River Avenue Blues

Yankees 11, Giants 5: Yankees close out RAB era with a sweep

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All things considered, I’m not sure I could’ve asked the Yankees for a better ending to the RAB era. With RAB set to close its internet doors Monday, the Yankees went out and clobbered the Giants in Sunday’s series finale to finish the three-game series sweep. The final score was 11-5. The Yankees have won eleven of their last 13 games.

Our high flyin’ large adult baseball sons. (Presswire)

Two In The First, Two In The Second, Two In The Third
The Yankees have played a lot of bad teams in the early going this season. The Orioles, the Tigers, the White Sox, the Royals … the Yankees have played them all already. The Giants have more name value on their roster than those four teams combined, but gosh, they are every bit as bad based on what we saw this weekend. Every bit as bad on the field and way more expensive. San Francisco has some onerous contracts, for sure.

It did not take long for the Giants to show their badness on Sunday. DJ LeMahieu opened the game with a single to left, then righty Dereck Rodriguez nibbled the bases loaded. He walked Luke Voit on six pitches and Brett Gardner on five pitches, and only six of those eleven pitches were fastballs. Rodriguez kept trying to get Voit and Gardner to chase something soft and they wouldn’t do it. Three batters, three baserunners.

Gary Sanchez gave Rodriguez and the Giants the double play ball they needed. Tailor-made 6-4-3 double play ball. Instead, the usually sure-handed Brandon Crawford bobbled the grounder and zero outs were recorded. The Giants did turn the 4-6-3 double play on Gleyber Torres’ broken bat grounder, but another run scored to give the Yankees a 2-0 lead. It’s nice being on the other end of those sloppy mistakes, isn’t it?

The second inning opened with two quick baserunners (Gio Urshela single, Tyler Wade walk) and two quick outs (Domingo German strikeout, LeMahieu fly out). For whatever reason, Giants catcher Erik Kratz tried to pick Urshela off second base with a snap throw, but no one was ready for it. Certainly not the infielder at second. The throw sailed into center, the runners moved up, and Voit brought them home with a single against the shift.

Two runs in the first after the botched double play, two runs in the second after Kratz’s ill-advised snap throw, and two runs in the third on a Gleyber homer. Rodriguez walked Sanchez to start the inning and Torres parked one in the left-center field seats. This is one of the few times the behind-the-plate camera angle is #ActuallyGood:

Good gravy Oracle Park is huge. Look at that left-center field gap. Also, the way Gleyber smiled and pointed at the dugout as he rounded first base leads me to believe he called his shot there. Either he called it or whoever he pointed called it. Pretty cool. The Yankees worked Rodriguez over: 3 IP, 7 H, 6 R, 4 ER, 4 BB, 3 K, 1 HR on 81 pitches. Two of the three strikeouts were German, the opposing pitcher. Eighty-one pitches to get three outs. Lordy.

German Hits A Wall
As great as he’s been, Domingo German was not going to sustain a sub-2.00 ERA all season. That’s just not happening in Yankee Stadium and in the AL East in general. At some point the correction was coming. It came in the sixth inning Sunday and it came at a good time. If you’re going to give up four runs in one inning, the best time to do it is when your team has given you an 8-0 run cushion.

German cruised through the first five innings against an admittedly terrible Giants lineup. He retired 15 of the first 17 batters he faced and the two baserunners were a single by the opposing pitcher (Rodriguez) and a Voit error. Voit had more time than he realized when he rushed and airmailed a throw to German covering first base. Only three of those first 17 batters managed to hit the ball out of the infield. German made it look easy. Very easy.

The wheels kinda came off in that sixth inning. Tyler Austin worked a hard-fought ten-pitch leadoff walk, Cameron Maybin misread a ball off the wall in left field, German hung a two-strike breaking ball to Kevin Pillar … just not a lot went right in that sixth inning. After throwing 59 pitches in the first five innings, German needed 28 pitches to get through that sixth inning. His final line: 6 IP, 5 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 1 BB, 4 K. Looks worse than it was.

Even after seemingly hitting a wall in that sixth inning, German owns a 2.56 ERA (2.79 FIP) with strong strikeout (25.8%) and walk (7.3%) rates through 32.1 innings. He walked five batters in five innings in his first start, remember. Only four walks in 27.1 innings since. I’m not sure the homer rate will last forever (0.57 HR/9 and 6.3% HR/FB), but gosh, German looks so confident right now. It really seems like something has clicked. Exciting!

