Yankees turned off the Klubot, and it still wasn’t enough
CLEVELAND — The cruelest of ironies hit these Yankees at the worst time.
Who had them beating up on Corey Kluber … and still losing this American League Division Series Game 2?
“It sucks,” Aaron Hicks said in a deathly silent Yankees clubhouse after the Yankees dropped an agonizing 9-8 game in 13 innings to fall behind 2-0 in this best-of-five event. “We had opportunities to keep pushing, keep fighting. We didn’t really quite push away and get that tiger in.”
The tiger is out now in the form of anti-Joe Girardi venom. Good grief, has the Yankees manager registered a worse game in his 10 years on the job? Whether you’re an error-of-omission (leaving in Chad Green and David Robertson too long) or error-of-commission (taking out CC Sabathia too soon) type, or whether you just want to see Lonnie Chisenhall’s sixth-inning hit-by-pitch challenged, Girardi checked all of the boxes.
That this all transpired in a game in which the Yankees entered with a seemingly low chance of winning, and they proceeded to build an 8-3 lead over the probable AL Cy Young Award winner, well, … it’s legendary for all of the wrong reasons.
What transpired here was unfathomable, unpredictable — and unassailable. It happened. The Yankees will have to live with the consequences.
Kluber entered the night with a 1.42 ERA in his prior 12 starts, totaling 89 innings, having struck out 104 and walked nine (thanks, Baseball-Reference.com). In only one of those starts, Aug. 13 at Tampa Bay, did he allow as many as three runs. In each and every one of those starts, he pitched at least five innings to qualify for a win. Twice in this stretch, he faced the Yankees and permitted a total of three runs over 17 innings.
Hence the shock here when, after Kluber walked the game’s second batter, Aaron Judge, the third batter, Gary Sanchez, ripped a Mike Piazza-esque, line-drive, opposite-field homer to right-center for an instant 2-0 Yankees lead.
“We weren’t swinging at bad pitches,” Sanchez said through an interpreter. “We were swinging at good pitches to hit. We had good results.”
For even after Sabathia quickly gave back that lead and then some, the Indians going ahead 3-2 in the bottom of the second, the Yankees went right back after Kluber. In the top of the third, with two outs and Sanchez on second base, Starlin Castro lined a base hit past a diving Francisco Lindor into left field, bringing Sanchez home with the tying run. Greg Bird lined a single to right, moving Castro to third. And Hicks ripped a three-run homer to right field, giving the Yankees a 6-3 advantage.
And like that, the Klubot was unplugged with a line of six runs allowed in 2 ²/₃ innings, Terry Francona coming to get his No. 1 starter out of Game 2 in favor of (very brief) former Yankee Tyler Olson. As baseball stats guru Katie Sharp noted on Twitter, it marked the first time in Kluber’s career that he allowed six or more runs in an appearance of less than three innings.
“Klubes just fought his command right from the get-go,” Francona said. “In the third, when you’re around 75 pitches into the third, that kind of speaks volumes. He was having trouble working ahead. Then he was having trouble finishing hitters. And guys that he’s handled in the past were — obviously, the Hicks home run was a huge blow. It was just, you know, he was fighting his mechanics from the get-go.”
Man, oh man, however, these Indians are good. So they fought their way back, Lindor following the Chisenhall oddity with a grand slam off Green to pull the home team within 8-7 and Jay Bruce launching a solo eighth-inning blast off Robertson to tie the game. By the time Yan Gomes grounded the game-winning single in the 13th, scoring Austin Jackson from second, the Yankees looked more fatigued than Evan Drake in the “Cheers” episode when Rebecca gets trapped in his closet.
If the Yankees somehow can win the next two games in The Bronx and bring it back here for a Game 5, which Kluber is on course to start, then they at least would know they can beat this guy. That they did beat this guy. And that should provide the smallest of consolation.
They re-digested a more painful lesson, though: Beating the starting pitcher doesn’t guarantee you’ll beat the team.