Yankees keep finding new ways to rack up victories
BALTIMORE — For six games, the Golden State Warriors have been slathered in praise for remembering how to win without Kevin Durant. Durant may be the best basketball player on the planet, but he hurt his calf with two minutes to go in the third quarter of Game 5 of the Warriors’ Western Conference semifinals with the Rockets.
The Warriors won that game. They won Game 6 in Houston. Then they swept the Blazers in four straight games, spotting Portland double-digit leads in the third quarter a couple of times. No Durant, no worries for the Warriors. The other guys stepped up, stepped forward, stepped on the Rockets’ necks, squashed the Blazers’ souls. Good stuff. Great team.
That’s six games. For the Yankees, it’s been six weeks. Six weeks ago, on April 12, the Yankees dropped a 9-6 game in a rain-shortened quagmire to the White Sox. They were 5-8. They had already lost Giancarlo Stanton and Gary Sanchez. They were a week away from losing Aaron Judge. They were about to welcome a gaggle of no-names to the party, and they’d all figure a way to be part of the puzzle soon enough, but it did look grim.
They are 27-9 since. They won for the fifth straight time Thursday afternoon at Camden Yards, 6-5, the final touches coming as the skies over Baltimore began to resemble those over Dorothy and Toto’s farm in Kansas. They won despite coughing up a four-run lead in the eighth, despite Masahiro Tanaka nearly being taken out by a magic bullet of a line drive.
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And they won because they’ve gotten so proficient at winning in spite of themselves, in spite of their injuries, in spite of an epic run of bad luck that they won again despite voluntarily giving Gleyber Torres and Sanchez most of the day off. Torres and Sanchez have been swinging bats so scorching that a whiff of kerosene has been accompanying their rocket blasts toward the far reaches of the ballpark lately.
Before the game, Aaron Boone told both of them to stay off their feet and be ready in case they were needed.
“I’ll be ready to pinch hit,” Torres told his manager. “I’ll be ready to help the team any way I can.”
So of course there arose a moment in the top of the ninth inning, after an easy walk in the park had turned more complicated, after 5-1 had become 5-5, after Orioles closer Mychal Givens had blazed through the first two Yankees in the inning. At that moment, the angry clouds hinted we might all be forced to stay here until early next week.
So Boone summoned Torres, who has treated Orioles pitching the way your dog treats a pile of Milk-Bones. So epic has Torres’ mastery of the Birds been that after another two-homer game Wednesday night Orioles manager Brandon Hyde threw his hands up and chose not to be subtle about his frustration with his own pitchers, quaking at the sight of No. 25.
“Gleyber has two homers besides facing the Orioles, and he’s hitting like .220 [actually it’s .250], so major league pitchers are pitching to him.” Asked if there should be a plan to pitch around him and Sanchez Hyde said: “Well, there’s definitely a pitching plan. It’s definitely not to throw the ball in the middle part of the plate.”
Givens clearly agreed. He walked Torres on a 3-2 pitch. Then Sanchez was summoned to pinch hit for Romine; Sanchez took a couple of mighty cuts, then took a diminished one, but when you are enjoying the kind of splurge Sanchez is the ball dunked in for a single.
And look: If you’ve watched the Yankees (and the Orioles, too, for that matter) for the last six weeks, what happened next seemed scripted. Givens issued a non-competitive walk to DJ LeMahieu to load the bases. He threw three straight balls to Aaron Hicks, none of them particularly close to the 410 area code. Hicks took a strike, fouled one off, then stared at ball four so wide it seemed closer to the third baseman than the catcher.
And the train chugs merrily on.
“We’re a team that’s going to score runs and do damage,” Hicks said. “The great thing about our team is that guys can take rest days. We never want to give up on games and there’s no need to because guys keep doing their jobs.”
Funny how that always seems to happen to good teams, whether a basketball team missing a star or a baseball team missing half its roster.
Six games or six weeks. Good stuff. Great team.
