All you really need to know. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
The Yankees finally broke through against Josh Beckett, touching the righty up for five runs (four earned) over seven innings, but it wouldn’t be enough to overcome another shaky outing by Phil Hughes, as the Bombers fell to the Red Sox 9-5 on Wednesday night.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this game was that Hughes started out like a man possessed, blowing out-of-nowhere 95mph fastballs past the Boston hitters, and picking up two strikeouts in the first inning (including four swinging strikes, all on the heater) but as Hughes’ velocity dipped so did his performance. I was all set to be quite content with Phil’s outing as he appeared poised to get through five innings having given up only two runs, but David Ortiz had other ideas, launching a terribly located four-seamer into dead center field for his eight trillionth career home run against the Yankees to extend Boston’s lead to 4-1.
The Yankees battled back in the top of the sixth, scoring four runs due in part to a huge Eric Chavez two-run triple double, but despite handed a 5-4 lead in the bottom of the 6th Hughes couldn’t shut the door. After retiring Carl Crawford, Josh Reddick came back from an 0-2 hole to work a walk, which wound up being the turning point in the game. The corpse of Jason Varitek somehow got his bat on a curveball that was way out of the zone and took a funky hop, enabling Reddick to score easily and putting Varitek on second, and while you really couldn’t fault Hughes for that particular sequence, and he also managed to shockingly retire Marco Scutaro, who’s hit something like 1.000/1.000/4.000 on the season against the Yanks, it was still rather frustrating that Hughes was unable to hold his second lead of the game. Not only that, but aside from his fastball Hughes’ secondary offerings — or really, lack thereof — were once again pretty worthless. He barely even seems to throw his one-time bread-and-butter cutter anymore.
Joe Girardi summoned Boone Logan to face Jacoby Ellsbury — also hitting a robust 1.000/1.000/4.000 on the year against the Yanks — and Boone did what Boone does, as he not only didn’t retire the lefty Ellsbury, but yielded the worst possible result as Ellsbury went deep to break the tie and give the Red Sox a lead they wouldn’t relinquish. Oh, and not that it would really matter, but Jason Varitek would add a two-run homer in the 7th to put this thing completely out of reach.
Despite an elevated pitch count and a fairly laborious six innings of work, Beckett came back out for the 7th and promptly shut the Yankees down. That 7th likely represented the Yankees’ best chance of mounting a comeback, because with the 8th inning came Daniel Bard, who they never seem to be able to do anything against except hit the occasional solo home run (.136/.269/.364 this season prior to this game’s perfect eighth), and the ninth brought Jonathan Papelbon, whose Yankee issues seem to be a thing of the past (.182/.217/.182 over 6 innings prior to his perfect ninth).
And thus, after blowing two leads, the Yankees fell to 3-11 on the season against the Sox, and are on the cusp of losing their seventh(!) straight series to the Red Sox, as A.J. Burnett not only gets to face the best non-Yankee offense in MLB but has to do it against Jon Lester, who co-owns the Yankees with Felix Hernandez. Good times.
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11 Responses to Red Sox top Yanks in 9-5 see-saw game
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TIQ IQ
any body see tex??? way to step up mark, i think this is the tex we see in the playoffs..he does not belong in the three spot hitting LHed
The Varitek excuse me double, followed (one out later) by the Ellsbury homer, just sums up the entire season of NYY/BOS. Or, the inning when the Sox scored two:
@mimbro1: Get Pedroia, Gonzalez, and Crawford out on a grounder, a fly ball, and a strikeout. Give up hits to Scutaro and Lowrie. #RAGE
I thought Hughes pitched better than his line, and was glad to see Girardi agreed after the game. Obviously the last runner was charged to him when Logan gave up the bomb to Ellsbury. The previous one was a walk and an excuse me triple (scored a Double) by Varitek. Do you know how many Triples Varitek has this year? One. Just horrendously bad luck there.
The big mistake was to Ortiz, who’s just on fire right now. He got him out the previous AB on the same pitch, but you can’t go back to the well with a savvy veteran like him (who owns Phil) swinging the bat the way he is. In the playoffs, they’d just walk him in that spot, so I don’t worry about history repeating itself.
Funny, Hughes’s performance against the Twins wasn’t as good as his line suggested and this one against the Sox wasn’t as bad as it suggested.
Re: tonight.
If Burnett pitches 5 IP 0-2 ER ball, I go batter to batter with him after 5 IP. If he gets the first batter out in the sixth, leave him in to get the second out, and so on.
Burnett 5 IP then Wade, Soriano, Robertson, Rivera for the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th inning respectively.
I pray for this formula tonight. I for some reason have a gut feeling Burnett can go 5 solid.
Hughes just needs to pitch more. Taking him out of the rotation isn’t going to benefit him or the team.
I think taking him out of the rotation might very well help the team in the sense that he tends to lose his starts. But of course, the question is who do you replace him with, and I don’t have a good answer for that.
I see steady, although uneven, improvement in velo and command. He hasn’t pitched much as a starter since 2007, except for 2010. Patience will likely pay off.
At this point, I don’t care if it’s AJ or Phil in the rotation. As Joel Sherman wrote today, the only thing Phil has going for him is that he’s not AJ…….He was very poor yet again -and yet again, his stuff declined. He had a chance to solidify his spot in the rotation and he failed to do it – a moth in his eye? Please.
Phil is not going to pitch any meaningful innings in the post-season, fortunately. As to his future, he needs to come prepared to fight for a spot in 2012………him winning a spot is not a given.
I didn’t mean to cheat on my g/f but a moth flew in my eye.