Domingo Dandy. (Presswire)

Leftovers
Second homer in as many days for Sanchez, who hit a two-run shot deep into the left field bleachers in the sixth inning. Maybe a row or two from the concourse. It wasn’t as long (430 feet) as Saturday’s grand slam (467 feet), but it looked longer because it was closer to the line and nearly cleared the bleachers. Even after missing time with the calf injury, Gary still leads all catchers with eight home runs.

The Giants made some more mistakes in the ninth inning to help the Yankees score three more insurance runs. Maybin (one run) and Wade (two-run) both had run-scoring singles that inning. Three hits and a walk for Voit, who’s up to .283/.397/.538 (149 wRC+) on the season. Two hits and a walk for Torres, two hits for Urshela before getting hurt (hit-by-pitch in hand), and two hits for Thairo Estrada after coming off the bench to replace LeMahieu (knee inflammation).

Pretty easy afternoon for the bullpen, even after the Giants hung a four-spot on German in the sixth. Jonathan Holder went 1-2-3 in the seventh, Tommy Kahnle pitched around a walk in the eighth, and Joe Harvey allowed a garbage time solo homer in the ninth after the offense tacked on those insurance runs. Nice and easy game for the relief crew. Thanks for that.

And finally, make it a 39-game on-base streak for Voit. It is the longest active on-base streak in baseball — Freddie Freeman is second and he extended his streak to 28 games Sunday afternoon — and it is the longest streak by a Yankee since Mark Teixeira had a 42-gamer in 2010.

Box Score, WPA Graph & Standings
MLB.com has the box score and video highlights and ESPN has the updated standings. Here’s our Bullpen Workload page and here’s the win probability graph:


Source: FanGraphs

Up Next
For RAB, one final day of posts. Tomorrow is the site’s final day. For the Yankees, it’s an off-day. They’ll spend Monday’s off-day in Phoenix before opening a quick two-game series with the Diamondbacks on Tuesday. CC Sabathia and righty Merrill Kelly are the scheduled starters for Tuesday night’s opener.

The Final DotF: Park, Gittens have big games in Trenton’s win

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RHP Nick Green has been placed on the Double-A Trenton injured list, the team announced. He joins RHP Trevor Stephan and RHP Nick Nelson (and others) on the shelf. Also, RHP Garrett Whitlock was removed from yesterday’s start after one inning, though he remains on the active roster. No word on what’s wrong with any of these guys. The injury bug that bit the big league team has spread through the minors too, apparently. Sheesh.

The Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders were rained out. No word on the makeup date yet.

Double-A Trenton Thunder (4-2 win over Erie)

  • SS Hoy Jun Park: 3-3, 1 R, 1 2B, 1 CS — 13-for-34 (.383) with five doubles and three triples in his last eight games
  • LF Ben Ruta: 1-3, 1 2B, 2 RBI, 1 K — this game *lowers* his batting line to .403/.506/.582
  • 1B Chris Gittens: 2-3, 1 R, 1 2B, 1 HR, 2 RBI, 1 BB — 12-for-27 (.444) with three doubles, one triple, three homers, eight walks, and six strikeouts in his last eight games
  • DH Brandon Wagner: 0-3, 1 BB
  • RHP Rony Garcia: 5 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 4 BB, 8 K, 1 HB, 3/1 GB/FB — 55 of 101 pitches were strikes (54%) … some control issues, but that’s a fine Double-A debut for the 21-year-old, who has been pressed into duty here because of all the injuries

[Read more…]

Update: DJ LeMahieu exits Sunday’s game with right knee inflammation

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(Getty)

7:33pm ET: LeMahieu will get an MRI and see an orthopedist tomorrow, Aaron Boone announced following the game. It looks like a deep bruise but they want to make sure that’s it.

5:45pm ET: LeMahieu has right knee inflammation, the Yankees announced. X-rays came back negative. Hopefully he’ll be able to return to action following the off-day tomorrow.

