River Avenue Blues

Fan Confidence Poll: April 22nd, 2019

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Record Last Week: 5-1 (36 RS, 19 RA)
Season Record: 11-10 (109 RS, 82 RA, 13-8 expected record)
Scheduled This Week: Four games at Angels (Mon. to Thurs.); Three games at Giants (Fri. to Sun.)

Top stories from last week:

  • Following Monday’s off-day, the Yankees welcomed the Red Sox to the Bronx. James Paxton dominated in Tuesday’s 8-0 win and Brett Gardner’s late grand slam led to Wednesday’s 5-3 win and the two-game series sweep.
  • The Royals came to town next. The Yankees were flat in Thursday’s 6-1 loss, but they rebounded nicely in Friday’s 6-2 win and Saturday’s 9-2 win. Austin Romine came up big in Sunday’s 7-6 win.
  • Injury Updates: Aaron Judge (oblique) was placed on the injured list with a “pretty significant” strain. Greg Bird (foot) was placed on the injury list with a torn plantar fascia. Gary Sanchez (calf) will play a minor league rehab game today and rejoin the Yankees on Wednesday as long as everything goes well. Aaron Hicks (back) has started hitting in the cage. Miguel Andujar (shoulder) has increased his hitting and throwing. Troy Tulowitzki (calf) has resumed baseball activities. Jacoby Ellsbury (hip) has been slowed by various setbacks. Estevan Florial (wrist) had his cast removed and is close to beginning baseball activities.
  • The Yankees signed Logan Morrison to a minor league deal following Bird’s injury. Mike Ford and Thairo Estrada were called up last week to help cover for injuries.
  • Gio Gonzalez opted out of his minor league contract over the weekend. The Yankees have 48 hours to release him or add him to the roster.

Please take a second to answer the poll below and give us an idea how confident you are in the Yankees. You can view the interactive Fan Confidence Graph anytime via the Features tab in nav bar above, or by clicking here. Thanks in advance for voting.

Given the team's current roster construction, farm system, management, etc., how confident are you in the Yankees' overall future?
View Results

Yankees 7, Royals 6: Saved by Austin Romine

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Well, it wasn’t the prettiest game you’ll ever see, but a win is a win is a win. The Yankees survived an epic bullpen meltdown Sunday afternoon to pick up a 7-6 walk-off win against the Royals in ten innings. First walk-off win and first extra-innings game of the season. Also, the Yankees have won five of their last six games. Sweet.

(Presswire)

The Paxton Express
Although he was not quite as sharp as he was last time out, this is back-to-back dandies for James Paxton. He tossed six scoreless innings Sunday and joined David Cone as the only Yankees to strike out 12+ batters in back-to-back starts. Three hits and one walk. At one point spanning the second though fifth innings Paxton struck out eight of nine batters faced, with only an infield single mixed in.

Paxton’s formula Sunday was very simple. He attacked the Royals with elevated fastballs, and buried the cutter and curveball down in the zone and in the dirt. Here are his pitch locations:

That is Paxton at his best. His fastball is so good — Paxton averaged 95.1 mph and topped out at 97.8 mph with his heater Sunday, down a tick from his last outing but still excellent overall — that he can pitch up in the zone with it and have success even against great hitters. The cutter and curveball change eye levels and keep hitters honest. It is brutally effective when done right and Paxton has done it right the last two times out.

The final line: 6 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 12 K on 104 pitches. Paxton generated 20 swings and misses for the third time in five starts. Mike Clevinger, Gerrit Cole, and Blake Snell are the only other pitchers with 20+ swings and misses in multiple games this year. They’ve done it twice each. Paxton has struck out 24 of 50 batters faced in his last two starts and has a 37.4% strikeout rate on the season. Also a 3.10 ERA (2.41 FIP). Pretty rad.

