From Jeff Jones:
When a team goes through rough patches over a long season, it can often be useful to get back to basics and play the style of baseball that helped define the team at its essence.
They’re known as the Bronx Bombers for a reason, after all.
The Yankees muscled up for three homers, Trent Grisham scored a career-high four run, and Ben Rice matched a career high with seven RBIs in a 12-8 win on Saturday night, securing a Players’ Weekend series victory at Busch Stadium.
A matchup between Max Fried and St. Louis’ Sonny Gray might have been fairly billed as a battle of the aces, but it was the offense for both sides which supplied the soundtrack to a muggy, drawn-out night.
Fried battled through five-plus innings and allowed two homers of his own, totaling seven runs surrendered (all earned) on eight hits.
I mean, obviously, on the one hand, you have to give major props to the Yankees offense. Ben Rice, holy shit, right?
And Aaron Judge also woke the fuck up, and had a great game (while still having a shockingly bad at-bat at a different point in the game).
However, the big story, of course, is how much Max Fried sucks. Fried changed his grip this season, but that obviously wasn’t a problem, as he was excellent for the first half of the season. But as Braves fans are well used to, Fried then developed blisters, and since then, he’s obviously been trying an adjusted grip to avoid blisters, and, well, that shit has NOT been working.
Remember Gerrit Cole in 2021? He started the season with probably the most dominant pitching I’ve ever seen from a Yankee starter (I didn’t get to watch peak Ron Guidry), and then they banned sticky stuff, so Cole had to work out a new grip to get the spin he wanted, and he sucked for MONTHS. Finally, though, he figured the grip out, and was great again (then he got hurt and sucked while pitching hurt, and the Yankees for some fucking stupid reason still used him in the Wild Card game against the Red Sox despite the fact that he was clearly pitching hurt, and was not good).
I imagine that that is what we’re seeing with Fried. He is using an altered grip to avoid blisters, and it just doesn’t work. See how often he kept trying to get the pitches down, and instead, they remained up and were CRUSHED.
To be fair, Dominguez also fucked him on a hard hit single that Dominguez played into a triple, but generally speaking, the Cardinals were hitting everything hard because he wasn’t keeping the ball down like he needs to do. He pitched well for a few innings, so I think he’s probably still a good pitcher, he just needs to figure this grip shit out. OR go on the IL when Yarbrough returns and let the blisters fully adjust, then he can go back to the original grip that eventually brings blisters back, but they’ll hopefully get two good months out of him first.
The Braves notably put him on the IL late last season for that specific reason, to have him healthy for the playoffs (he sucked in the one game he pitched, by the way). It’s very frustrating to see the guy who was an automatic win on the schedule in the first half of the season now mean an automatic loss (unless you score 12 runs).
Mark Leiter had some problems in the ninth, but I don’t mind. He was pitching to the scoreboard, and gave up a home run, and then he got screwed by two unlucky hits. So I’m fine with Leiter still (I wouldn’t have used him in the ninth period, though. Just use Headrick).
The Guardians lost again, so the Yankees now have a 2.5 lead on the Guardians for the final playoff spot. Worse than NOT having a 2.5 lead.
The featured image is Ben Rice’s home run. I just loved how you can see everyone’s eyes looking at the ball – Rice, Pages, and the umpire.