BOSTON — The Yankees know what a good bullpen looks like. They’ve fed off one all year. They’ve seen how satisfying it can be shortening…
BOSTON — The Yankees know what a good bullpen looks like. They’ve fed off one all year. They’ve seen how satisfying it can be shortening games, daring opponents to take them down early lest they get caught in the vortex of shut-down relievers who start running in during the sixth inning or so and never stop.
They also know what a shaky pen looks like.
And if there is one thing to salve the disappointment of this 5-4 loss to the Red Sox on Friday night, Game 1 of their long-awaited AL Division Series, it has to be this: the Yankees are going to keep getting cracks at the Sox’s bullpen, a bullpen that is full of cracks. They’ll get a bunch of hacks against the hacks who litter that pen.
It will be enough at some point.
It was almost enough Friday.
“We just ran out of time,” Aaron Boone said.
For five innings, it was a party at Fenway Park, an unbridled keg party. The Sox jumped to a quick 3-0 lead that quickly became 5-0. Chris Sale, who wears No. 41 on his back but could have easily subbed one of the Riddler’s question marks instead given the shaky status of his billion-dollar left arm across the season’s last two months, was cruising.
Whatever angst might have been loitering around this city — and, given the fact the Sox won 108 games this year, there was a surprising surplus of it — was quelled. Life was good. Life was wicked good.
And then it wasn’t.
The Red Sox spent close to a quarter of a billion dollars assembling this team that ransacked baseball start to finish. Yet they skimped on adding bullpen help at both the July 31 and Aug. 31 deadlines. They watched the Yankees acquire Zach Britton. They watched the Indians get Brad Hand. Hell, they watched the A’s get Jeurys Familia.
They stayed put. For a team that spares no expense, it seemed an odd choice. And so for the most part, the Sox’s pitching philosophy much of this year has mostly been this:
1. Get six good innings from the starter.
2. Wear out rosary beads for the next two.
3. Then summon Craig Kimbrel and his 99-mph gas.
Sale never did get through the sixth, and so the bullpen door swung open and it wasn’t just a parade of pedestrian pitchers who came on running through, it was hope — aimed at the Yankees — and angst — proffered to the 39,059 nervous wrecks populating the grandstand, the bleachers and the Monster Seats.
“You want to try to get their pen in the game,” Yankees first baseman Luke Voit said, not even bothering to camouflage the Yankees’ most critical blueprint for success in this series. “We’re trying to get those guys in.”
Said Brett Gardner: “We knew we could put a lot of pressure on them.”
Sale left with an empty tank with one out in the sixth after delivering 93 pitches, a superb performance, but he was gassed. He left two runners on; both scored thanks to the largesse of the Sox’s first two relievers, Ryan Brasier and Brandon Workman. Workman and Matt Barnes then tried to engineer 39,059 cases of cardiac arrest by loading the bases with none out in the seventh.
“To get 27 outs at this stage of the season,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora would say later, “is very diffilcult.”
He shook his head.
“And sometimes,” he said, “you have to go Plan B. Or Plan C.”
Plan B was a stunner: Rick Porcello, the Sox’s No. 3 starter, the Cy Young Award winner two years ago. Porcello got two quick outs in the eighth, allowed a scratch infield single to Gleyber Torres, and gave way to Plan C. That was Kimbrel.
And by then, the Yankees’ last best chance was gone.
“We never could get that back-breaking hit,” Boone said.
But they kept getting their chances. They loaded the bases in back-to-back innings. Torres drove the count against Workman full in the sixth before striking out; Giancarlo Stanton fanned against Barnes for the out that halted their momentum with the bases jammed and no outs in the seventh.
They had their chances.
There will be others. Kimbrel is outstanding, but he’s not getting any 11-out saves, and even he provided one last burst of hope (or despair, depending on where you were sitting) by surrendering a homer to Aaron Judge leading off the ninth. Cora has a lot of options out there, few of them good ones.
“We almost caught them,” Boone said. Next time, they just might. Given what we saw Friday, next time they probably will.
