Inside the Empire

by Bob Klapisch

  Every quality team likes to think it has a formula, a pathway to prescriptive success. For the Yankees, that formula is power plus power: home run prowess paired with killer relievers. Other teams are happy if they have a single closer; in the playoffs, the Yanks had five. Here was a proof-point of Cashman’s faith in pile-on talent: he’d overstocked his bullpen with playoff-proven arms in the belief that they’d be the difference in October. But he’d bolted that premise onto a shaky foundation: the conviction that his starters could go five innings against great lineups. And there, it turned out, he was badly wrong: those starters, Tanaka excepted, crapped out early. Three of the starts were so woefully brief that the Yanks’ pen was never a factor in the series. Among them, Happ, Severino, and Sabathia pitched a total of eight innings, allowing fourteen runs and disarming their team before it had a chance to fight. They didn’t throw strikes, couldn’t put away hitters, and failed to contain the damage done with runners on. In Happ’s case, failure was a harsh surprise. In Sevy’s and CC’s cases, it was not.

  For much of the second half of the regular season, the team’s youngest and oldest starters were basket cases. There’s no point in piling on these poor souls again; their declines have been well documented already. The point, rather, is to acknowledge what both Boone and Cashman said at several points during the year: baseball will break your heart if you let it. For half the season, Sevy and CC were the Yankees’ two best starters. One was the Cy Young favorite at the break, while the other looked like he could pitch for years and engrave his own bust in the Hall of Fame. Neither of them blew his arm out or was felled by a batted ball. Both simply stopped pitching well and never rebounded. With Sevy, it was youth that largely did him in. He lacked the guile and tradecraft to muddle through when his talent (and nerves) betrayed him. With CC, it was the reverse: all those thousands of innings and strikeouts had seemingly taken the last of his soft tissue.

  There’s little a team can do to gird for such a blow, unless it has the bankroll for six strong starters, one of whom it stashes for a rainy day. Some clubs do get lucky: that kid they’re grooming at Triple-A suddenly comes of age and saves their season (cf. Walker Buehler with this year’s Dodgers). Other teams—well, one team, the Houston Astros—are so skilled at acquiring and improving starters that they can prevail when a Dallas Keuchel has a down year. For everyone else, though, it’s perniciously hard to keep a staff intact. Contenders like the Cards, who lost Carlos Martínez and Michael Wacha, the Diamondbacks (Robbie Ray and Taijuan Walker), and the A’s (Sean Manaea, among many) might have made deep playoff runs had they not been bushwhacked during the year. It’s cruel and inexplicable—and it happens all the time. Just ask that star-crossed bunch in Queens, who, for the last two years, watched their season’s hopes blow up when young arm after young arm went down.

  In the clubhouse after game 1, the Yankees were in shock. Though they’d made the score respectable by the end, the mood in the room harked back to August, when Sabathia got rocked in the series opener. Like CC, Happ had been taken apart by a prepared and patient lineup. Worse, their histories had been no help against a team that was vastly better than its past. Happ himself was helpless to explain his dreadful outing. He stood there manfully and answered each question (“I always stress trying to get strike one. I wasn’t very good at that tonight, and the big hit cost me”), but he was as baffled by his dismantling as the players dressing beside him. Like so many of these Yankees, Happ’s an honest and honorable man, a guy who, within the parameters of the sport, speaks to you from his heart. But what is there to say, finally, about the randomness of human performance? Prior to this game, he’d made three starts in his playoff life, one for the Phillies in 2009 and the other two—both of them solid—for Toronto. He’d also pitched splendidly down the stretch, been the Yankees’ best starter for two months. Clearly, he was built for pressure games, but on this one pivotal night he didn’t produce. Happ isn’t Justin Verlander, who can skunk you with his curveball when his best pitch, the fastball, isn’t clicking. That’s why you pay up and don’t think twice when a Verlander hits the market in July. Do you want to be the guys who broke the home run record for the season—or the ones carousing on the mound in all those posters on your walls?

