Red Sox/Yankees AL Wild Card Primer
Notes and thoughts on a Wild Card game so big it might just bend space and time
You have to see this as a success. Here on in is found money. The Red Sox weren’t expected to make the playoffs. Many didn’t think they’d have a winning record. Yet here they are, and as long as you consider the Wild Card game a playoff game, and by the strict definition of the term “playoff” I think it qualifies, they’re in the playoffs. The mere fact the Boston Red Sox are set to host the New York Yankees today, Tuesday, October 5th, 2021, at Fenway Park makes 2021 officially a successful season. Anything that happens beyond this is that ten dollar bill you found in your dirty jeans, or that extra packet of ketchup in the bottom of the bag when you thought you were out. This game is that ketchup packet.
That doesn’t mean we don’t want more ketchup though because, be real, we all want more ketchup.
With that all in mind, below is my best shot at previewing this single baseball game. But before getting into everything, if you’re already subscribed to Sox Outsider thanks so much for reading and following along this season. If you’re not yet subscribed, please, subscribe! Sox Outsider is free, it ends up in your in-box after I write it, and hopefully it’s a fun, engaging, and intellectually expanding read. Hopefully! So please subscribe, and if you already subscribe forward this to a friend you think might enjoy it. Thanks for reading!
So let’s get into it. The Wild Card game is more wild and less card. In fact there’s no card at all, but there is a lot of wild, especially when the media gets a hold of a playoff matchup between the Red Sox and Yankees. I turned on ESPN at 1am just a moment ago and you’ll never guess what I saw: commercials! But after the commercials was Red Sox/Yankees talk and highlights. This is a big deal and it will grind us all down. Be glad it’s a one game series held two days after the regular season ended, rather than, well, anything else.
Starting Pitchers
So let’s start with the biggest outcome changer in the sport: starting pitching. When you talk starting pitching and the Boston Red Sox, you’re talking Chris Sale. Unfortunately, Sale threw 62 pitches into the third inning on Sunday. If this were vintage Chris Sale we’re talking about, the team would have him ready to throw an inning in the game, a role he performed twice with considerable success in the 2018 playoffs. But clearly this version of Sale is struggling with his command and his velocity seems to come and go. If the Red Sox win this game, they’ll end up relying on Sale in the Divisional Series against Tampa, but there’s no real reason to push this Sale here and now as he’s clearly struggling and likely tired. The upshot is don’t expect to see the Red Sox ace in the Wild Card game or even on the team’s Wild Card roster.
The fact that Boston won’t have Sale in this most-important of playoff games is unfortunate, but they will have Nate Eovaldi, and despite not having Sale’s reputation for greatness, it’s Eovaldi who has been their best pitcher this season. He doesn’t have the same potential to dominate as Sale, but Eovaldi has been the most valuable Red Sox pitcher by fWAR this season, the third most valuable pitcher in the American League by that same standard, and the most valuable Red Sox player (overall narrowly edging out Xander Bogaerts). It’s been an impressive season and one that has flown under the radar a bit, given the myriad happenings surrounding the team this season. Starting this game is an opportunity to change that, and we’ve seen how Eovaldi has performed in the post-season before COUGH2018COUGH.
Eovaldi has come by his success this season with a combination of old and new skills. For a guy who throws as hard as he does, he doesn’t possess an otherworldly strikeout rate. Eovaldi’s 25.5 strikeout percent is good but not outstanding. His walk rate is outstanding, just 4.6 percent and that’s been a big part of his success, but that’s not what has taken him to a new level this season.
That would be his ability to avoid homers. Eovaldi has given up just 15 in 182 innings this season, nine fewer than Gerrit Cole in a similar number of innings. Eovaldi had been victimized by the homer over the course of his Red Sox career up until 2021. In 2019 and 2020 he threw a combined 116 innings and gave up 24 homers. Twenty-one percent of the fly balls Eovaldi allowed went over the fence during those two seasons. That’s a lot! For context, this season the league average is a home run on 14.2 percent of fly balls. This season Eovaldi has allowing a few more fly balls, but less than half his previous percentage, only eight percent, of fly balls given up by Eovaldi leave the park. So Eovaldi has gone from almost twice as bad as a league average pitcher, to better than league average in giving up homers on fly balls, and given that this is 2021 and baseball is pretty much homers and fly balls, limiting the former is a good and necessary thing for those that enjoy winning.
