Schadenfreude 334 (A Continuing Series)

ALCS Game 3 is a must-win for the Yankees because they know no team has ever choked so bad
as to blow a 3-0 lead in a seven-game series!

Ian O'Connor, Post:

Someone should immediately propose a rule that no team that strikes out 30 times in two playoff games is allowed to complain about anyone's roof, opened or closed, with the docking of a first-round pick for all offenders. Or that no manager — in this case, Aaron Boone — is allowed to claim that outdoor conditions in an opponent's indoor home "kind of killed us" when said opponent has prevented said manager's team from holding a lead at the end of 80 of the 82 innings the teams have played in a single season. . . .

[The Yankees need to] clear a psychological hurdle in Game 3 and evict the Astros from their heads, because right now that's where they are living, and quite comfortably.

The great Mariano Rivera once called Sandy Alomar Jr. "lucky" for hitting a series-changing homer off him in 1997, and it didn't sound any better then than it sounded from Severino on Thursday night. And Boone's whining about the roof didn't sound any better than many hapless visitors to The Bronx have sounded over the years when whining about those pinstriped pop-ups clearing the wall in right.

Maybe the Yankees didn't appreciate that little taste of their own right-field medicine. . . .

The Astros beat the Yankees with the roof closed one day, and the roof open the next. Houston is now 4-0 against the Yankees in one-run postseason games, 8-1 against them in playoff games staged at Minute Maid Park, and 7-2 against them overall this year. If the Yankees don't start hitting immediately, they will start packing shortly.

Mark W. Sanchez, Post:

In two games of the ALCS, the Yankees' bats have missed on about 40.6 percent of the pitches they have offered at.

For some context, hitters against Jacob deGrom this season whiffed on about 41.5 percent of their swings.

So six Astros pitchers have nearly equaled the Mets superstar in avoiding Yankees bats through two games in which manager Aaron Boone's crew was fortunate to score four runs.

As the series shifts to The Bronx for Game 3 on Saturday, something will have to shift within a Yankees offense that has batted .138 and struck out 30 times in the pair of losses.

"Thirty strikeouts, that's too much," Boone said . . .

But radical changes in approach will not happen. . . .

Giancarlo Stanton — not exactly known for small-ball — suggested the Yankees should change their approach and "shorten up" to put the ball in play more often. Boone does not wholeheartedly agree.

"Contact is incredibly important, especially in certain situations. But I would argue that controlling the strike zone is more important," Boone said . . .

The Yankees have been held to six or fewer hits in nine straight games, dating back to the regular season, which is the longest streak in a single season in franchise history, according to ESPN Stats & Info. . . .

"When we needed the ball in play, that's what allowed us to get our two runs," Boone said. "So that was at least encouraging.

Dan Martin, Post:

The Yankees' wild postseason lineup changes continued for Game 3 of the ALCS on Saturday . . .

Matt Carpenter, who has struck out in all seven plate appearances he's had this postseason since coming back from a fractured left foot, was back at DH and switch-hitting Oswaldo Cabrera at shortstop, meaning Giancarlo Stanton had to play spacious left field at the Stadium for the first time since 2019.

Mike Lupica, Daily News:

The Yankees come home now after scoring just two earned runs in two games at Minute Maid Park, then talking afterward about the roof being open and a mean old wind blowing through there on Thursday night, allegedly helping the Astros and hurting them . . .

By the time the weekend is over we will know if these Yankees are something more than the champs of being pretty good, of only being able to dominate the American League Central at this time of year; if they're about fall short of the Fall Classic. Again.

This much, though, we know already: When you don't hit, you're not supposed to leave town giving a weather report. Maybe this is the weekend when the Yankees look like a more complete team than the Astros, who have become the kind of perennial contender the Yankees ought to be. . . .

They get the chance to win tough games at home the way the Astros just did. But they sure can't do it sounding like Al Roker with their post-game analysis.

It's probably past time for Yankee fans to stop litigating the past with the Astros . . . if they want to make it to their second World Series in the past 19 seasons.

The Astros? They're trying to make it two in a row and four over the last six seasons. . . .

You want to finally be better than the other guys? Be better now. Or never.

Mike Lupica, Daily News:

They're the New York Damn Yankees and their standards are supposed to be different . . .

Yankee fans make fun of the Red Sox, who just finished in last place for the fifth time in the last 11 years and have once again set hair on fire in Red Sox nation. But here is the qualifier, and a huge one, with them:

The Red Sox have won four World Series in the last 19 season to the Yankees' one. The Red Sox get knocked down . . . but somehow they get back up and every four or five or six years and there is another Duck Boat Parade around Boston.

So Yankee fans have to ask themselves a question. Would they rather root for the most famous baseball team in this world, or would they root for the Red Sox, who changed the Yankee-Red Sox narrative in '04 like they were altering the space-time continuum in the "Back to the Future" movies?

The Red Sox have won world titles with Theo Epstein as their general manager, and Ben Cherington, and Dave Dombrowski. But since the Red Sox got out of that 0-3 hole in October of '04 and won four straight against the Yankees in the most famous ALCS ever played, in the greatest baseball comeback of them all, the Yankees have won one World Series with their one general manager, Brian Cashman. . . .

Does the best team always win? It doesn't. . . . But sometimes the best team does win. The Red Sox of 2018 were the best team in that team's history. They won 108 during the regular season and then they went 11-3 in the postseason to win it all.

The Yankees haven't been the best team in baseball entering the postseason one time since 2009. Not once. . . .

Yankee fans want there to be a reckoning about Cashman and Boone if the Yankees fall short of the Fall Classic again, you know they do. There probably won't be one. And if the Yankees don't make it past the Astros and there isn't a reckoning, that means that there is a Yankee fan who is content with the way things are, and that fan is Hal Steinbrenner, though sometimes you wonder how much of a baseball fan he really is.