twilightdawning

A writer's thoughts – mainly about music, sport and theatre. Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, live shows, New York Yankees

The New York Yankees in October – Part Two – The Pitchers (2021)

Posted on November 17, 2021 by twilightdawning

It was October and the Yankees’ starting rotation was struggling.

While Gerrit Cole was on the active roster, the Yankees elected to not use him in the series with Tampa Bay in order that he might be ready for the Wild Card game.

Jameson Taillon was back from injury and a rehab assignment and ready to go but, as already noted in last month’s report, the Yankees had sent Andrew Heaney to the bullpen and now assigned him outright to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Railriders (Triple-A) – an assignment he would decline and so elect to become a free agent.

Let’s see who rose above the challenges of the end of the year:

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The New York Yankees in October – Part One – The Batters (2021)

Posted on November 4, 2021 by twilightdawning

Pretty much every baseball season ends in October – although there have been exceptions: one of which comes to mind all too easily and painfully. This year’s was scheduled to possibly run into November…

The Yankees’ season ended way too early in October. They had a three game series against the Tampa Bay Rays to round out the regular schedule and that qualified them for the one game wildcard playoff where they would face the Boston Red Sox.

And that’s where it all came to a premature end. To be frank, whilst it would have been nice to beat a great rival, the Yankees didn’t deserve much more. They had a season where they bounced between simply horrible and very good. Were the best bad team? Or the worst good team? Either way they didn’t deserve to be taking home any pennants this year. We have two tables for you – the stats for the last regular games and then the stats for that one post-season game. Let’s take a look at who did what:

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The New York Yankees in September – Part One – The Batters (2021)

Posted on October 5, 2021 by twilightdawning

The New York Yankees of September were not the New York Yankees of August. From the 4th to the 10th of the month, they had a 7 game losing streak. However, later in the month (20th to 28th) they were to match this with a 7 game winning streak.

Inconsistency was their watchword.

This all meant that they only closed the gap on Tampa Bay by one game across the whole month and as the month came to an end, they were locked in a blockbuster situation with only three games to play. They still needed to head off Boston, Toronto and Seattle to earn one of the Wildcard places and this was going right down to the wire.

Most of the batters struggled. Some were pretty good…

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The New York Yankees – The Pitchers in the Playoffs (2018)

Posted on November 4, 2018 by twilightdawning

So, as we have seen there were some questionable decisions made by Aaron Boone, the Yankees’ manager, with regard to the batting line-up and substitutions. We, therefore, shouldn’t be surprised that those strange moments weren’t confined to the batting and the defence but affected the pitching too. Can anybody spell Austin Romine?

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The New York Yankees – The Batters in the Playoffs (2018)

Posted on November 1, 2018 by twilightdawning

The Yankees’ time in the playoffs was short and sometimes not so sweet. They beat the Oakland Athletics in the one-game wildcard game but then were out of their depth in the 5 games series for the American League Division Series (ALDS) losing 3-1 to the Boston Red Sox who would eventually go on to take the World Series.

The performances of the batting line up were not far from how the players had performed in the regular season. Let’s take a look:

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