  There was a second fail in game 1 that shadowed game 2, and however many games stretched beyond it. Five times Stanton came up in key moments; four of those times he whiffed. The worst of his punch-outs came in the seventh, when the Yankees, down three, had the bases full and no one out and were facing a wobbly Matt Barnes. (Barnes had come on, thrown a wild pitch to Gardner, then walked him to load the bags.) Stanton had already K’ed twice with runner(s) aboard, so expectations were modest. All the Yankees hoped for was a medium fly ball that would score McCutchen and move Judge up to third. Instead, this is what they got: strike one, strike two, a pair of waste pitches, then—for the nth time all year—a Stanton flail-and-miss on a curve away.

  In Fenway, the press box is so high above the field that you can barely see the game, let alone hear it. But virtually audible from the back of that nosebleed room was the air going out of the Yankees’ dugout. So often had Stanton mounted unproductive at-bats that this one could’ve (should’ve?) been assumed. But in his last plate appearance in the wild-card game, he’d crushed a hanging slider 440 feet to the bowels of the second deck—and given his teammates hope that they had him back. When Stanton is right, he obliterates mistakes, hitting balls so far and with so much force that they almost count for more than a single homer. Watch the way players in pinstripes react when Stanton does his number on a pitch. They jump and hop and dance jigs with each other, as if they’ve all done a vicious hit of nitrous. They can’t help themselves: at some level, they’re still just kids who stand in awe of the man. They also, frankly, love him—he’s that unicorn superstar who works longer, harder hours than anyone else.

  But the inverse is also true: when Stanton goes into slumps for long stretches, he seems to drain the lifeblood from this team. No one would accuse him of not working his tail off or of moping in the dugout during droughts. But when he’s not on his game, there are downstream effects: the Yankees’ offense seems to run out of gas. So it was in the divisional series: Stanton’s four-for-eighteen—the four hits were all singles—delivered a gut-shot to his team’s morale. Time after time, the guy who had carried the team when Judge was out failed with runners on, even in the one game that they won. (For the entire series, the Yankees scored fourteen runs; the Sox scored sixteen in game 3.) But the sad truth was that Stanton was going through a down cycle during the ALDS, and Yankee fans everywhere were feeling his immense frustration.

  Not all of that lands on Stanton, of course. None of the Yankee hitters produced runs except for Judge and, for one rare game, Gary Sánchez. Otherwise, the lineup that terrorized the league looked terrified at the plate. It batted .214 and was even worse against anyone not named Price. The rest of the Sox starters cruised through their outings, particularly Eovaldi and Porcello, who couldn’t be touched. In their moment of truth, the Yankees made Eovaldi into the second coming of Clemens and Rick Porcello (4.26 lifetime ERA) the spitting image of Greg Maddux.

  But the biggest surprise of the divisional series was the efficiency of Boston’s pen. All those leaky vessels—Heath Hembree, Ryan Brasier, Joe Kelly, Matt Barnes—were watertight with games on the line. Overall, the Sox middle men pitched nine and two-thirds innings, surrendered zero runs (earned or otherwise), and gave up a grand total of one hit. Their Yankee counterparts—Dave Robertson, Zach Britton, Chad Green, and Dellin Betances—posted solid but not shutdown numbers: 13.2 innings pitched, ten hits allowed, and three runs, each of them earned. And when it mattered most, their short men blinked. Green let both of his inherited runners score in the game 1 loss (5–4), and Britton served up the back-breaking homer to Christian Vázquez in the game 4 clincher (4–3). To be clear, then: the loss of this series was a team effort by the Yankees. The lineup, the starters, and the bullp
en failed. Justice was served, the better team won—and as the old ball coach Bill Parcells used to say, It wasn’t even close for second.

  There isn’t much point in reviewing the two losses after the Yanks tied the series at 1–1—and even less to gain from rehearsing game 2, when they beat around Price, as expected. Still, there were several moments worth reviving here for what they said, in requiem, about this group.

