The Red Sox got three hits. The Yankees got a grand slam, a second Ben Rice home run, and 6.1 scoreless innings from a starter throwing a career-high 117 pitches. New York 9, Boston 0, and the Yankees lead the Wild Card series 1-0.
How it happened
Cam Schlittler gave the Yankees 6.1 scoreless innings on a career-high 117 pitches. Boston never solved him.
- Ben Rice hit two home runs, including a grand slam.
- Lombard scored on a sacrifice fly by Wells to start the breakout inning before Rice cleared the bases.
- Boston finished with three hits as a team.
- Final: Yankees 9, Red Sox 0.
The Yankees lead the best-of-three American League Wild Card Series 1-0. Boston has to win twice.
The homegrown thing
Worth pointing out because it runs against how this team is usually described.
Schlittler and Rice are both Yankee draft-and-develop products. For a franchise whose identity for thirty years has been buying whoever is available, a 9-0 playoff opener carried by two players it raised is a different kind of night.
The BeezLoop Take
A 9-0 game in a best-of-three is worth exactly one win, and Yankee fans who have watched this before know it. The 2004 ALCS is still the governing text of this rivalry, and it started with New York winning by a lot.
What should actually encourage them is Schlittler rather than the score. Nine runs in a playoff game is noise; a young starter holding a lineup to three hits over 6.1 innings on 117 pitches is a repeatable thing, and it is the thing the Yankees have not reliably had in October for years. They have lost postseason series with better offenses than this one because the rotation could not hold a lead into the seventh.
For Boston the number that matters is three hits, not nine runs. Getting blown out is survivable in a short series. Producing nothing against a 25-year-old making a postseason start is the problem, because it does not have an obvious fix between Tuesday and Wednesday.
The 117 pitches deserve a flag, though, and nobody will raise it while the team is winning. That is a lot to ask of a young arm in Game 1 of a short series, and if this goes the distance the Yankees have already spent him. Managers do this in October and then spend February explaining an elbow.
The question
Was Tuesday a starter arriving or a lineup that happened to be cold? And was 117 pitches in Game 1 of a best-of-three worth it?
More: the Astros won their division at 81-81, which no team had done in a 162-game season.
Sources: ESPN box score · CBS Sports · Bleacher Report · MLB.com
