When Miguel Sano fouled off the hanging slider in the second inning, whatever optimism I had about the Twins in the third game of their ALDS series faded almost completely away.
Bases loaded, nobody out, and a fat pitch -- and an opportunity lost. Sano eventually popped up. Which is more than Marwin Gonzalez and Jake Cave achieved; each struck out.
And in their next at-bats, the Yankees -- with a man in scoring position, two outs and and two strikes -- managed to push a ground ball through the infield.
The 2019 Twins hit a lot of homers. We know that. But they also didn't strike out very much. They struck out a lot in this series. Credit the Yankee pitchers, blame the Twins hitters, question the heavy use of hobbled players. It happened.
The 2019 Yankees were a slightly better team during the regular season than the 2019 Twins. That this series went the Yankees way is not really surprising. That it went their way so emphatically, that does surprise me.
But that's baseball. If Sano crushes that hanging slider, that game might be completely different. An opportunity lost.
They flashed a graphic on the TV late in the game that showed we had 5 times when we hit the ball at more than 100 mph. Only one of those resulted in a hit. And that didn't include Polanco's 106 mph smash in the 9th that Gregorius caught.
ReplyDeleteIt got me wondering if we were just snake bit or if the Yankees were geniuses at postioning their players. I thought maybe looking at BABIP against would show if the Yankees were above average there. Alas, I couldn't find that stat for the regular season.
So, I took a stab at calculating playoff BABIP and found a couple interesting things.
Twins Playoff BABIP .262 vs. regular season of .300
Yanks Playoff BABIP .364 vs. regular season of .306
Number of at bats by players with individual BABIP below .300
Yankees 6 Twins 60 (including .000 BABIP's for Mitch, Max and Miguel.)
Ahh well... It was a fun season to watch. Looking forward to next year.