5:06pm ET: DJ LeMahieu was removed from this afternoon’s game in the third inning with a possible injury. He walked off the field gingerly following the bottom of the second and was slow going down the dugout steps. LeMahieu fouled a pitch into his knee two days ago.

I’ve honestly lost count of how many Yankees are on the injured list right now. I think it’s 13? At least 12, I know that much. Among those injured Yankees are three infielders (Miguel Andujar, Didi Gregorius, Troy Tulowitzki), and three outfielders (Aaron Hicks, Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton). Geez.

LeMahieu had a single and a fly out earlier in the game, not to mention several fairly routine defensive plays, and he seemed to be moving okay until the end of the second inning. With a sizeable lead and an off-day tomorrow, hopefully this is just precautionary. Stay tuned for updates.

Should LeMahieu miss time, the Yankees already have Thairo Estrada on the big league roster, and the recently signed Brad Miller in Triple-A as an obvious call-up candidate. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that. We’ll see.

Update: X-rays negative after Gio Urshela takes pitch to hand

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(Presswire)

7:14pm ET: X-rays on Urshela’s hand came back negative, the Yankees announced. That’s great news. That said, I’m sure Urshela’s hand is swollen and sore. He might need a few days before returning to the lineup. Hopefully he can avoid the injured list. Here’s the video:

5:38pm ET: Ah good, another injured Yankee. Gio Urshela exited this afternoon’s game after taking a pitch to the top of the left hand in the fifth inning. DJ LeMahieu exited the game with a possible injury earlier as well. Urshela will presumably go for x-rays. So many little easy-to-break bones in the hand.

The Yankees have either 12 or 13 players on the injured list. I forgot exactly how many at this point. Urshela is filling in at third base for Miguel Andujar and he’s been great, including reaching base three times Sunday. Add in the defense and you couldn’t have asked him for much more.

Thairo Estrada is already on the big league roster and the Yankees have Brad Miller in Triple-A as an obvious call-up candidate. If they need to replace LeMahieu or Urshela, they go do it easily. If they have to replace both? Goodness, I have no idea. Stay tuned for an update on Urshela.

Game 28: Sweep by the Bay?

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(Presswire)

The West Coast trip is going about as well as anyone could’ve reasonably hoped. The Yankees have won five of the first six games, and their makeshift lineup keeps finding ways to scratch out runs. Seems like it’s a new hero every day, doesn’t it?

“That’s one that kind of sucks the air out of the building,” Aaron Boone said to George King when asked about Gary Sanchez’s grand slam in yesterday’s win. “I had to walk down the steps and let out a yell. That fires you up when you see when of our dudes really step on one. I enjoyed that one.”

Domingo German has been his team’s most consistent starter this season, which sounds weird, but is definitely true. Little Sunday has been excellent. Now he can pitch the Yankees to a three-game series sweep on Sunday. Fitting. Here are today’s lineups:

New York Yankees
1. 2B DJ LeMahieu
2. 1B Luke Voit
3. CF Brett Gardner
4. C Gary Sanchez
5. SS Gleyber Torres
6. LF Mike Tauchman
7. 3B Gio Urshela
8. LF Tyler Wade
9. RHP Domingo German

San Francisco Giants
1. 2B Joe Panik
2. LF Yangervis Solarte
3. 1B Brandon Belt
4. 3B Pablo Sandoval
5. SS Brandon Crawford
6. CF Kevin Pillar
7. RF Gerardo Parra
8. C Erik Kratz
9. RHP Dereck Rodriguez

It is a nice and sunny day in San Francisco. Great afternoon for a sweep. Today’s series finale will begin at 4:05pm ET and the YES Network will have the broadcast. Enjoy the game.

Injury Updates: Didi Gregorius (Tommy John surgery) has graduated to taking full batting practice. He continues to progress with his throwing program as well. The Yankees still aren’t giving a firm timetable for his return — at this point he is definitely still several weeks away — but things are going well with his rehab … Clint Frazier (ankle) hit in the cage and ran on a treadmill today for the first time since being placed on the injured list. He’s not eligible to be activated until Friday, but it’s good he’s already resumed normal baseball activities.

The ‘It’s not what you want’ guide to the 2019 Yankees

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It’s not what you want. (Mike Stobe/Getty Images)

The Yankees manager, whether you like the person or not, becomes a part of your life if you follow the team consistently. You begin to understand the way they talk, the nicknames they have for the players and how they handle the team.

