Rays 0 Yankees 4: No miracles today

Crazy thing about Steinbrenner Field, how the wind apparently carries the the balls hit by opposing players out of the park on the regular, but doesn’t have the same impact on the Rays batted balls!

Maybe it’s just harder to hit homers, or score runs for that matter, when you spend 7 innings simply hitting the ball into the ground?

The Yankees Max Fried was really on his game today, or maybe it’s just that his game matches up well (or poorly, from a Rays point of view) with the Rays lineup.

Fried only struck out two, but he was pretty much in command for nearly eight innings. His sinker made it hard for the Rays even to hit a ball out of the infield, as he induced 12 ground balls. He walked just two and gave up two hits, an infield single by Chandler Simpson (which was first ruled an error, no doubt because the official scorer didn’t want to be responsible for ruining the no-hitter) and a soft liner by Jake Magnum.

But even when the Rays did get those base runners they managed to erase them. Christopher Morel hit into a double play with two runners on base. To be clear, I don’t fault players for hitting into double plays, you hit the ball as hard as you can and don’t have a ton of control where it goes.

I do blame him, however, getting picked off second base after he’d walked. He didn’t even have a huge lead! If you are focused on the game, how do you not notice the that an infielder has dashed over to cover second and the pitcher is spinning around to throw? Chris, buddy, you can think about your post game dinner order for the many hours you spend sitting and waiting for your at bat, you do not need to be daydreaming when you are on base.

Then, Danny Jansen drew a walk, which is pretty surprising in itself. I mean, why would Fried be trying to paint the corners with Jansen? But then Jansen got caught stealing. (Jansen also hit into the game ending double play with two men on in the ninth but again, while that’s frustrating I’m not blaming him, see above).

Meanwhile the Yankees put together four runs, two on solo home runs. Three of the runs were scored against Pepiot whose six innings weren’t terrible. He didn’t walk a lot of batters, which is good, but a number of players had some pretty hard contact against him. Also, he seems incapable of ever pitching a clean inning — even when the Yankees didn’t score, they always had a least one baserunner during his six innings, which meant Pepiot was constantly pitching under stress.

But let’s be honest, when your team’s hitting and baserunning are this pathetic, the pitcher isn’t the problem.

There were some fun and/or interesting plays: Mangum threw out the Yankee’s Dominguez trying to stretch a single into a double: Dominguez beat the throw by a split second but then slid off the base so Caballero could tag him.

And Aaron Boone got tossed because Aaron Boone is an angry man and that’s what he does. (He was arguing whether an Aaron Judge ball was foul or a home run, but the umpires even reviewed it before confirming the call.)

On a positive note, reliever Eric Orze pitched two strong innings; on a sour note I wish the league allowed teams to DH for a position other than pitcher because there are days when I think our pitchers would be better options at the plate than our catchers.