Despite the early good news, I remained a bundle of a different sort. Sale also threw dynamic sliders and a bundle of curves at the Yankees, a melange with no evident pattern that mostly soothed anxieties about his health.
Sale is a Clint Eastwood look-alike with long, spindly legs that make the baseball leaving his hand very difficult to see, especially one travelling at more than ninety-five miles an hour. When the expected came, Martinez lined the ball over the Green Monster, the massive green wall in left field.īoston’s pitching was likewise masterful. He’s also big into opposition research, which, in this case, told him to look for a low fastball from the Yankees starter J. A. Williams was old-school cerebral, reliant upon impression and memory Martinez is an I.T.-age modernist who studies video of himself after taking his daily practice swings. Martinez is the most rigorous analyst of hitting-as-craft in Massachusetts since Ted Williams. In the first inning, Boston’s designated hitter, J. D. I was watching with the kids as Game 1 began, at Boston’s Fenway Park. New York’s great other great strength was a bullpen rippling with the kind of power that infantilizes batters-and opposing fans. New York’s entire batting order was shaped in their brawny image the Yankees are the first team in history to produce twenty home runs from every hitting position, one through nine. The pair combined for sixty-five home runs this season. There was also the designated hitter Giancarlo Stanton, last year’s National League M.V.P., who was traded to New York for pocket change by the Marlins and their new chief executive, the former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. The biggest reason was that the Yankees had, out in right field, the newest addition to the New York skyline: Aaron Judge, a six-seven, two-hundred-and-eighty-two-pound edifice of a man whose vast arms alone, festooned with a variety of protective sleeves, resemble window boxes. That the Red Sox led the league in hitting, and ran and fielded with elan, was fine. 177 for the season, including a recent 0–30 ditch. And the man they would all be throwing to, the catcher Sandy León, was taking the concept of defensive specialist to extremes: he had batted. The bullpen behind the suspect starters was likewise hinky. The team’s second-best pitcher, David Price, was 0–8 in previous playoff starts, and, as a member of the Red Sox, an unseemly 2–7 against the Yankees. The team’s (and the league’s) best pitcher, Chris Sale, missed most of August and September with a sore shoulder.
Beyond this potent competition, there were, for Boston, internal vexations. This was the first time that three teams with a hundred victories would compete in the American League playoffs. Close behind were the Yankees, who won a hundred, and who were managed by their own first-year skipper: Boone, Boston’s erstwhile bête noire.
RED SOX NEWS TRAGEDY SERIES
The second-best team was the Astros, the defending World Series champions, who won a hundred and three. Led by a new manager, Alex Cora, who was the Houston Astros’ bench coach last year, the Red Sox won a hundred and eight games, more than any other team in baseball this season. This year, we in New England really had no right to fret. As the Hall of Fame pitcher Stanley Coveleski once said, “Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.” Part of it is that dark New England souls seem captive to doomy and irrational premonitions. Part of it is that every time the two teams meet the national networks once more detail Babe Ruth’s long-ago transfer from Boston to New York, and screen, again, replays of Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone hitting season-ending home runs, in 19, respectively. All winter afterward, the joy was shadowed with concern that Sox fans had lost what defined us.īut, fourteen years later, as this season’s playoff rematch with the Yankees began, the dismaying revelation for many of us was that we remain trapped in the fanly persona we felt sure we had repudiated. They went on to defeat the Cardinals in the World Series. (I’m a Red Sox fan.) And then Boston won that 2004 series, as dramatically as they’d always been defeated, losing three consecutive games to the Yankees before suddenly winning four in a row. The Yankees, meanwhile, were gilded metronomes of grandiose success, so regularly victorious that it made them smug, chesty, insatiable, and entitled. The last time that the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees met for an October playoff series, in 2004, the Red Sox were a tortured outfit, the fouled-up team that not only hadn’t won a World Series since 1918 but that lost in such tragic yet inventive ways that it seemed like they were staging a Chekhov play in baseball costume.
0 kommentar(er)
