Charles Krupa/Associated Press
The cruel irony of Garrett Whitlock ending the New York Yankees season was not lost on anyone who watched the American League Wild Card game Tuesday night. It was especially not lost on the pinstripe faithful.
Whitlock, the Boston Red Sox reliever who delivered the final blow to the Yankees 2021 season by limiting them to one run in the ninth in a 6-2 loss at Fenway Park, was once a highly-regarded prospect for the Yankees. But Tommy John surgery took him out of action in 2019 and the 2020 minor league season was wiped out. The Yankees didn’t protect him in the Rule 5 Draft last year and the team’s biggest rival picked him up as a result.
Whitlock and the Red Sox are moving on to face the Tampa Bay Rays in the ALDS because they did everything the Yankees couldn’t do in this game: They got a dominant start out of their ace, Nathan Eovaldi, they got fantastic defense—especially the play Kike Hernandez, Xander Boegarts and Kevin Plawecki combined to make and save a run from crossing in the sixth inning—and they got key hits from their key hitters when it mattered the most.
The Yankees’ $324 million man failed to deliver.
Gerrit Cole is the highest-paid pitcher in baseball and the Yankees are paying him to perform in these situations. The money wouldn’t be discussed if it wasn’t such a great amount, but Cole was just flat out bad in his most crucial start as a Yankee. He allowed three earned runs on four hits and made it through only two plus innings. His stuff was flat and manager Aaron Boone had to go to the bullpen early, which was not ideal considering many of those same arms had just pitched Sunday in an attempt to clinch this coveted Wild Card spot in a series against the Rays.
“It was just a little bit of grind for him,” Boone said.
A grind seemed like an understatement. Cole, who has battled Covid and hamstring injury in recent months, was a little more emotional about his disastrous start.
“Sick to my stomach,” he said to reporters.
He now has a 7.00 ERA at Fenway Park and a 2.94 at all others.
Boone had two messages for the team following this disappointing loss: He was grateful for the efforts the team put into what he described as a “challenging” season. But his second message was the more important one.
“The league has closed the gap on us,” he said. “We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to get better in every aspect. It’s not just the Red Sox and the Astros now. Look at our division.”
It was a strange quote from the embattled skipper considering the Yankees have not even reached the World Series in more than a decade, but he did have a point. The game has passed this version of the Yankees by.
A few years ago the Bronx Bombers seemed destined for a championship after the Baby Bombers led the team to the 2017 ALCS. Finally, the young core was ready. The club supplemented that youthful group with stars like Giancarlo Stanton and Cole.
Boston is less than two years removed from the sign-stealing scandal and less than a year removed from a season in which many questioned whether or not the club even wanted to win. Their former franchise face, Mookie Betts, was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers. But one of the outfielders the Red Sox received in return, Alex Verdugo, drove in insurance runs in the sixth and seventh innings.
The Red Sox showed that a reset is possible while the Yankees showed that building a team around a lineup full of heavy hitters isn’t actually a winning formula.
The Yankees might have been a team to beat a few years ago but they have proven to be beatable this year. Sure, they have dangerous hitters like Aaron Judge and Stanton, but those two alone cannot out-hit the other deficiencies.
The team has been stiff on the basepaths, bad defensively and lacking starting pitching outside of Cole. Midseason additions Joey Gallo and Anthony Rizzo helped the defense but even with them, the team was exceptionally streaky and was never able to figure out how to consistently excel in every facet of the game.
Charles Krupa/Associated Press
This storied franchise has been eying another World Series, with the last one coming back in 2009, but instead it’s the Red Sox who are moving on in the postseason while the Yankees are heading into the offseason with a lot of questions surrounding them.
But to be fair, those questions have plagued the Yankees all season.
Why can’t they hit? Why don’t they have enough starting pitching? Why did emerging young stars Gleyber Torres and Miguel Andujar regress? Will they fire Aaron Boone?
Eovaldi was everything Cole needed to be in this game, and it wasn’t surprising considering his outstanding season. The Red Sox have struggled to get consistent production from their starters all season but Eovaldi was a steadying presence every five days. His 5.6 combined fWAR ranked No. 12 in the regular season.
Charles Krupa/Associated Press
And this start came on the heels of one of his worst. Last weekend against the same team he faced Tuesday night in the same ballpark, he gave up seven earned runs in just 2.2 innings. But he was throwing harder than he did all season in the Wild Card game and he set a winning tone for the Red Sox with 5.1 innings and eight strikeouts.
It’s yet to be seen if Boston has the depth needed to match up to the Rays in the next round, but this resetting season provides a road map for others. Maybe the Yankees will follow suit and do the same, because it’s clear they can’t continue going down the same path they’ve been on since 2017. The league has, as Boone said, “closed the gap.”
Maybe this is where we look back and see this as what triggered a reset and put the club back on the championship path. If that’s the case, then maybe we can say Whitlock was useful for the Yankees after all.
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