Despite all of his accomplishments in New York, Joe Girardi left an imprint on my daily life with one phrase that became synonymous with him: “It’s not what you want.” Life will let you down in ways you can’t control and it will leave you throwing your hands up in the air in despair in the fashion of Girardi, muttering the catchphrase. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I say it too often.

INWYW works well with any aspect of random failure. You leave your house in the morning and forget your umbrella? It’s Not What You Want. Your computer gives you the blue screen of death? It’s Not What You Want. Your baseball team loses every single valuable contributor to injury? It’s definitely Not What You Want.

There are also different levels of INWYW. Some issues are minor and cause minimal annoyment while others will introduce severe exasperation.

I decided to rank some of the problems facing the 2019 Yankees on the It’s Not What You Want scale, which ranges from 1-5 Girardis.

Shaky April Bullpen: Two Girardis

Despite coming in with tremendous expectations, the Yankees’ bullpen has had a rocky beginning to 2019. They’ve accumulated innings while not necessarily looking great doing so. Zack Britton, Adam Ottavino and Aroldis Chapman have each struggled. Dellin Betances is out for a while. Meanwhile, Chad Green was optioned to the minors and looked lost beforehand.

It’s not what you want.

But! the Yankees are hardly the only team having bullpen issues. Among contenders, the Red Sox, Dodgers, Brewers, Mets and Nationals are all having some trouble. Furthermore, would you be shocked if the Yankees’ bullpen shapes up? I wouldn’t be. There’s a lot of guys with proven track records and even if Green doesn’t get it together, others will. There’s minimal exasperation.

Aaron Boone’s Managing: 1.5 Girardis

OK, if this is from Girardi’s perspective, this is a five, but Boone is his successor.

Anyway, the complaints about Boone are pretty constant and it’s hard not to quibble with some of his decisions, whether it’s off-days, bullpen management or some strategic inconsistencies. The playoffs put them on the national stage.

However, the role of a modern MLB manager is entirely overblown. The front office hands down a lot of the decisions and Boone isn’t to blame for the spate of injuries or underperformance of others. Feel free to question Boone, but he’s not the main source of the Yankees’ problems. I just can’t get myself too overhyped about managerial decisions.

Oh no, more injuries. INWYW. (Brian Blanco/Getty)

The Injured List: Four Girardis

Oy vey. The Ringer detailed this pretty well, but the Yankees have had a truly historic smattering of injuries to their team. There are some short-term injuries with CC Sabathia and Gary Sanchez making quick returns and there are the long-term, significant ones to Aaron Judge, Luis Severino and Betances. The latter trio is arguably the Yankees’ best hitter, starting pitcher and reliever. The team has lost five (!) outfielders.

I’m genuinely unsure how a team can withstand the blows this team has taken, but they’re over .500 right now and thriving. Perhaps Severino being the only major blow to the rotation thus far has been its saving grace. Regardless, each subsequent IL announcement just gives an overwhelming feeling of despair, cursing the heavens with a INWYW.

The Defense: Two Girardis

The silver lining to the injuries has been everyday time for D.J. LeMahieu and Giovanny Urshela on the infield. Those guys are tremendous. The final groundout from Wednesday’s game would have been a throwing error or just a single with Miguel Andujar But losing Aarons Judge and Hicks, as well as Sanchez’s throwing arm for a time, haven’t help at all. Brett Gardner is still a strong outfielder but he’s best in a corner. We all miss Didi.

Pondering whether this is what you want or not. (Mike Carlson/Getty)

Missing out on Machado/Harper: Three Girardis

This is a special case of It’s Not What You Want: The level of exasperation is high, but the level of consequence is unknown. Would the Yankees have a better record with these guys? Maybe. Will not signing either player cost New York a World Series? Perhaps. It’s hard to know how much this has set back the Bombers and we’ll never truly nail it down. ¯\_(?)_/¯

River Avenue Blues Shutting Down: Five Girardis

This is my last post for the site. This place is the centerpiece to the Yankees Internet to me and there’s a major void without it. Losing this place is … not what you want. The last two-plus years writing here has been a blast. I hope to keep writing in some capacity and will be popping up on YESNetwork.com on occasion. Thanks to Mike, Ben, Joe and everyone who has made this site what it’s been.

