From Bryan Hoch:
The Yanks stood one out from victory before Clay Holmes was tagged with his Major League-leading 10th blown save.
“Look, anytime you lose, it sucks,” said manager Aaron Boone. “It’s hard traveling home now and you’re right there, ready to grab two out of three on a weekend where you didn’t score a lot of runs. That’s part of the game, part of the grind; that’s the tough part of it. But there’s also memories of the experience and getting to be here. You try to keep that perspective, too.”
Boone said that he will continue to stick with Clay Holmes as his closer, despite Holmes proving to be a terrible closer. Which sucks.
Mark Leiter Jr. is also in the middle of a pretty shitty stretch here, that’s his second terrible game out of his last four (and he gave up a run in another game, as well, just not as bad as he was tonight or against Texas).
Hopefully Scott Effross and Ian Hamilton return soon.
Otherwise, Marcus Stroman was good, which was nice to see. The offense, though, was putrid. Juan Soto had probably his worst series of the season, and the Yankees continue to suck on national TV games.
Some big games coming up against Cleveland. Let’s see if they continue to play towards their competition.
The featured image is the Tigers’ walkoff win when Jason Dominiguez double-clutched on what could have been an out at the plate (he has a good arm, and when he finally DID throw the ball, he made a good throw).
Maybe the weirdest thing about the Holmes as a closer thing is that the Yankees have actively changed his repertoire/pitch usage this year to try to turn him into a better strikeout pitcher. Yeah, the new slider/sweeper is pretty good, but his sinker is still his best pitch, even if it makes him a more risky pitcher.
Do they have a better option for closer? Kahnle? Weaver if he gets it back together? Even if Schmidt goes back to the BP when he returns, I don’t think he’s a closing option.
Cousins has generally been quite good, and he IS a strikeout guy (12.6 K/9), so I think he should get a chance at the job. Not only that, but Cousins is signed longterm, too (under team control until 2029), so why not see what you have with the guy who can be here for multiple seasons?
Closer by committee. They need help as Blake’s magic potion has run out for most of these guys.
Last night was so disgustingly foreseeable I thought about putting a quick bet in.
You may be a bad manager when your closer leads the league in blown saves and the guy in second place has about half as many and you keep using him as your closer.
You may be a bad manager when your short stop doesn’t hit for weeks and you don’t sit him down for a few games. (Especially since after the ASB he came back hitting!)
You may be a bad manager when you keep running out a Left fielder who can’t hit for weeks and months and there is likely a better solution (defensively for sure…) in the bench.
You may be a bad manager when you keep benching players after a good game but not after a bad month.
I can go on…but this is a major reason they won’t win a WS with this guy at the helm. This team has the talent to win; they have one of the best records in baseball despite an idiot making dumb in game decisions. But once the playoffs start they are doomed because every dumb decision is magnified.
Leiter has a Yankee era of 6.48 and a BAA of 381. De Los Santos numbers are 14.21 and 419. Cash’s deadline moves.
The Yankees are not a bad team but they’re not that good either.They’ve got mediocre to bad players at every position except RF,CF/DH,C which is why they go on these long streaks of not hitting. They had one good inning in 6 games against the White Sox and Detroit. Stanton, phenom, Vertigo, DJ/Rice are pretty much non factors offensively. phenom is 4/41 and 2 of his hits were infield hits. And to Boone there’s nothing wrong, he treats phenom like he did when Judge had a bad month,
I mean what other team has a better lineup?
Why did Boone go Leiter over Cousins with the lead in the 10th?
Went to Cooperstown yesterday. They have a display that’s supposed to be current for each team. In the Yankees slot they had a Judge jersey and a “Kraken 24” BP jersey.
https://x.com/riveraveblues/status/1825572453101269104?s=61&t=fhOaqwtc8q2TMSXUDRjPeg
As I have been saying for some time, Hal is THE problem.
Biggest Yankees failure over the last 15 years is Hal Steinbrenner’s ownership and his reluctance to make tough decisions and hold people accountable
https://x.com/ScreamingLiner2/status/1825590794818039837
Attendance is good, ad rates are high, merch selling, stock price sold. By his metrics things are great.
I think the issue is Hal and cashman have similar dispositions. they need a 3rd, more provocative, personality as a foil(s)
Hal feels ‘comfortable’ with Cashman. Besides, it would be too much work to search for a young replacement GM.
The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton
the problem w Holmes is his delivery is very predictable. good for his health but eh
More Judge homers
go orioles
mutts doing gods work
You spoke too soon.
I am no Mark Leiter Jr. apologist, but yeah – a BABIP nearing .500 is going to normalize.
Note that “normalize” doesn’t mean “He’s going to be good.” It just means that a BABIP that high is stupid lol
https://x.com/mryclept/status/1825622057364894124
His FIP is 5.80.
As expected, Jasson sent back to AAA.
why is marinaccio in aaa when we have this terrible pen?
even when he’s bad he’s better than the retreads. he might even be better than holmes.
this franchise is not serious.
nach kinda sucks imo. his best pitch – change – is very hittable
I think he took the last ice-cold Coke that Cashman wanted for himself.
If Holmes was even an average closer the yanks would be running away with the AL East.