Building A Lead
For seven innings, Sunday’s game was as easy and stress-free as it gets. Paxton was cruising and the offense put up some early runs against Jorge Lopez. DJ LeMahieu almost single-handedly built a first inning run by doubling down the right field line, advancing to third on Luke Voit’s deep fly ball, and scoring on a wild pitch. A Mike Ford double and an Austin Romine single, both with two outs, created a run in the second inning.

The Yankees broke the game open — or so we thought — in the fifth inning. Voit and Brett Gardner had back-to-back singles with one out, setting up Clint Frazier for the long three-run home run into the left field bleachers. It cleared the visitor’s bullpen. Look at this blast:

I do not want to think about where these depleted Yankees would be without Frazier. He is hitting .339/.358/.661 (164 wRC+) in the early going and he leads the team in pretty much every meaningful offensive category. That home run was his sixth of the season and it ties him with Gary Sanchez for the team lead. With Paxton cruising and a nice little 5-0 lead, it seemed like the Yankees were well on their way to win. Alas.

The Eighth Inning of Doom
Paxton actually went out to start the seventh inning, but a single and a walk later, he was out of the game, and in came Tommy Kahnle. A strikeout, a fly ball, and a strikeout later, the inning was over. Seems like Tommy Tightpants has climbed the bullpen pecking order a bit. At this point, I can’t say it’s undeserved, even though he’s not all the way back to 2017 Kahnle yet.

The wheels came off in the eighth inning. The Yankees had a 5-0 lead and the bottom of the lineup was due up for the miserable Royals, so it seemed like a safe spot for the struggling Chad Green. I mean, if you can’t use him then, when do you? A single, a walk, and a single later, the bases were loaded with no outs, and Adam Ottavino was on his way in from the bullpen. Green has allowed ten runs and put 15 runners on base in 7.1 innings. Bad. Very bad.

Ottavino, for the first time as a Yankee, had a disaster outing. Adalberto Mondesi dunked a double into right field to score two runs, then Ottavino left a spinner right out over the plate to Alex Gordon …

… who promptly deposited it into the right field seats for a game-tying home run. The Yankees went into the eighth inning with a 5-0 lead. Five batters later, the game was tied. One batter after that, the Royals had the lead. Hunter Dozier followed Gordon’s home run with a solo homer of his own. The back-to-back shots turned a 5-2 lead into a 6-5 deficit. Gross.

I know this is the “blame the manager, coaches, and trainers first” era, but come on, that inning is squarely on Green and Ottavino. No need to overthink this. Green couldn’t retire a batter while facing the bottom of the lineup with a five-run lead and Ottavino threw some junky pitches out over the plate. The right guys were in the game in the right spots as far as I’m concerned. They just coughed it up.

Save By Romine, Twice
Fortunately, the game did end after the Gordon and Dozier homers. In fact, the Yankees answered right back in the next half-inning. Tauchman started the bottom of the eighth inning with a double and Romine brought him home with a two-out single through the left side. I was totally cool with Gio Urshela not bunting after the double. Tauchman’s already in scoring position! Give yourself three chances to bring him!

Anyway, Romine tied the game in the eighth inning and Aroldis Chapman kept it tied with some yeoman’s work in the ninth. He gave up a leadoff single to the speedy Billy Hamilton, who was on third base with one out two stolen bases later. Chapman struck out Mondesi and got Gordon to fly out to center — Gardner nearly lost the ball in the sun — to strand the runner. Heck of a job by Chapman to escape that mess.

Welcome to the big leagues, Thairo Estrada. Jake Diekman started the tenth inning rally by gifting the Yankees two runners. He walked Tauchman and Urshela to start the frame. Estrada made his MLB debut as a pinch-bunter for Ford. Estrada got it down, the runners moved up, and Romine again came through for the Yankees. This time he slammed what goes into the history books as a walk-off single, but was really a legit double into the right-center field gap.

