NEW YORK — The sweetness of summer is so gone it can be hard to remember. Its memory is subsumed by the earlier nightfall, the zipping of a jacket, trees giving up their leaves in surrender to the coming cold and, if you’re the Boston Red Sox, the relentless might of the New York Yankees. The 37 midsummer games when the Red Sox saved their season and won in ways that were almost laughable are now dried flowers in an album, a poor placeholder for what once was.
Can you remember? Maybe not if you saw the Yankees—without Aaron Judge—steamroll Boston in a wild-card sweep, 9–0 in Game 1 Tuesday and 9–2 in Game 2 Wednesday. And it wasn’t that close.
“That,” New York manager Aaron Boone says, “was about as good as we can play. I just told the guys, ‘If we play like that, we can beat anybody.’”
The Red Sox’ season ended spectacularly poorly, which is to say it was a matching bookend to the year. It’s a tragicomedy in three acts: 32–46, 32–5 and 23–26 in which they were the worst hitting team in baseball for the last month. The anomaly was those 37 games of summer bliss.
The way the season ended, the Red Sox must question their offensive depth. Certainly, it was no match against the firepower and depth of the Judge-less Yankees.
Rarely do playoff games devolve into ugly mismatches, but that’s what happened over two games. The Yankees knocked the spirit out of what was, during its heyday, a feisty Boston team. Willson Contreras didn’t cover first base while his shortstop laid out for a liner and he didn’t stretch for a throw from catcher Adley Rutschman on a third-strike wild pitch, the spark to the flame of six runs in the sixth. Manager Chad Tracy repeated his mistake of pulling his starter to ask Erik Miller to be a shutdown lefty reliever—while lefties are batting .533 against Miller this month. Jazz Chisholm Jr. stole second base standing up with a six-run lead. Rutschman threw a ball into center field on a stolen base by Spencer Jones. It was about as anticlimactic a series as you could find.
CODY BELLINGER THREE-RUN HOMER
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IT'S 8-1 YANKEES! pic.twitter.com/gUQC8CJQb9
While the Red Sox were left to question where they are on the winning curve, the Yankees found their new voice without Judge. The Bronx Bombers looked like the Rays, their next opponent in the American League division series. Game 2 marked the first postseason game in franchise history in which they sprayed 12 singles around the field and stole four bases. Throw in two run-scoring productive outs and a perfectly executed bunt and New York showcased speed and athleticism that give them another ramp to victory if Judge is not recovered from his calf injury in time for the ALDS.
The Rays will present a different, better challenge to the Yankees than Boston. But again, the Yankees have much more offensive depth and more elite stuff in the rotation. Cam Schlittler and Max Fried, allowing one run in 12 1/3 combined innings, never allowed Boston momentum, constantly keeping Red Sox hitters off balance. Brilliantly mixing his pitches, Fried hit 23 different speeds between 73 mph and 98 mph.
Tampa Bay won the season series against New York, 7–6, but was outscored, 54–45. The Rays are an opportunistic team that doesn’t strike out, but they were 12th in the majors in runs per game. They prefer to play a series with soccer scores to take out New York. And that may be their one path, whereas the Yankees, as they showed Boston, have many avenues to victory.