  The Yanks returned to the Bronx to play game 3 having wildly misread the meaning of game 2. To a man, they thought that that win was the truth and the loss in game 1 was an illusion. You could see it and hear it at 5:00 p.m., in their swaggering preparations in the cage. Judge and Stanton were hitting bomb after bomb, to the relaxed amusement of their mates, while Boone and his coaches were laughing and joking as they watched the guys get ready. In banter and body language, both players and coaches behaved like this was a rivalry game—in April. Veteran writers gathered behind the ropes near the dugout kept remarking how loosey-goosey the team looked. Not that their word is gospel, but good beat writers can always tell you the emotional weather of a club. Think of them as cops driving patrol in their cruisers while scanning the demeanor of corner boys. They know the whole story without stopping the car: who’s slinging, who’s holding, and who’s packing the flamer. It’s the nature of their job and they’ve done it forever, so they get the cues. Thus, too, the guys scribbling notes in their head while watching the Yankees work out. Here was a team that, by every indication, believed that it would sweep at home and go straight to Houston.

  If reporters needed to corroborate what their eyes were seeing, they got it at 7:32. Severino, who said he always throws a ten-minute bullpen, was still long-tossing off flat ground. That would’ve been fine if the game started at eight—but first pitch was at 7:42. Ron Darling, the ex-Met working the broadcast for TBS, astutely noted that Sevy hadn’t warmed up yet and had just been told the start time by his pitching coach, Larry Rothschild. The kid scrambled to the pen, got maybe seven minutes in—and was a helpless mess from the moment he took the mound. That electric fastball he’d thrown in the wild-card game was nowhere to be found in game 3.

  Straight from the gate, the Red Sox jumped him, hammering rockets to the gap in left-center. Gardner managed to run down all three ropes—but if ever a pitcher deserved to be pulled from a game after a one-two-three first inning, here he was. In the biggest start of his life, Sevy had virtually nothing.

  But this wasn’t about being young and not up to the job; that stuff you can, and should, accept. It was about undermining your talent, and your teammates’ chances, with the whole season hanging on the line. We’ll probably never hear from him what happened that night. In the clubhouse after the game, he spat on the idea that he’d done anything wrong (or different). “Who’s that guy?” he snapped, referring to Ron Darling when reporters pressed the issue after the game. “How would he know what time I go out there? I came out twenty minutes before, like I always do.” He also denied having less than ten minutes to warm up, though the TBS tape showed he hadn’t. All Sevy’s denial did was escalate the matter and further incense the millions who were already angry. YES’s studio analyst, the typically diplomatic John Flaherty, shredded Severino on the postgame show. “There is no way you can go on a big league bullpen mound eight minutes before the scheduled first pitch and expect to be ready.”

  How stunning was that takedown? The YES Network subsequently fed that quote to all the media outlets, making it the unofficial position statement of the New York Yankees.

  For one night, then, the ghost of Big Stein walked—but that’s what happens when a good team goes to pieces. It absorbs the worst loss of its postseason life, a history dating back to 1901. It goes down by ten runs early, never utters a peep on offense, and sends its fans racing for the exits. “So awful,” in Boone’s words, was the 16–1 thrashing that the Stadium was half-empty by the sixth. Far beyond the walls of the big ballpark, the Major Deegan was slammed, one long snarl of departing traffic. By the time Austin Romine came out to pitch mop-up, there was no one in the seats or the streets. Even the cops had gone home to their wives and kids, or wherever it is they go after a tour.

  All that remained was the formality of game 4. The Yanks, to a man, knew they were cooked as they somberly dressed after game 3. They stood and answered questions till the writers were gone, because no one on these Yankees runs and hides. But what was there to say? They’d had the crap kicked out of them—and the hard fact kicked in that the Sox were better. It was a tough nut to swallow after a year of believing that they were the gods’ anointed. If you rewound the tape to winter—specifically, the day they traded for Stanton—the master narrative among these Yankees was that the dynasty was back. They weren’t just big and bruising: they were baseball’s version of the Hulk. With their height and heft and superhuman strength, they were the evolution in the on-deck circle, the forebears of baseball’s mutant race. They’d turn the regular season into a video game, scoring runs by the bunches, hitting homers to Altair 3, and inflicting harsh justice on hanging curves. And they’d do this with a smile, saving the planet and their sport, while waiting for the Marvel movie to come out. You could almost see it now: BronxBombers Versus BoSox: Revenge of the Empire, Part VI. To quote a narcissist ex-receiver who richly deserves to go nameless: Better getcha popcorn ready, folks.