Three hits for Romine and three runs driven in. All three hits came with runners in scoring position. Great day for the backup-turned-temporary starting catcher. With literally two-thirds of the starting lineup on the injured list, the Yankees are going to need some backups and fill-ins to have random big games to stay in the race, and Romine most certainly had one Sunday. What a game for him. First career walk-off hit too.

Leftovers
Zack Britton allowed a leadoff single in the top of the tenth and promptly picked off pinch-runner Terrance Gore. That was unexpected and I say that only because Gore is crazy fast and a dynamite baserunner. Britton caught him napping and Gore was stuck in a rundown. Kahnle, Chapman, and Britton did some mighty fine work out of the bullpen. Green and Ottavino? Not so much.

Three hits for Romine and also three hits for Gardner, the No. 3 hitter. Two hits for Tauchman as well, including his first single as a Yankee. Four doubles, three homers, one single this far. Ford’s double into the left-center field gap was his first MLB hit, so that’s cool. Also, Voit extended his MLB leading on-base streak to 32 games. Longest by a Yankee since Aaron Judge had a 32-gamer in 2017.

Box Score, WPA Graph & Standings
For the box score and updated standings, go to MLB.com. For the updated standings, go to ESPN. Here’s our Bullpen Workload page and here’s the bananas win probability graph:


Source: FanGraphs

Up Next
The final homestand of the RAB era is over and the Yankees are now heading out on a nine-game, ten-day West Coast road trip. Four games against the Angels, three games against the Giants, then two games against the Diamondbacks. J.A. Happ and Matt Harvey are the scheduled starters for Monday night’s series opener in Anaheim. That is a 10:07pm ET start.

Game 21: Win it for Judge

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(Elsa/Getty)

Another day, another injury. And it was maybe the worst injury of all. The Yankees lost Aaron Judge to a “pretty significant” left oblique strain yesterday. Obliques are rarely “spend ten days on the injured list and come back good as new” injuries. It’s going to take some time for Judge and his massive oblique to heal up, and then get up to game speed.

“I truly feel it will make it sweeter after going through all of this,” Aaron Boone told Joel Sherman following yesterday’s win. “We have a resilient group. We are getting plenty of good news with players making progress working their way back. We will find our way through this. As I told Aaron before he left, this will make it all sweeter when we get to where we want to go.”

The injuries are getting comical at this point, but what can you do? Just cross your fingers and hope no one else gets hurt. On the bright side, the Yankees have won four of their last five games and five of their last seven games. Keep it going, next man up, etc. etc. Here are today’s split squad lineups:

New York Yankees
1. 2B DJ LeMahieu
2. DH Luke Voit
3. CF Brett Gardner
4. RF Clint Frazier
5. LF Mike Tauchman
6. 3B Gio Urshela
7. 1B Mike Ford
8. C Austin Romine
9. SS Tyler Wade

LHP James Paxton

Kansas City Royals
1. 2B Whit Merrifield
2. SS Adalberto Mondesi
3. LF Alex Gordon
4. 1B Hunter Dozier
5. RF Jorge Soler
6. 3B Chris Owings
7. DH Lucas Duda
8. C Martin Maldonado
9. CF Billy Hamilton

RHP Jorge Lopez

It is a bit cloudy in New York, but otherwise it’s a pleasant afternoon for a ballgame. Today’s homestand finale will begin at 1:05pm ET and the YES Network will have the broadcast. Enjoy the game.

Injury Update: Gary Sanchez (calf) will play his rehab game with Low-A Charleston tomorrow and, as long as everything goes well, he’ll join the Yankees on Tuesday and be activated Wednesday. Triple-A Scranton and Double-A Trenton are both on the road tomorrow. Charleston’s the closest affiliate for a warm weather game … Jacoby Ellsbury (hip) has “had some things” pop up that have slowed his rehab. He’s yet to ramp up baseball activities. Congrats to the Steinbrenners on the insurance money … Gleyber Torres is fine. Just a rest day.

