By Yours Truly
https://fancredsports.com/Articles/not-now-either-oakland
An old joke has it that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a flat tire and a busted muffler. Sometimes the same journey ends likewise. The Oakland Athletics may not have started this season's journey that way but it sure ended that way in Yankee Stadium Wednesday night, the A's losing 7-2. With a man you could call the Yankees' almost unknown soldier breaking the game open wide enough to count, several innings after one of the Yankees' usual suspects opened the scoring in the first place.
You expect someone like Aaron Judge to wreak havoc just as he did with a two-run homer in the bottom of the first. You probably had no idea it would be Luke Voit, whom the Yankees picked up from the Cardinals rather quietly before the non-waiver trade deadline, who'd begin busting the game apart with a two-run triple in the bottom of the sixth. With the Yankee Stadium crowd chanting "We want Boston!" all game long, anticipating a division series showdown with the Red Sox.
Well, Yankee history is well enough covered with big postseason moments in which the big boppers and heavy howitzers often take back seats to the unknown soldiers. Luke Voit, meet Bob Kuzava, Billy Martin, Don Larsen, Pedro Ramos, Bucky Dent, Brian Doyle, and Luis Sojo. Voit's two-run triple off A's closer Blake Treinen put the game well enough out of Oakland's reach.
In the bottom of the sixth.
The A's figured their best chance against the Yankees in the American League wild card game was to go to the bullpen from the outset, a bullpen loaded with closers past, present, and perhaps future, against a Yankee team who decided to play it with one effective starting pitcher before going to their own running of their extremely effective bulls.
And that starter, Luis Severino, brought his best side to the park as opposed to last year's disaster. He pitched four virtuoso innings with seven strikeouts and squirmed out of a bases loaded jam in the fourth with a nasty rising fastball that tied Oakland shortstop Marcus Semien into knots on the swishout. The A's got eight baserunners against Severino but came out only going 1-for-11 with two walks at the plate with those men on.
So what was Liam Hendriks---a journeyman from Australia whose 2015 with the Blue Jays was his aberrational career year, and whose 2018 for the A's shows a 4.18 ERA in 24 innings work---doing as the chosen opener in the biggest game of an A's season that almost wasn't supposed to get even this far in the first place? Why not open with someone like Lou Trivino (2.92 ERA) or Ryan Buchter (2.75)?
Because Trivino pitched three scoreless. After shaking off a second inning-opening infield single (Didi Gregorius) and followup walk by getting Gary Sanchez to dial Area Code 6-4-3 and striking out Gleyber Torres, Trivino---normally the A's setup man---threw stuff the Yankees couldn't hit with a telephone pole. He totaled four strikeouts in his three innings' work, three of them swinging, including Aaron Judge. He looked like the hero of the hour for the A's before he yielded expatriate National Shawn Kelley.
The problem was, Trivino's virtuosity came after Hendriks made the Yankees wait all of nine pitches before they answered the aforementioned question. He opened by walking leadoff hitter Andrew McCutchen on five pitches and falling behind 2-1 to Judge, before throwing a four-seam fastball right into Judge's wheelhouse. And watching it sail about eight rows back into the left field seats.
Kelley shook off Miguel Andujar's fifth-inning leadoff dash to beat out an infield hit, just barely eluding A's third baseman Matt Chapman's dive and daring throw acruss, with a forceout, a line out, and a pop out compelling Semien to amble out to shallow left for the ball and the side. Then A's manager Bob Melvin handed off to ancient Fernando Rodney, hoping Rodney could just help keep it close.
Judge had his own ideas, smacking an 0-1 pitch past first and down the right field line for a leadoff double. Hicks had his own ideas, too, lining Judge home with a double to the right center field gap. Exit Rodney, after falling behind Giancarlo Stanton 1-0 on a wild pitch allowing Hicks to third; enter Treinen, Melvin's usual closer, third in saves in this year's American League and with an 0.78 ERA over 80.1 innings in 68 games, and with a .158 batting average against him. And exit Stanton on ball four.
Enter Voit. Enter Stanton stealing second on a ball low in the dirt. And after working himself to a full count, exit his high drive up, down, and off the right field wall sending home Hicks and Stanton, while enter a 5-0 Yankee lead.
Voit's grandmother has a habit of sending him $25 checks for every home run he hits. The husky first baseman by trade saved Nana $25 Wednesday night, but he was big enough bank for the Yankees even though he's probably the last Yankee you might expect to run himself into a triple. He's about as swift as a millipede, but when he swings the bat he's deceptive. Treinen---who hadn't pitched before the eighth inning since early April, incidentally---thought his book said don't let him extend. Voit has a shorter swing than most power hitters, and if Treinen thought he could fool Voit with a breaking ball in, he was disabused swiftly when Voit's drive sailed the other way high and deep.
"I think if you look back and you told us we would have 97 wins and an opportunity to be in a wild card game against a 100-win team," Treinen told a reporter after the game, "we'd all take that. Obviously, tonight didn't go the way we wanted. But it's not because of effort. Just more or less not our day."
Indeed. Khris Davis parked Yankee reliever Zach Britton's first pitch to him in the top of the eighth in the right field seats with Jed Lowrie aboard to account for the only two Oakland runs of the night. Too little, too late for the A's. Again. Stanton finally got to do some big damage in a postseason game when he hit Treinen's 1-2 slider into the left field seats to lead off the bottom of the eighth. Gravy for the Yankees. Again.
Before Davis teed off, Dellin Betances and David Robertson kept the A's quiet enough and then some, Britton shook off the Davis blast to turn the A's away before any further damage, and Aroldis Chapman flicked Semien's ninth inning-opening single to one side while dispatching the next three A's for the game.
Nothing the A's try seems to work when they get to the postseason. The knock on general manager Billy Beane is that he's built teams for the long season haul but that's about it. This year they anchored themselves with a shutdown bullpen and went for broke Wednesday night by sending that pen forth from the outset. What's next for the A's? They'll have all winter to figure something out. A team that's lost all eight winner-take-all postseason games in which they've played since 2000 has a lot to think about.
Not that the Yankees have easy times awaiting them, either. The fellows against whom they open an American League division series Friday have baseball's best regular season record this year. The last time the Yankees squared off against the Red Sox in the postseason was . . . 2004. When the Red Sox, down to their last out and facing a League Championship Series sweep out, overthrew the Yankees in four crazy games before winning the World Series at long enough last.
If you think that history doesn't mean squat now, you haven't spent a lot of time among the innards of the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry. They weren't trying to be funny chanting "We Want Boston!" in the Yankee Stadium stands most of Wednesday night. Forty years after B.F. Dent (if you have to ask, you weren't there) drove a stake into Boston's heart in that AL East tiebreaker, following a staggering Yankee stretch drive comeback, two Northeastern cities with baseball's most embittered historical rivalry can't wait to bust their guts roaring one way or the other.
That was then---a Red Sox fan could and did lament, "They killed our fathers, and now the sons of bitches are coming after us." This is now---in the 21st Century, the Red Sox have won three World Series to the Yankees' one.
Betances gets it. "We wanted Boston, that's who's next, right? Obviously they're a tremendous team, we've battled them all year, so I think everybody in baseball wants this matchup," said the relief ace. "And so do we."
Unfortunately, it's not quite the matchup the A's hoped to see. And while it would have been mad fun to see the back-from-purgatory A's get past Wednesday night on the winning side, there's not much you can do when your journey of a thousand miles ends with a flat tire and a busted muffler.
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