Dan Martin, Post:
Bases loaded, no one out in the 12th inning of a one-run game, with Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton coming up.
What seemed like a setup for a YES Network Yankee Classic instead became the finale of a particularly ugly weekend in The Bronx, where the Yankees lost nearly as many games to the Orioles as they did players to the disabled list.
Judge, facing Baltimore closer Brad Brach, hit a comebacker that the pitcher turned into a 1-2-5 double play [the first in Orioles history!!]. And Stanton followed with yet another strikeout, his fifth of the afternoon in an 8-7 loss that took 4 hours, 48 minutes to play. ...
[T]he Yankees are limping into Boston, where they'll face the streaking Red Sox at Fenway Park on Tuesday.
In the meantime, they'll stew on this loss, their third in four games at home to the Orioles — and one in which they blew a 5-0 first-inning lead. ...
Stanton was booed after almost every at-bat ...
The Yankees ended an ugly weekend in the worst way possible, with an 8-7 loss to the Orioles that saw them blow several chances to pull out a win — including when Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton came up empty to end it.
Austin Romine and Didi Gregorius opened the 12th on Sunday with walks before Brett Gardner reached on a bunt that reliever Brad Brach mishandled to load the bases with no outs. But Judge then grounded a comebacker that Brach turned into a double play and the struggling Stanton ended it with his fifth strikeout in an 0-for-7 performance. ...
[New York] dropped three of four to a Baltimore team that entered the series with a five-game losing streak.
[T]he Yankees had a great chance to win the game in the 10th against ex-Yankee southpaw Richard Bleier, who threw three shutout innings.
Adam Jones lost Didi Gregorius' fly ball and it fell for a one-out double. Brett Gardner followed with a fly ball to left that a lunging Gentry barely managed to catch up to. Baltimore manager Buck Showalter elected to walk Judge intentionally to get to the struggling Stanton and Stanton grounded to third on the first pitch to end the inning.
Stanton heard boos again...
The Yankees looked like they were in for an easy win with a five-run first inning, instead they hit the road dropping three of their last four.
The Yankees blew a 5-0 lead and fell to the Orioles, 8-7, in 12 innings — their second extra inning loss of the weekend — and dropped the four-game series three to one. ...
The boos rained down on Stanton again as he finished 0-for-7 with five strikeouts.
Yankees starter Jordan Montgomery faltered after being handed a 5-0 lead in the first inning, allowing four runs on 10 hits and two walks through 4.1 innings. ...
Stanton now has 20 strikeouts in 42 at bats this season. ...
The Baltimore relievers held the Yankees to two runs in 11.1 innings as they crept back into the game and defeated the Bombers in extra innings for the second time in three days.
First Homestand As A Yankee
First game: 0-for-5, 5 strikeouts Last game: 0-for-7, 5 strikeouts Boos: Too many to countThis Season
Season (10 games): 7-for-42 (.167), 20 strikeouts Bases empty: 3-for-19 (.158) Men on base: 4-for-23 (.174) Men on second and/or third: 1-for-10 (.100) After Opening Day: 4-for-37 (.108), 19 strikeouts Six-Game Homestand: 3-for-28 (.107), 16 strikeouts Since March 31: 3-for-last-32 (.094), 17 strikeouts
This was predictable.
OK, maybe not two platinum sombreros in his first week wearing the pinstripes, or Giancarlo Stanton looking more lost at home plate than the titular band of "This Is Spinal Tap" wandering backstage in Cleveland.
But the game's highest-paid player, and the reigning National League Most Valuable Player, from a team that didn't play a meaningful September game in his eight seasons there, directing himself to the Yankees and then getting off to a lousy start and receiving an ocean of boos?
More predictable than rush-hour traffic in The Bronx.
The Yankees suffered a terrible, 12-inning, 8-7 loss to the Orioles Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, and you couldn't have drawn up a more fitting conclusion than the new guy Stanton receiving a situation to be the hero, only to wind up the goat once more. The big guy's strikeout against Baltimore right-hander Brad Brach, with teammates on first and second and two outs, concluded this four-hour, 48-minute slog — and followed Aaron Judge's 1-2-5 double play with the bases loaded and none out — and gave Stanton five whiffs on the day, tying his career high ... which he established in Tuesday's home opener.
In the six games of this homestand, during which the Yankees went a modest 3-3, Stanton posted a .107/.167/.214 slash line with one home run, two singles, two walks and ... wait for it ... 16 strikeouts in 27 at-bats. ...
Sunday proved quite a capper, as he stranded nine teammates and committed a throwing error in right field.
This is the nightmare scenario for any newcomer, but especially the one with the biggest contract in baseball, with the world watching to see if he can handle the bright lights in New York.
So now we're going to find out in a hurry about whether Giancarlo Stanton, the most feared slugger in the game, has the necessary mental toughness to go with all of that power.
Is he going to be another Bobby Bonilla, who was so freaked out over getting booed as a highly paid Mets free agent that he resorted to using earplugs and never came close to living up to expectations? ...
[C]onsidering that the fans don't really care much about baseball in Miami, it's fair to say he's never been through anything quite like this, the pressure to produce mounting with every strikeout, every round of resounding boos. ...
Stanton may have had the worst first homestand in the history of baseball. Twice he struck out five times in a game, including Sunday when he swung through a 93-mph fastball down the middle from Brad Brach to end the game, leaving the tying and winning runs on base. ...
For the season he has struck out 20 times, while hitting .167. But his skid is worse than that: in the nine games since his grand opener, he is hitting .108 (4-for-37) with one home run and three RBI, as well as 19 Ks. If all that wasn't humbling enough, Buck Showalter walked Judge intentionally to pitch to Stanton in the 10th inning with the winning run at second base, and journeyman lefty Richard Bleier got the Yankee slugger to hit a routine ground ball to third to end the inning. ...
So where does Stanton go from here? To Boston, as fate would have it, where he'll get his first taste of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, and no doubt a different kind of booing from the Fenway Faithful. ...
How he responds could be quite revealing. ... [T]he longer this nightmare scenario lingers, the more dangerous it becomes for him.
From the start, something was amiss. Even in his scoreless innings, Jordan Montgomery put multiple runners on base. ...Bonus, from Saturday morning:
It was his poor fastball command that led to one of the more disappointing outings of his brief career.
Handed a five-run lead, Montgomery gave four back, failed to even make it through the fifth inning, and allowed a career-high 10 hits ...
He helped turn what looked like an easy win into an ugly defeat. ...
Without the fastball command, Montgomery relied mostly on his offspeed pitches, and he was unable to put away hitters.
Elias: "Pedro Alvarez's 14th-inning grand slam was both the latest to be hit by innings in Orioles history and the latest by innings allowed in Yankees history."
4 comments:
I'm giggling like a prepubescent school girl - love the schadenfreude!
Absolutely
Fucking
Delightful
The Red Sox headline - linked to an early wire service story - is pure gold. My cap is tipped to the Post employee to wrote that one.
The Orioles' 12th-inning DP was the FIRST 1-2-5 DP in Orioles history!
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