short stops in MLB but I take Xander Bogartes 7 days a week. Tough division battle tested, few WS rings, leader on the team.
If JD opts out, I'd like to take a shot at moving Bogaerts to 3rd, Devers to DH, and bringing in a glove-first SS. But that said, I like Bogaerts better than Betts. Betts is better, but Bogaerts really feels like the heart of the team. I never got the sense that Betts was committed to the RS in the same way.
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Oct 6, 2021 21:06:34 GMT -5
Peter Gammons @pgammo · 7h In the last 2 days of the regular season, with the Red Sox having to win, Tanner started and threw 5 perfect innings. Final day, in a tie, Garrett Whitlock threw a pefect 7th. Wild card--Houck perfect 7th, Whitlock finished game. Rookies, and a manager unafraid of using them Excellent point by Gammons. At the start of the season, in a one-game WC game between the RS & NYY, how many guessed our RPs would be Brasier, Houck, Robles & Whitlock?
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Oct 6, 2021 21:08:53 GMT -5
Bill Koch @billkoch25 · 11m From the email inbox -- Tuesday's #RedSox-Yankees game was the most-watched #MLB game on ESPN platforms since 1998.
Telecast averaged 7.7M viewers and peaked at 8.4M viewers. Boston market delivered a 19.8 rating -- highest for a Red Sox game on ESPN since 2009. What? I thought no one watched baseball anymore?
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Oct 6, 2021 21:27:10 GMT -5
The latest Red Sox trick is their best one yet: Slaying the win-now Yankees Four years ago, the Yankees seemed on the rise. Now what?
By Jon Couture October 6, 2021 | 1:02 PM This was always a fear of mine. When they had Judge, Sanchez, Hicks, Frazier, Severino, Tanaka, Chapman, etc., it really looked like were capable of winning multiple WSCs. They still could, but Cashman hasn't really done a lot to align everything.
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Oct 6, 2021 21:28:44 GMT -5
Red Sox Stats @redsoxstats · 5h Since 2001 - baseball's age of enlightenment - Cashman has spent about $4.4 Billion on Yankees' payrolls to win 1 championship 13 seasons ago.
The Yankees entered the year with a collection of talent that rivaled the Dodgers. Overwhelming AL favorites. But they didn't fortify like the Red Sox in 2018 - instead they maneuvered to get under the luxury tax before giving up a bunch of good prospects at the deadline. Sad. They still had a good team, but Cashman waited too long to make the improvements that everyone thought was necessary early on. It was impossible to miss the fact that they had no lefty hitters.
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Post by Kimmi on Oct 7, 2021 16:57:01 GMT -5
Bryan Hoch @bryanhoch · 5h Aaron Boone: "The league has closed the gap on us. We've got to get better in every aspect."
Lou Merloni @loumerloni · 5h Closed the Gap? When was the last time the Yankees won a World Series? Exactly Lou. The Yankees have been surpassed.
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Post by Kimmi on Oct 7, 2021 16:59:46 GMT -5
John Tomase @jtomase · 8h This crowd is legitimately making a difference. Crazy energy. Red Sox are feeding off it. The crowd was crazy. I wasn't even there and I could feel the energy. The loudest I've heard it in a long while.
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Post by Kimmi on Oct 7, 2021 17:02:10 GMT -5
One more thing I know there are flashier , better defensive, outspoken short stops in MLB but I take Xander Bogartes 7 days a week. Tough division battle tested, few WS rings, leader on the team.
I'm right with you Jon.
I am so happy for Xander for having such a great game, both offensively and defensively. He deserves it.
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Post by Kimmi on Oct 7, 2021 17:03:27 GMT -5
Nathan Eovaldi’s dominance in Red Sox Wild Card win, cements his ace status, postseason legacy | Matt VautourPublished: 6:20 a.m. Nate Freakin' Eovaldi.
That is all.
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