Roster Move: In case you missed it earlier, Thairo Estrada was called up to replace Judge on the roster. Wade is the backup outfielder right now. Also, the Thairo call-up announcement was kinda weird yesterday. “The Yankees expect INF Thairo Estrada to replace OF Aaron Judge on the roster tomorrow,” is how they announced it. Usually they explicitly say this player will be called up, not they “expect” this player to be called up. That leads me to believe Brian Cashman was working the phones hard looking for another outfielder after the Judge injury.

Update: Aaron Judge placed on 10-day injured list with oblique strain, Thairo Estrada recalled

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(Jim McIsaac/Getty)

Sunday, 11:01am ET: As expected, Judge has been placed on the 10-day injured list, the Yankees announced. Aaron Boone called it a “pretty significant” strain and did not have a timetable for Judge’s return. Thairo Estrada was called up to fill the roster spot for the time being. The Yankees now have 13 players on the injured list.

Saturday, 4:34pm ET: Judge has a left oblique issue and is heading for an MRI, the Yankees announced. “Probably not, no” Aaron Boone said when asked whether Judge might be able to avoid the injured list.

3:17pm ET: Well this is potentially terrible. Aaron Judge exited this afternoon’s game with an apparent injury after a single to right field in the sixth inning. Replays showed him grabbing at his left side, which is a pretty good indication it’s his oblique, but we’ll see. He did not appear to lobby to stay in.

Here’s video of the injury:

Judge is the Yankees’ best hitter and best all-around player, and, as we saw last year, they are not the same team without him in the lineup. Losing him for any stretch of time would be devastating even if the Yankees were perfectly healthy otherwise. That is most certainly not the case though.

The Yankees do not have any 40-man roster outfielders in Triple-A Scranton. They’re all in the big leagues already. Trey Amburgey, Billy Burns, and Zack Zehner are the healthy actual outfielders with the RailRiders right now. First baseman Ryan McBroom can play some outfield as well.

Gary Sanchez is expected back next week and Giancarlo Stanton maybe not too long after that. The Yankees will probably have to roll with a Clint Frazier-Brett Gardner-Mike Tauchman outfield until Stanton (or Judge) returns, with Mike Ford at DH. Yeesh.

The Yankees have not yet released an update on Judge — the injury just happened a few minutes ago — and, if it is indeed his oblique, he’s likely heading for an MRI and whatnot. Could be a little while before we get definitive word about anything. Keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned.

Feeling Young Again: The Transformation of CC Sabathia

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(Mike Stobe/Getty)

While both were inevitable, the impending closures of RAB and CC Sabathia’s career still seem hard to fathom. Both have been fixtures for Yankee fans for over a decade now and 2020 and beyond will be strange without them for those of us that have known nothing but. Sabathia’s tenure with the Yankees has had three distinct sections: four years of excellence, three years of awfulness, and three plus of reinvention. When I looked that up, I could’ve sworn the bad period of his time here was longer. We were so used to Sabathia being so good for so long–before and during his time as a Yankee–that his struggles felt interminable.

They felt so interminable that in late June of 2015, I wrote a rather fatalistic piece about Sabathia’s struggles to that point. The opening:

To paraphrase The Wonder Years, growing up means watching your heroes turn human in front of you. This process is never easy in sports. Professional athletes have this marvelous–and marvelously frustrating–habit of making what they do look incredibly easy, like they could do it forever and ever, as naturally as anything you and I do. Then, the cliff shows up. Sometimes the decline is slow and gradual. Other times, the player pulls a Wile E. Coyote and looks down, plummeting dramatically. For CC Sabathia, and we Yankee fans who’ve had to “grow up” this season, it’s been a combination of those things. Sabathia’s performance has dropped off considerably, but it’s been going on for two and a half years now. Watching Sabathia, someone we’ve loved and revered for so long, go through this has been painful (granted, I’m sure it’s 100 times more painful for him).