Answering why did this change happen is harder, but it could be due at least in part to Eovaldi’s use of the cutter, a pitch he started throwing in 2016, when his home run rate skyrocketed. He continued using the pitch up through the 2020 season, but in 2021 he’s deemphasized it in favor of his slider. Whether that’s the reason or not, Eovaldi has kept the ball in the yard, and that’s been a huge part of his success. If he can do that against the Yankees he should have success.
For the Yankees, Gerrit Cole is certain to take the mound, provided he doesn’t trip over second base. Cole is the likely 2021 AL Cy Young winner, and owns the best strikeout percentage of any starting pitcher in the AL (third in all of baseball behind Corbin Burnes and Max Scherzer). Cole struck out 33.5 percent of the batters he faced while walking just over five percent. He’s incredibly good. His ability to not walk hitters is especially important against the Red Sox who don’t walk much. This means there won’t be any walks for Red Sox hitters. Like, none. The Red Sox are going to have to hit their way on against Cole. Sometimes that works, but that approach has the side effect of keeping Cole’s pitch count low, meaning if he’s pitching well, he’ll get to stay in the game a long time. This is bad. In turn, that will mean the rest of the Yankees bullpen won’t be exposed, nor will Yankees manager Aaron Boone have a chance to do something ill-advised.
That all said, Cole is not unhittable. He has been struggling a bit in September where his ERA for the month was over 5.00. His worst stretch of the season came in his last three starts where he gave up seven runs in 5.2 innings to Cleveland, three runs in six innings to the Red Sox, and five runs in six innings to Toronto.
Homefield Advantage for Boston is real!
The Red Sox also have the advantage of playing at Fenway Park, a park they’re much more suited towards than Yankee Stadium (or any of the other possible parks in baseball). The Red Sox are one of the best hitting teams in the sport at Fenway, but just a league average hitting team on the road (the Yankees are about the same regardless). Playing at Fenway gives the Red Sox the advantage offensively over the Yankees that they wouldn’t enjoy if they played in New York.
There’s further advantage to playing in Boston for the Red Sox, too. It’s no secret they’ve struggled defensively this season (New York hasn’t been great either, for the record), but playing at Fenway helps blunt the Sox defensive shortcomings in the outfield at least a bit. Manager Alex Cora can play his best hitting outfielders with less fear than he would otherwise. In left the Red Sox can stash either JD Martinez or Kyle Schwarber, defensive butchers both. If Martinez’s ankle won’t let him play then Schwarber can DH and the Sox will have a better defensive outfield, but if Martinez is healthy enough to go, he will (or should) DH and Schwarber will patrol baseball’s smallest outfield spot.
Lineup vs. Lineup
Let’s be charitable and start with the Yankees. I’ve been the low man on the Yankees all season long and that’s maybe not a smart place to be generally speaking, but I’m not overly impressed with the Yankees lineup. Aaron Judge is great and Giancarlo Stanton is extremely dangerous, as Red Sox fans have seen. After that, well, Anthony Rizzo walks a lot, and Joey Gallo walks a lot and hits the ball extremely far on the rare occasions he makes contact. Other than those four guys there isn’t much to recommend this lineup. Gary Sanchez has power but contact problems of his own, and probably won’t be in the lineup with Cole pitching anyway because Cole hates pitching to Sanchez. Instead, in this elimination game, the Yankees figure to start Kyle Higashioka and his weak bat (watch him hit two homers). Gleyber Torres will be at second base and he’s had an awful season. Same for center fielder and human thumb model Brett Gardner who looks done both offensively and defensively. Elsewhere third baseman Gio Urshella has been playing shortstop since the Yankees moved Torres off of shortstop because he was so bad at it. So that’s not great. And at third base the Yankees have been playing Rougned Odor who is straight up terrible regardless of where you put him.
