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Yankees/Red Sox
The Yankees’ best players in Game One were Cam Schlittler. Ben Rice, George Lombard, Austin Wells, Spencer Jones, and Anthony Volpe. Every single one was drafted by the Yankees, none has ever played for a team other than the Yankees, none makes more than $3.5 million. Only Volpe has advanced to arbitration eligibility.
The single biggest edge in baseball is identifying, developing, and deploying good young baseball players. Austin Riley won a game yesterday, and he’s never played for anyone but the Braves. Hagen Smith threw three shutout innings, and he’s never played for anyone but the White Sox. Colson Montgomery, Grant Taylor, Fernando Tatis Jr....yesterday’s heroes were mostly players who have never been free agents. The obsessive focus on payrolls and revenues blinds us to the single most important edge in the sport, the ability to pay good and even great young players a fraction of their market value for the most productive part of their careers. The single biggest factor in the game’s very good competitive balance is the six-season hold teams have on their young players.
The Yankees showed off what is one of the two or three best player development programs in baseball last night. Schlittler, a seventh-round pick they turned into a Cy Young winner, struck out ten. Ben Rice was a 12th-round pick who hit 41 homers this year; he added two more last night. Jones, Wells, Volpe, and Lombard were all first-round picks from the part of the first round where the draft becomes a crapshoot. Well, it’s always a crapshoot, but your hit rate in the 20s, where the Yankees have been drafting for 30 years, is a lot lower than it is in the top ten. We’ll never stop talking about money, but it’s always secondary to player development under the current rule set.
Last night’s game went off the rails for Chad Tracy, managing his first playoff game. He surprisingly lifted an effective Payton Tolle with two outs in the fifth, nobody on, and lefty Ben Rice at the plate. After the game, he told the media that it was “Not just the pitch count necessarily, but you're trailing already, you're moving through the third time. Rice had already hit a double in the gap off of him, and you have a nice lane there for Miller, and obviously he got him. Just felt like it was the time to go.”
Rice hit a bomb off lefty reliever Erik Miller to stretch the lead to 2-0. That’s not necessarily an indictment of Tracy’s decision, but everything he did after that was. By lifting Tolle, you’re saying you’re going to be aggressive about trying to win this game. I didn’t disagree with that choice, but it does indicate, as the choice by Mattingly earlier in the day did, that you recognize the playoffs are different from May and from August, that you need to take a different approach.
The problem is that Tracy didn’t follow through. With the Red Sox down 2-0 in the bottom of the seventh, still a leverage position in a best-of-three series, he inserted Alec Gamboa into the game, skipping over his two best remaining relievers as well as Garrett Crochet -- when this would have been a good spot to get Crochet into a game. He could have used Jake Bennett, the rookie lefty who made Connelly Early expendable. Instead he used Gamboa, then Wyatt Olds, his #11 and #12 pitchers. The two turned a 2-0 game into a 4-0 game, and then Rice finished it off with a grand slam off Brayan Bello.
If you start the bullpen parade by hooking an effective starter in the fifth, you’ve committed to using your A bullpen as long as the game is close. The dichotomy between Tracy’s fifth-inning and seventh-inning choices may not have cost the Sox the game -- they didn’t score -- but it made them more likely to lose.
The Sox, who as mentioned had the worst wOBA in baseball in September and were shut out in Game One, may now play Game Two without Roman Anthony, who left last night with a recurrence of his right hand injury. The Sox have Sonny Gray going tonight and Ranger Suarez tomorrow, with their A bullpen fully rested, so they have some hope. They have to rely on those pitchers, though, because it’s hard to see them winning if they allow four runs in a game.
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