And the closing:

I won’t pretend to know what the answer is for Sabathia because I’m not sure there really is one. He’s not the same type of pitcher that Andy Pettitte was, so an Andy-Style reinvention probably isn’t going to happen. This One Bad Inning Syndrome doesn’t scream “Make me a reliever!” either. But running him out there every fifth day has already been bad and probably won’t get better. Since 2013, we’ve had to watch CC turn from hero to human; I’m not sure if we’ll ever see him as a hero again. Growing up sucks.

At that point, and given the rest of the year, that sentiment made sense. But it turned out to be the wrong sentiment altogether. That wasn’t the end of Sabathia, but a new beginning. He did turn himself into an Andy Pettitte style pitcher, relying on a cutter and location to get hitters out instead of raw stuff. He’s leveraged that into consistently weak contact against him and since 2016, including his two starts this year, he’s had a 3.68 ERA. His innings totals–like his pitch speed–have dropped off, but he found a new way to be effective.

All of that speaks to the immense talent that Sabathia has as a pitcher. There are few pitchers that would be able to do what Sabathia has done to change himself, even if they wanted to (which I assume all of them would). When J.A. Happ jokingly asked CC about pitching to the corners during CC’s post game a week or so back, I thought of the difference between the two of them. Happ–never a flamethrower, but nonetheless effective–will likely have a harder time adjusting to aging because he’s starting from a lower level than Sabathia. That’s relatively speaking, of course, since Happ–like all professional athletes–is better at baseball than any of us will ever be at anything. Sabathia, though, is just that much better. Every MLB player is driven and motivated to succeed in many ways. But few have the talent to make it come true in more ways than one.

In closing, this brings me back to the song I referenced in that June 2015 post. The line I paraphrased is as follows: “Growing up means watching my heroes turn human in front of me.” And, again, at the time, that made sense. But I should’ve been paying attention to the next line of the song: “And the songs we wrote at eighteen seem shortsighted and naive.” It was right there in front of me and I was too shortsighted and naive to think CC would turn it around. Well, he did and endeared himself to Yankee fans more than he already had.

DotF: Castillo extends hitting streak, Garcia goes deep again in Tampa’s loss

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Just a heads up, there will be no DotF tomorrow. None of the affiliates have games scheduled for Easter Sunday. Not sure if that’s intentional or a coincidence. I feel like I would remember it if they do that each year. Whatever. Anyway, no DotF tomorrow for that reason. Don’t wait around.

Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders Game One was suspended due to rain in the top of the third inning. Here’s the box score. It wasn’t loading properly when I wrote this, but maybe it’ll work by time you click it. The game will be completed when they play Buffalo in June.

Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders Game Two was rained out. It’ll be made up as part of a doubleheader during that June series.

The Double-A Trenton Thunder were rained out. The game will be made up as part of a July 2nd doubleheader.

High-A Tampa Tarpons (2-1 loss to Clearwater)

  • CF Pablo Olivares: 0-4
  • 2B Diego Castillo: 1-4 — 9-for-25 (.360) during his seven-game hitting streak after starting the season 1-for-34 (.029)
  • DH Oswaldo Cabrera: 0-4
  • 1B Dermis Garcia: 1-4, 1 R, 1 HR, 1 RBI, 1 K — fifth homer of the season was an inside-the-parker … 8-for-21 (.381) with two doubles and four homers in his last five games
  • RF Isiah Gilliam: 1-2, 1 HBP — got picked off first
  • C Donny Sands: 0-3, 2 K
  • RHP Rony Garcia: 5 IP, 5 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 5 K, 2/4 GB/FB — 50 of 80 pitches were strikes (63%) … 22/6 K/BB in 18.1 innings thus far

Low-A Charleston RiverDogs (3-1 win over Augusta)

