The Yankees’ power and relief pitching carried them to a wild-card win over the Twins.
NEW YORK – The New York Yankees beat the Minnesota Twins, 8-4, in the AL wild-card game on Tuesday night to advance to the ALDS. They’ll head to Cleveland to kick off a best-of-5 set against the powerhouse Indians on Thursday.
The Yankees got a clunker of a start from ace Luis Severino and relied on their bullpen for 8 2/3 innings on Tuesday, and parts of their relief corps will still be taxed by the start of Game 1. But wild-card winners fare just as well as any other club in the postseason, and teams with on-paper advantages often fail to capitalize on them in the course of short series.
Here are five keys for the Yankees to win the World Series:
You know what’s a really effective way of scoring runs? Smashing monster dingers. And the Yankees, with the help of their postage-stamp of a ballpark, hit a ton of them. Their 241 longballs led the Majors this season. Towering slugger and Rookie of the Year lock Aaron Judge led the way with 52 in the regular season, then tacked on a line-drive shot to left in the wild-card game that padded the Yankees’ lead.
David Robertson during his wild-card win. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
Aroldis Chapman and Dellin Betances get a lot of the attention thanks to their overpowering stuff, but the Yankees’ bullpen is good all over. They’re hardly the only relief unit, and there’s a case to be made that their opponents in Cleveland have an even better one. But the club’s performance on Tuesday night showcased its remarkable depth in dominant relievers: David Robertson, Chad Green and Tommy Kahnle were all arguably better than Betances and Chapman during the regular season.
Presumably Joe Girardi will try to avoid using Robertson and Green in Game 1 on Thursday, but he’ll have plenty of good options regardless. Betances was shaky in September and Chapman faltered for a stretch in the late summer, but a little time off and some added postseason adrenaline should help them.
Masahiro Tanaka (USA TODAY Sports Images)
That the Yanks’ starting rotation represents the closest thing they have to a weakness just speaks to the strength of their lineup and bullpen, for the Yanks’ starting rotation is pretty good. But Severino took a swift beating on Tuesday, Masahiro Tanaka had a maddeningly inconsistent season, and Sonny Gray got torched in his final start in September.
The soft-tossing, 37-year-old version CC Sabathia might be the team’s safest bet for some solid innings, but at this point in his career he can no longer dominate the way Severino and Tanaka can when they’re at their best. The length of their relief set should help bail out starters on bad nights, but there’s only so many 1/3-inning starts a bullpen can cover.
Brett Gardner (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)
The Yanks led the AL in walks this season, and nearly everyone in their lineup can work counts and draw lots of pitches. The more they make opposing pitchers throw, naturally, the more likely they are to get to whatever soft spots exist on postseason staffs.
Though Trevor Bauer had a good season, Terry Francona’s decision to open the ALDS with his third-best starter feels at least a little like hubris. It buys ace Corey Kluber an extra day of rest after his final regular-season start on Saturday and lines up Kluber to pitch on full rest in a potential Game 5, but Bauer can be prone to escalating pitch counts early and the Yankees look well-suited to frustrate him. Forcing the Indians to burn the likes of Andrew Miller and Cody Allen early in the series could pay off later, though Miller, especially, showed few such limitations in last year’s postseason.
(Brad Penner/USA TODAY Sports)
(Brad Penner/USA TODAY Sports)
Everyone but Yankees fans hates the Yankees because the Yankees, for most of their history, have been That Team. And though I still live in the heart of Yankee territory, you wn’t have to explain your rationale for hatred for them to me: I grew up in New York City suburbs as a non-Yankees fan during the thick of their dynastic late-90s run, and it was completely insufferable.
But I am here to tell you that the 2017 version of the New York Yankees is so remarkably fun. They’ve got a bunch of massive dudes who hit monster homers, highlighted by the utterly lovable and impossibly tremendous Aaron Judge. They’ve got dudes you’ve never heard of coming out of the bullpen and striking out the galaxy. They’ve got fun celebrations in the dugout. Gary Sanchez already appears one of the game’s great catchers, with awesome power and a phenomenally strong arm. Newcomer Todd Frazier repped New Jersey in the Little League World Series and just seems like a generally dope dude. Didi Gregorius is legitimately wonderful in every way. Greg Bird looks like a 90s heartthrob and owns a cat that descended from Mr. Bigglesworth in Austin Powers.
Let the 2017 New York Yankees wash over you, America. You can the Pinstripes, you can hate the talk of Tradition and Legacy and #RE2PECT, you can hate the Monuments and the Legends and a good portion of their fan base, you can hate the way they spend money and the way they make it, you can hate that the new version of their stadium looks like a Vegas knockoff of a courthouse and that the plutocrats who own the seats behind home plate never seem to show up by game time and that there’s a giant ominous portrait of George Steinbrenner looming over right field and they’ve somehow even snuck in a corporate jingle as the music they play to celebrate strikeouts, but it’s really hard to hate the actual dudes on the real-live Yankees this season. Just embrace them, and forget about all the other stuff for a few weeks. It’s not like they’re wearing inarguably racist imagery on their hats or anything.