Is 83% that big a deal? Pretty sure just about every teams closer is 83%. That would mean 4 or 5 more wins. Sheesh this guy is really not good at closing. Forget the Indians guy who’s great; or some others . Just pick some random closer on say the nationals. He’s better than 83%. It’s unbelievable how bad he is at this and yet they keep using him.
Yes this team is good – we’d all be really happy if we were 4 or 5 games up with the best record on mlb. Instead because of a terrible closer we may end up ac a wild card. Crazy.
Yep, even as bad as this line up is, with a decent Holmes, not 10-blown-saves-Holmes, we’d be four-six games in front.
The Yankees following the Green Bay Packers path, 30 years of Favre and Rodgers with 3 Super Bowl appearances and just 1 between 1998 and 2022), as the Yankees waste the best of Aaron Judge.
Francisco Alvarez with the walk off HR as the Mets beat the O’s.
Boston with their own bullpen meltdown. Yankees have a higher save % than Boston 65-55. The White Sox are at 38%.
How can anybody have that low a save percentage? Just pitch the kind of pitchers who pitched those other innings and GOT you to the save situation!
Oh…
are you making up numbers? and then writing them down? and then typing and posting them?
Also, how long until a pattern of lucky hits and bad play behind a pitcher becomes predictive? Maybe Holmes’ pitches impart some particuarly awkward spin to a hit ball. (Or maybe his teammates hate him.)
Either way, he allows way to many baserunners to be brought into late and close situations – let alone every damned late and close situation the team has.
OH…
The save % thing is malarkey. Any blown lead by the 7th or 8th inning guy is a “blown save”, but those guys can never get saves, only holds. This drives the save% down, but is not that meaningful.
Say a total leads 2-1 after 6. 7th inning guy gives up a run. Tie game blown save. They score taking a 3-2 lead. 8th inning guy gives up a run, blown save. They score taking a 4-3 lead which the closer closes out. A Win, with a save % of 33%.
Now what if the 8th inning guy does his job? A win with a save % of 50%.
What if they all do their jobs? It goes down as one save (and two holds) and then in to the next game.
See the problem?
Interesting… but why is it malarkey? You’re measuring how often then team blows late leads. That seems like a reasonable statistic to follow. The only conclusion you seem to be suggesting is that, overall, those numbers are likely to be lower than you’d expect before you understand how the stat works.
The only question is whether the stat has predictive value. If it does, it’s a pretty important stat, and you wouldn’t want to be doing badly in that regard.
Yes petwom – you are correct. It’s not total malarkey. it just doesn’t mean as much as one might think.
Also big difference between
Blowing a 7th inning lead and 9th inning lead with regard to win probability
Right. Which means it should be weighted to correct for that.
Did Judge hit any home runs last night?
All of them!
very good, carry on
What do you mean? We’re all done now.
Come on folks, nothing to see here, move along!
Thank God I was in the country at a poetry thing over the weekend – those were a couple of truly miserable losses. Why does the team seem so bad when they’re actually near the top of the league? Well, how many losses like this have they had? And also, of course, they’ve been a lot worse than this record for a long time now, it’s still the fantastic start skewing the results… for now.
8-7 against some very tough teams is not too bad.
At Patreon Soto is dead last on the team in % of ABs with runners on base at39.5% Wells and Judge are slightly over 50%, DJ and Vertigo at 46%
As for Boone… I think it was Letterman who asked Tyson what it was like to walk into a room and know you could take anyone there. Boone’s just the opposite – what’s it like for him to walk into a room and any random jerk would be a better manager than he is? Forget the timing of pitching changes and pinch-hitting and all that. (I mean, don’t forget it, it’s unbelievable, but leave it aside for a moment.) Who among us doesn’t see clearly how gallingly stupid it is to keep running out Holmes to blow saves and the team’s morale? What bizarre obligation does Boone think he has to be “loyal” to something that’s losing them games, what is he proving and to whom? Who among us doesn’t see how gallingly stupid it is (maybe was, but I’m not counting our chickens) to keep running out Verdugo at leadoff when he’s simply failed there, and then just keeps on failing there – added to the fact that it’s not as if he was ever a guy you’d think of as a prototypical leadoff hitter?
That random guy yelling at the game on TV at your local bar is a far, far better manager than Aaron Boone.
Also, I want to give Brian a shout out for the title of this thread, and the Yankees, because, well, when you think about it, kicking yourself in the crotch is not an easy feat to accomplish.
NYY is tentatively scheduled to see six LHP in the next nine games. Means we’re gonna see a lot of DJLM and potentially a lot of Trevino/not much of Wells. They have no good 1B options. It is what it is. Sitting Wells so much would be a mistake though, even against LHP.
https://x.com/Yankees/status/1825972360433869016?t=0aWURQ5cDY2KqWDts-bT3w&s=19
I know it is asking a lot (I totally get how they don’t deserve this at ALL), but I think they likely WILL play Wells in most of these games. But yes, it is a really bad look to sit him in the first game of this stretch. I can’t say, though, that I’m not a bit curious as to how Trevino will handle Gil.
Stanton last 7 days 154/466
Verdugo 133/367 Great Cash acquisition
phenom 158/449 aided by 2 infield hits
DJ 143/343 Finally coming in to form
Gleyber 211/581 who’s merely been terrible but head and shoulders over the others
The line-up has been awful, and yet had Holmes only blown 6 saves instead of 10, they’d be up 5 in the loss column.