If Eovaldi can command his pitches and not make mistakes, two thirds of the Yankees lineup can be pitched to relatively easily. The other four are tougher, but every playoff team has good hitters, and none of the Yankees guys, good as they are, are elite Vlad Jr- or Juan Soto-level guys (to be fair, none of the Red Sox hitters are on that level either).
As for the Red Sox lineup, it’s been a strange couple weeks. The team seems to go into extreme cold streaks where any minor league free agent and/or team mascot can make them look like beer leaguers for innings at a time. Then, out of nowhere, they drop three, four, or five runs on the scoreboard. In a vacuum I’d give the Red Sox the lineup advantage, but for two things. First is that coldness. It’s not an analytically-based concern, I grant you, as teams do switch between hot and cold without warning, but it does scare me. This lineup shuts down for long stretches and you just can’t do that and win a one-game playoff.
Beyond that, my concern is JD Martinez. One because his ankle might not allow him to play, and two, because if he does play, he’s a pretty good matchup for Cole. Martinez has struggled against velocity this season and velocity is Cole’s game. So we’ll see.
Beyond Martinez, the Red Sox sport their own four-headed monster in the form of Kyle Schwarber, Rafael Devers, Xander Bogaerts, and Martinez. Alex Verdugo’s recent hot hitting is big because he’s a guy who should be able to hit Cole, as much as anyone should be able to hit Cole. Kevin Plawecki should be in the lineup to catch Eovaldi and Plawecki has shown a bit of a dramatic flair this season, so maybe there’s a big hit in that bat.
Overall the two lineups are probably more even than I’d like to admit.
Bullpens
Jonathan Loaisiga is back healthy and he helps supplement a strong back end of the bullpen for New York. Aroldis Chapman may or may not be the closer anymore, but he’s been mostly effective since throwing his role into question a month or so ago. Beyond him, Chad Green has been his normal good self and newcomers Michael King and Clay Holmes are the best New York has to offer. There’s other dudes too but with Cole on the mound you don’t figure manager Aaron Boone will get too deep into the pen.
For the Sox, things are more up in the air. They used six relievers to beat the Nats on Sunday and that could impact their choices when it comes to relievers on the playoff roster. One thing we know is that with Garrett Whitlock healthy there’s about a 1000 percent chance he pitches in the game. Josh Taylor’s injury means we won’t be seeing him anytime soon, but Tanner Houck will be available to shut down righties and potentially give some innings. I expect we’ll see him give it a shot. Beyond them, Matt Barnes continues to exist, but whether or not he’s earned a Wild Card inning is up in the air. There’s also starters Nick Pivetta and Eduardo Rodriguez, who both pitched a good inning out of the pen on Sunday. Could they do it again? I don’t see why not. It won’t be the regular season pen for Boston, but we’ve all seen Cora cobble together a World Series-winning bullpen before, so perhaps he can figure a way to make these pieces fit.
Finally…
I’d hate to predict a New York win and be wrong. Also, I’d hate to predict a New York win and be right. So clearly I can’t choose the wine in front of you. On the other hand, I’d hate go all homer on you and be wrong about that too. So let’s be honest instead: I have no idea who will win. The teams are pretty evenly matched. As these things go, it’ll probably come down to starting pitching. If Eovaldi pitches well, something he didn’t do last time out against New York, Boston has a great shot. There’s something shaky about Cole this month and though he’s the best the Yankees can offer up I suspect he might be more reachable than is typical.
Regardless of what happens, I’ll be here tomorrow bright and early to recap it and discuss what comes next. Thanks for reading everyone.
Just like in that infamous & "never mentioned" 1978 Playoff the "hero" could be unlikely & in an unlikely spot ?
Let us just pray to no-one, anyone & everyone, that the Hero has a B on his cap ........
43 years is a long time to wait
But we are patient ........
GO SOX