A Brief History of the Tech Behind RAB

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Jay has been RAB’s SysAdmin, you can find him on Twitter at @jaydestro.

Keeping RiverAveBlues online has been “a thing” for me over the years.  Whether it’s when I worked at a web hosting provider and was just a fan of Mike’s writing… all the way until today, where I am getting ready to start archiving the site I’ve done my best to keep available.  Back in 2009, I did a ton of technical work for free for the guys to make sure the website stayed online and ran smoothly.  To repay me, they made me a partner in the company — pretty cool, huh?

RAB has run on the WordPress blogging platform since its inception.  Originally on a shared hosting provider, the site was eventually moved to a single VM with Rackspace.  I eventually migrated everything to two dedicated servers: one was a HP DL360 G3 front end server we used for all the web traffic with Apache and the other a SuperMicro generic white box we used for the MySQL database server and memcached.

The hard part was always keeping up with the excitement of the Yankees as the accessibility of the internet exploded on mobile.  Every day we saw the need for more capacity increase as the need for Yankees news at any moment continued to explode.  Mike’s profile began to grow as he took on jobs with MLBTradeRumors and eventually CBS.  People really came to rely on the work Mike did and I took personal responsibility to keep that work online, and for it to reach as wide of an audience as possible.

One moment I always recall as pivotal in making a major overhaul to the RAB infrastructure was the day the Yankees traded for Ichiro.  I was in Oxford, England at a job I had just started.  I had recently moved the website in a “lift-and-shift” manner to AWS and really had not had a chance to do a ton of optimization.  I woke up to a slew of text messages from Mike and Joe telling me they couldn’t get to the site.  I found a free moment to fix the problem I found on total MySQL connections and got the site back online.

I later would learn a ton more about AWS from my friends Lenny Herold, Jeff Kaplan and Tony Tonns (RIP).  I would take this knowledge to eventually fully automate the RAB services to no longer rely on static VMs and moved to an autoscaling platform.  Tony taught me a ton about memcached, tuning MySQL and ensuring reliability through resilient services.  I later configured a number of cache layers and made the W3 Total Cache plug-in an absolute MUST.  I found a lot of success in using the plugin in combination with a memcached service for each cache layer.  This was for object, page and MySQL database cache that ran on RDS.  Auto-scaling the front end also became an easy task so that when our traffic increased, we could easily add capacity automatically.

As time moved on, we removed the native WordPress commenting system for Disqus.  This was an absolute godsend, as server load during “thundering herd” moments of large traffic greatly decreased. Users were storing comments in a separate database which really meant we were prepared for GDPR protections years before it was implemented.  I never really wanted RAB to be in the business of storing anyone’s data.  Because of that, the old users were eventually purged from the RAB database, including any user information you may have provided us. This makes me happy that we have never compromised/hacked thanks to good security defaults and reducing our total data exposure by simply not storing that data.

Later on, we found new ways to further reduce server load with the implementation of a CDN and better communication amongst the writers about how we needed to store static images.  That meant faster load times and better access to the site when big moments happened.

Things haven’t always been perfect, but the bigger incidents have done a ton to teach me more about what I do for a living,  I have always appreciated including communities in the work I have done or the hobbies I enjoy.  Baseball and technologies are my passions and RAB was the ultimate culmination of both for me.

Now, I work at Microsoft and teach people how to use the Azure cloud.  I also spend my time helping organize the DevOpsDays NYC conference and do the On-Call Nightmares Podcast.  I love chatting technology and baseball – feel free to reach out if you ever need help or just want to talk about these topics, or metal music, or anything pug-related  Thanks for reading RAB all these years; it’s been a big part of my life.  None of this stuff happens without Mike, Joe and Ben.. to them I am eternally grateful.  Thank you always to my wife, Betsy, who was woken up as many times as I was to fix things (and occasionally woke me up for breaking news, like the Andrew Miller trade in 2016). Eternal gratitude to everyone who came to the site and returned an HTTP call successfully. That means I did my job.

RAB Tech Stack 2007 – 2019:

Linux, WordPress, Apache, PHP, Memcached, MySQL

Yankees Only.