  And now? Precisely none of that would happen. No dog-pile on the mound after they beat the LA Dodgers; no ticker-tape procession down the Canyon of Heroes; no raucous team appearance on Jimmy Fallon. You could see that it hurt like hell, even as it was sinking in. The future of baseball wasn’t theirs (not yet at least). Turns out you can’t just hit the ball farther than other humans and expect the sport to fall down on its knees. You need to be able to shut down other good lineups, and to do so when the chips are on the line. You need to be able to score when you’re not hitting for power, win games with variety as well as brawn. You need to be adept at some of the unsexy stuff: taking the extra base, bunting the ball past the pitcher, hitting it through the gaping hole at short. In short, you need to be more like the Sox and less like the X-Men, because baseball isn’t a comic book anymore.

  Ever since the sport clamped down on performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs)—suspending players half a season for one blown test and a full season (or more) for further offenses—teams have moved away from overdeveloped sluggers who hit homers but do little else to help. Between the end of this season and the start of the next one, there will be thousands of column inches spent on what the Sox did right and what the Yanks did wrong in 2018. Here’s some free advice: save your breath, baseball sages. The difference between these teams can be summed up in one sentence: the Red Sox signed J. D. Martinez, and the Yankees dealt for Stanton. Put Martinez, that resourceful, run-producing genius, in the three-hole behind Hicks and Judge and watch the parade of big innings and early blowouts. Now slot Stanton after Betts and Benintendi and see how many of those five-run rallies never happen. Strikeouts aren’t the cost of doing business in this game: they’re the margin of error between a championship team and one that bows out early.

  Now, to be fair to Stanton, he played the second half of the season with a tight hamstring that never loosened up. How much that hindered his stride and weight shift, no one seems to know. (The Yankees wouldn’t say, and neither would Stanton.) To his sizable credit as both a man and a teammate, he showed up every day, played 158 games, and refused to sit out when the Yanks were banged up, soldiering on all summer. It must further be acknowledged that the Yanks won a hundred games, and that they did so while riding two keystone rookies who weren’t quite ready for October. Gleyber Torres and Miggy Andújar are big stars in the making. Both are mortal locks to contend for batting titles and to be as potent as Betts and Bogaerts with some seasoning.

  Indeed, the case can be made that these Yankees were ahead of schedule. For years, all anyone has talked about is the 2019 season, when, fortified by some combo of Machado-Harper-Kershaw,
the Yankees will sail straight on to the World Series. And well they still might without any of those players—we can officially count out Kershaw, since he has re-upped with the Dodgers—and with only half a season, tops, from Didi Gregorius, whose elbow tear in the ALDS will cost him three or four months in 2019. It’s entirely possible that, with the acquisition of James Paxton in November and the signing of a second starter (Happ? Patrick Corbin?), the Yanks can win the division next year and power their way to a pennant.

  But it’s just as feasible that their baked-in weakness will leave them short again. Unproductive at-bats with runners on base crippled the team all season. Yes, they were out-everything-ed by the Sox—but lest you forget, two of those four games were winnable one-run losses. What if Stanton hadn’t struck out with the bags full in game 1, or whiffed with two aboard and no one out in the ninth inning of game 4? We’ll never know, of course, but the sample size will grow; these Yankees will be in the playoffs for years to come. Will Sánchez figure out what he was doing wrong at the plate and regain his stature as one of the game’s more feared hitters? Does Stanton, who’s signed for nine more seasons at a pricey $240 million, come in next spring as a more disciplined hitter, one really ready to hit the ball where it’s pitched? Will he discover a more consistent approach at the plate and recapture the kind of production he had when he was the National League MVP?