Red Sox Take Masahiro Tanaka's Ass Deep Three Times, While Drew Pomeranz Turns In A Very Economic 123-Pitch, Five-Inning Victory
I love how fat face JJ keeps tweeting about David Price needing elbow surgery when his team’s ace has an elbow that’s held together by silly putty and a couple paper clips. Meanwhile, Price is tossing gems and Masahiro Tanaka is giving up absolute BOMBS at Yankee Stadium to the Boston Red Sox, who are now a game out of first place, by the way.
And while I’m chirping my balls off on Twitter about the distance that all of these home runs are traveling into the bleachers, I’ve got Yankee fans chiming in saying that it’s not that impressive because they’re off of Tanaka. Yeah, he’s been bad this year. Like, really bad. But he does have a complete game shutout against the Red Sox this season, so I’m not trying to hear the excuse-making. The Red Sox had fuckin’ Drew Pomeranz out there, the absolute KING of giving up home runs, and he shut your team down for a very Pomeranz-like five innings that took 123 goddamn pitches to complete. Oh, and he gave up bomb too, but that was only out of habit.
There are a couple of ways to look at Pomeranz’s outing. You can be like me, and say something along the lines of, “Jesus Christ. How in the fuck did you only get through five innings after throwing 123 pitches?” Or you could have this mindset and think that it’s a “gutsy performance” because he threw that many pitches to qualify for a win. Maybe it’s a combination of both? I think I’d lean more towards gutsy if this weren’t so common for Pomeranz, but it is. Last night was Pomeranz’s eleventh start of the season, and he’s been able to complete at least six innings just four times, two of which were in his previous two outings prior to last night. The motherfucker went to ELEVEN 3-2 counts in five innings. Eleven!
What’s important is that he battled and gave the Red Sox a chance to win, which they did. My biggest gripe with Pomeranz has always been his inability to go deep into games, because in these starts where he can’t give you at least six, he hardly ever gets shelled. He just throws an ungodly amount of pitches and gets the hook because his arm might actually fall off if he continues any further into his outing.
Since the start of May, Pomeranz has made seven starts and he’s got a 3.93 ERA, which you’ll obviously take from your fourth or fifth starter, but he’s averaging five innings per start over that span. He’s also averaging five innings per start for the whole year. There are only two pitchers in all of baseball who have made as many starts as Pomeranz (11) who also average fewer innings per start than him. But, to his credit, that’s a really good Yankee lineup over there with a number of right-handed hitters who can take you deep, and he only allowed one, his lone earned run of the night to go along with seven strikeouts. Dwew Tang Clan ain’t nuthing to fuck wit.
Yankee fans, feel free to discredit everything the Red Sox did last night offensively, because it came off Tanaka, and apparently that doesn’t count, but I’m gonna go ahead and talk about it, if that’s okay. Last night’s game (June 6) marks exactly one month since John Farrell made that lineup shakeup in Minnesota. Over that one month, the Red Sox scored the second most runs in the American League (166), third most in the majors, and the team’s OPS (.792) over those 28 games was 83 points higher than it was over their first 29 games (.709). I’m not going to give a hundred percent credit to Farrell here, though. I’m sure it helped, but a lot of this was guys just simply getting it going, as we all knew they would eventually.
Everyone made a big deal out of this 104 MPH pitch by Joe Kelly to Aaron Judge (officially registered at 103.5 MPH), but the most impressive part of the at-bat was the slider that he punched him out on. All the credit in the world to Judge, because the fuckin’ guy was able to foul off a pitch that was going at the speed of sound, but that slider made it move a little bit. Don’t look now, but Kelly hasn’t allowed an earned run since April 30.
And for as impressive as Kelly was last night, and really has been all season, he still doesn’t have Farrell’s trust because we have Kelly pitching in the seventh, and Matt Barnes, who has been anything but automatic this year, going in the eighth, who then had to be rescued by Craig Kimbrel to complete that inning and then also close out the ninth. In his last 12 appearances, Kimbrel has had to come into the game in the eighth inning five times. That’s not a sustainable model with 105 games remaining on the schedule if you still want this guy to be dominant come September.
Speaking of dominant, he once again recorded all of his outs via the strikeout and then added one for good measure. He recorded five strikeouts in an inning and a third. Just some updated numbers here — Kimbrel has recorded 80 outs this season, and he has 53 strikeouts, but two of those have reached base. So, that means that 51 of the 80 outs he’s recorded have been strikeouts, which is 64%. Complete sicko.
The other thing that I noticed about Yankee fans — when they had a comfortable lead in first place, they couldn’t stop bragging about it and talking about how good their team is, which is absolutely true. I think they’re going to the postseason whether they win the division or not. But the second the Red Sox started coming for that ass, they can’t remind you enough that they’re in a “rebuilding year”. They’ve got a $201.5 million payroll, the second highest in all of baseball, but take it easy on the Yankees, guys. They’re rebuilding this year.
Final score: Red Sox 5, Yankees 4