Robinson Cano and the Seattle Mariners revisited the Bronx over the weekend for a three game set. Both teams came into the series looking to build momentum from so-so starts to the season. The first eight games of the season were feast or famine offensively for the Yankees as the team had scored 35 runs in their four wins and a total of 7 runs in their four losses.
A tale of missed opportunities
On Jackie Robinson Day, Luis Severino took to the mound for his second start of the season, facing off against an old AL East foe in Nathan Karns. Severino pitched decently in his first start against Detroit, but the offense game him no support. Unfortunately, the results weren’t any better this time around.
The Yankees got on the board in the bottom of the first inning with a solo home run off the facing of the second deck from Brett Gardner, his first of the year. Severino would keep the Mariners off of the board for the first three innings thanks to some nifty defense, especially this gem from Starlin Castro:
The Mariners would finally catch up to Severino in the fourth inning with Cano’s RBI single and then in the fifth with Chris Ianetta’s two-run blast to left field. He would end up going 5.2 innings allowing four runs on eight hits with a walk. Severino’s night was punctuated by only generating eleven swings and misses as his secondary pitches and location were inconsistent.
However, the biggest story of the game was the Yanks offense. RISP is the only stat needed for this game, as the Yanks were 0-for-12 with runners in scoring position. They put 13 runners on base for the game and none of them scored. Karns gave them multiple opportunities, but always managed to wiggle out of every situation. This included having men on second and third with nobody out in the fourth inning, and the Yanks responded with three straight strikeouts.
Not hitting with runners in scoring position is maddening, but the bottom line is that if the team keeps getting runners on base like this, things will even out and take care of themselves. But, for the series opener, it was certainly the story of the game as the Yankees went down 7-1.
Saturday afternoon deja vu
CC Sabathia vs King Felix would have been Game of the Week stuff five years ago, but now was more or less a matchup of two pitchers trying to remake themselves. CC pitched about as well as could be expected in his first start of the season against Detroit, going 6 innings and giving up 3 runs on 6 hits.
Sabathia looked respectable through 4 innings, but met his undoing in the 5th after Leonys Martin tied the game at 1-1 with a long home run. Cano and Nelson Cruz would put together back-to-back RBI hits that would knock CC out of the game. As expected, the bullpen pitched 4.1 innings of shutout baseball with 8 strikeouts.
Unfortunately for the Yankees, the offensive side of the game fared no different from Friday night. They received a career high six walks from Felix, but could never come up with the big knock against him. They had runners on base the whole game, even in the ninth inning when they had the winning run at second base and couldn’t come through. For the game, the Yankees were 0-for-12 with runners in scoring position, leaving a total of 14 men on base. Ten hits and six walks in nine innings should yield more than two runs, but this is the funk the team is in right now.
Carlos Beltran was the hero at the plate going 4-for-5 with a home run and driving in both runs. Castro had three hits and Brett Gardner added two. The bullpen kept the game close, but once again is only going to be so good without help from the offense and getting more than 5 innings from their starting rotation.
A couple of telling stats for the Yanks early on in 2016:
RISPÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â .225/.317/.427 with 20 Ks in 89 ABs
RISP w/2 outs         .132/.283/.289 with only 9 runs batted in
So not only are they not getting these runners home, they are not even making contact almost a full quarter of their at bats with less than 2 outs and runners in scoring position.
Put away those brooms
Sunday afternoon saw Masahiro Tanaka head to the mound with the team looking for a solid performance from a starter, while trying to break out of an offensive drought. Things did not look good early after three of the first four Mariner batters reached base on soft singles. A force out gave the Mariners an early 1-0 lead. Tanaka would get on a roll from there, giving the team their longest outing of the season with 7.0 solid innings.
Alex Rodriguez would snap an 0-for-19 slump with a two-run home run to left field to put the Yanks in front, 2-1. A second ugly streak would be snapped after Gardner would drive in Jacoby Ellsbury with a ground-rule double. This snapped an 0-for-30 streak with runners in scoring position by the Yankees. As a team, they were still only 1-for-11 on Sunday with RISP.
The story of the day was the pitching staff. Tanaka would go 7 innings giving up two earned runs on six hits with six strikeouts. For the second day in a row, Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller would both strike out the side in the 8th and 9th innings. The pair has recorded 33 outs this season, and 27 of them have been strikeouts. These three would generate enough swings and misses to keep a path worn out back to the Mariners dugout. The Yankees would grind out enough offense for a 4-3 win.
The Yankees lost 2 out of 3 games to the Mariners in a series that with a few key hits sprinkled in here and there, could easily have turned into a possible sweep by the Bombers. The team has to keep believing that the odds are in their favor if they keep getting runners on base the way they are, that the big hits will come. In the meantime, they will enjoy an off day before entertaining the Oakland Athletics at the Stadium in a three game set beginning Tuesday night.
