September 7, 2019

G142: Yankees 5, Red Sox 1

Yankees - 000 400 001 - 5  9  0
Red Sox - 000 000 001 - 1  5  0
Xander Bogaerts's fourth-inning single was the 1,000th hit of his career.

Bogaerts is only the third player (along with Tris Speaker and Bobby Doerr) to have 1,000 hits in a Red Sox uniform before turning 27. ... Carl Yastrzemski had 980 career hits when he turned 27 on August 22, 1966. He got his #1,000 hit on September 15, 24 days later.

The milestone hit came on his mother's birthday.
She texted me ... "You gotta do it today." I'm like, "My numbers aren't pretty good against Happ." In the end, I got one ... My first big league home run came against the Yankees on my mom's birthday. A thousand hits against the Yankees on my mom's birthday again is pretty neat.
Also, Bogaerts needs one more double to become the third shortstop in major league history with 30+ home runs and 50+ doubles in a season. Alex Rodriguez was the first, with 36/54 for the 1996 Mariners, and Alex Bregman had 31/51 for the Astros in 2018. (Bogaerts, however, could be the first 30/50 shortstop not named Alex.)

A season with 30 homers and 50 doubles is, of course, an arbitrary benchmark. If you widen the search for players with 25+ home runs and 45+ doubles, you get 11 seasons from 10 players, all since 1982.

DJ LeMahieu singled off Ryan Weber to start the top of the fourth. Aaron Judge struck out and Didi Gregorius lined a ball right at J.D. Martinez in right. He lost the ball in the sun (being charitable). It handcuffed him and went to the wall.

Colten Brewer walked into that jam and merded the mattress, giving up a ground-rule double to Gary Sánchez (on a pop-up near the right-field line that JDM took a bad route on and was not hustling) and a two-run homer to Edwin Encarnación. Brewer also allowed a two-out single, a stolen base, and a walk before getting the third out.

The Red Sox were helpless against J.A. Happ (6.1-2-0-1-7, 92) and did not have two runners on base at the same time until the eighth. Mitch Moreland and pinch-hitter Marco Hernández both singled off Tommy Kahnle with one out. Zack Britton came in and struck out Brock Holt and got Mookie Betts to line out to right.

In the ninth, J.D. Martinez hit his 35th home run off Aroldis Chapman, but there were already two outs. Andrew Benintendi popped to first to end the game.

AL Wild Card: TBR/OAK –, CLE 1.5, BOS 7.0 (assuming Oakland beats the Tigers).
J.A. Happ / Travis Lakins
Betts, CF
Bogaerts, SS
Devers, 3B
Martinez, RF
Benintendi, LF
Vázquez, C
Moreland, 1B
Travis, DH
Holt, 2B
AL Wild Card: TBR/OAK –, CLE 0.5, BOS 6.0.

2 comments:

Dr. Jeff said...

I think Xander is just a shorter version of Alexander which means of course that they all basically have the same name!

Dr. Jeff said...

(which you probably already knew....sarcasm doesn't come across well online!)