  • LF Brandon Lockridge: 1-4, 1 2B, 2 RBI, 1 K
  • 2B Kyle Gray: 0-3, 1 BB, 2 K
  • CF Josh Stowers: 1-4, 1 K — 9-for-21 (.429) during his five-game hitting streak
  • 3B Nelson Gomez: 1-4, 1 R, 1 HR, 1 RBI, 1 K, 1 E (missed catch) — 5-for-17 (.294) with a double and three homers in his last five games
  • DH Canaan Smith: 1-4, 1 R
  • RHP Luis Medina: 5 IP, 8 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 5 K, 4/1 GB/FB — 48 of 77 pitches were strikes (62%) … getting progressively better each time out
  • RHP Shawn Semple: 4 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 4 K, 2/3 GB/FB — 37 of 52 pitches were strikes (71%) … 30/2 K/BB in 17 innings now … I can’t imagine he’ll be down here much longer, he’s not being challenged

The Short Season Staten Island Yankees, Rookie Pulaski Yankees, and two Rookie Gulf Coast League Yankees teams begin play in June.

Yankees 9, Royals 2: Yankees win but lose Judge to injury

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The Yankees knocked various Royals pitchers around Saturday afternoon en route to a 9-2 victory and their fourth win in the last five games, yet none of that seems to matter. Aaron Judge exited the game with an oblique injury. That would be devastating even if the rest of the Yankees were healthy, which they most certainly are not. Whoever has the 2019 Yankees voodoo doll, please stop.

(Presswire)

The Home Run Robbery That Didn’t Matter
The Yankees wasted no time getting to Heath Fillmyer on Saturday afternoon. Judge hit Fillmyer’s seventh pitch into the short porch for a first inning 1-0 lead, and Clint Frazier hit Fillmyer’s 19th pitch into the short porch for a second inning 2-0 lead. It’s early, I know, but man is it awesome to watch Frazier do what he’s doing after the injuries last year and his Spring Training struggles.

For a brief moment in the third inning, the Yankees led this game 5-0. DJ LeMahieu walked and Luke Voit singled, setting up Gleyber Torres for the three-run home run. Except it was not a home run. The play was reviewed and MLB’s central replay crew determined the fan interfered with Alex Gordon, and called Torres out. Here’s the video:

Clearly, the fan did interfere with Gordon. He bumped into Gordon’s glove as he reached for the ball. MLB Rule 3.16 covers this type of play:

No interference shall be allowed when a fielder reaches over a fence, railing, rope or into a stand to catch a ball. He does so at his own risk. However, should a spectator reach out on the playing field side of such fence, railing or rope, and plainly prevent the fielder from catching the ball, then the batsman should be called out for the spectator’s interference.

The call on the field was home run, which means the replay crew in Chelsea saw clear and convincing evidence the fan reached over in to the field of play to interfere with Gordon. That’s what allowed them to call Torres out and send the runners back to first and second bases. That is … questionable. Questionable and also a high-impact call at that point in the game:

  • Win probably after three-run homer (5-0 lead): 94.3%
  • Win probability after call was overturned (2-0 lead): 75.8%

Aaron Boone predictably stormed out of the dugout and gave the umpires the business even though the call was out of their hands. It was MLB’s central replay crew. Still, gotta stick up for the team there, even in a no-win argument, and Boone did that. Frazier popped up as the next batter to end the inning and strand the two runners. Gah.

Fortunately, Gleyber’s non-homer ultimately did not matter. In the very next inning Mike Tauchman socked a three-run homer — Tauchman is capitalizing on an opportunity in a way Greg Bird was unable to the last four years — and LeMahieu followed with a solo homer, his first as a Yankee and the 50th of his career. Tauchman and LeMahieu combined for the Yankees’ first set of back-to-back homers this season. Why’s everyone so surprised?

LeMahieu’s homer snapped his 0-for-15 skid and Tauchman now has three home runs in the past five days. Not too bad for a guy who hit one (1) homer in 129 Triple-A games in 2016. Tauchman embraced a launch angle approach two years ago and the Yankees had him on their radar for a while — earlier this week Boone said the Yankees were eyeing Tauchman last year — and now things are working out for everyone. Also, fun fact: Tauchman does not have a single this season. He is 6-for-29 (.207) with three doubles and three homers.

(Presswire)

Terrific Tanaka
Weirdly, Masahiro Tanaka started his afternoon by walking two of the first four batters he faced. This is a dude with a 5.5% walk rate the last three seasons. He walked back-to-back batters before giving up the grand slam in his last start, then walked two of the first four batters he faced Saturday. Huh. That’s unusual. Fortunately Tanaka was able to strand the two runners and the walks led to nothing.

Following the second walk, Tanaka retired eleven of the next 14 batters he faced, and he stranded a runner at third with no outs in the third inning. Voit whiffed on Billy Hamilton’s grounder (78.5 mph exit velocity) and it rolled into the right corner, which gave Hamilton plenty of time to race to third. Tanaka bounced back to strikeout Whit Merrifield and Adalberto Mondesi, Kansas City’s two best hitters, before getting the inning-ending ground out.

It wasn’t until the Yankees had a 6-1 lead in the sixth inning that Tanaka gave up the #obligatoryhomer, and that’s not a big deal at all as far as I’m concerned. If you’re gonna give up a solo homer, that’s a good time to do it. The Royals were patient in the first inning, so Tanaka adjusted and started throwing his splitter and (especially) slider for strikes at the knees. They had little chance after that.

Tanaka’s final line: 7 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 3 BB, 7 K, 1 HR on 94 pitches. Only the second time he’s walked three batters in back-to-back starts in his MLB career. That is three very good to great starts and one dud start for Tanaka so far this season. He’s sitting on a 2.76 ERA (3.31 FIP) with 23.9% strikeouts, 6.9% walks, and 53.8% grounders through 29.1 innings. Hard to expect Tanaka to pitch better than he has this season. What a stud.

Leftovers
The Yankees added insurance runs late in the game. Torres and Frazier singled in runs in the sixth inning and Austin Romine singled in a run in the seventh. Every starter reached base at least once and seven of the nine starters reached base multiple times. Torres went 1-for-5 with a single but had that homer taken away, and also had a single taken away when the pitch threw out his glove to snag a hard-hit grounder. Tough day.

Frazier was a triple short of the cycle — he already has four three-hit games this year, tied with Tim Anderson for the most in baseball — and is hitting .351/.371/.649 (169 wRC+) on the young season. Hell yeah. Between the injuries and his effectiveness, Frazier’s gone from cool story to indispensable in a hurry. Also, Gio Urshela had three hits as well. He’s hitting .321/.406/.464 (142 wRC+).

Jonathan Holder was the only reliever used and he labored a bit (2 IP, 2 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 1 BB, 1 K, 1 HR), including giving up a solo home run to Chris Owings, who once upon a time I said I preferred to Didi Gregorius. True story. I figured Holder had some home run rate regressing coming his way this year. He allowed four in 66 innings last year. He’s allowed two in eleven innings so far this season.

And finally, Voit’s third inning single extended his MLB leading on-base streak to 31 games. It is the longest such streak by a Yankee since Judge had a 32-gamer in 2017. The longest prior to that was Derek Jeter’s 36-gamer spanning 2012-13. Voit can match Judge’s streak in the series finale Sunday.

Box Score, WPA Graph & Standings
MLB.com has the box score and video highlights, ESPN has the updated standings, and here’s our Bullpen Workload page. Here’s the win probability graph:


Source: FanGraphs

Up Next
The series finale and the homestand finale. The Yankees and Royals wrap up this four-game set Sunday afternoon with another 1:05pm ET start. James Paxton and Jorge Lopez are the scheduled starting pitchers. Hopefully no one else gets hurt.