Tom Ley is making me write this. He doesn't give direct orders often, but as it is Defector's birthday, and a lot of staffers are traveling in order to be at tonight's big birthday shindig, we're a little light on the blog budget today. So he told me to blog my beloved Yankees getting the absolute snot beaten out of them by the Tigers. He can be a real tyrant sometimes. Although he can make me blog, he can't hurt me any worse than my team already has.
The 2025 Yankees are more or less what the last few editions have been: power-hitting lineups that struggle to score by any method other than home runs, fine starting, suspect relief, putrid defense, putrid baserunning, and perfectly respectable records against bad teams but mediocre records against anyone good. The Tigers, battling for the AL's best record, count as one of those good teams, and for six innings on Tuesday things were tense, looking like a barnburner to kick off this possible playoff preview series. And then the seventh inning happened, and refused to stop happening.
The melted-down relievers were Fernando Cruz (recently back from injury; promising) and Mark Leiter Jr. (stinky), and together they allowed nine runs on four hits, four walks, and a hit by pitch in a combined 0.0 innings of work. “It was tough,” said New York starter Will Warren, who had just watched his six quality innings go up in smoke. "I don’t know what to say. I haven’t seen anything like that before.”
The final score was 12-2, Detroit, and I don't want to think about this game any more than I've already been cruelly forced to. So allow me to turn this blog over to valued colleague and less-valued Tigers fan Maitreyi Anantharaman, who was in attendance in the Bronx:
That was crazy! To me, the weirdest part was that only the seventh and eighth runs of the inning came via any kind of gapper or big swing; everything before that was just station-to-station RBIs. And walks! So many walks! The Dingler walk to score Torkelson was probably when the vibe started to shift, and then it totally curdled when Volpe couldn't run down the Sweeney fly to shallow center with the infield in.
Also, Barry, you people are SO mean to Anthony Volpe! He came up with two runners on and no one out in the fifth, and the guys in front of us were so disturbed by his mere presence at the plate. I actually explained to my friend (not a baseball fan) that everyone really hates this guy this year, and then right on cue he popped up a bunt and everyone started booing! Bunting there was dumb, but I feel so bad for him!
Later in the game, when Riley hit a groundball to first for the first out of the seventh inning (his second AB of the inning), I would have the opportunity to explain another crowd behavior to my friend: the Bronx Cheer! She got to experience a real one! In the Bronx!
Anyway, it was a really bizarre game. The guy next to me asked if I’d ever scored a nine-run inning before, and I definitely had not. One thing about scoring games is that you actually get kind of annoyed when your team bats around, because you have to cross out the inning headers, and the half inning ended up taking so long—it was something like 30 minutes—that I was pretty ready to be done with it, even as a fan of the victorious team. In the next inning, Gleyber worked a walk, and while I was proud of my beautiful professional disciplined Gleyber, I was also like, “It's 11-2, just swing and let me go home!” His run ended up scoring to make it 12-2, but I still wanted to go home.
Gee, that must have been really hard for you, having to stick around to watch your guys go up by 10. My heart bleeds. Thank you, Maitreyi. Your account did not help me feel better about anything, so let's farm the rest of this out to, I don't know, some guy calling an entirely different game:
Hm. The Blue Jays would score two in the ninth and walk off in the 10th. God damn it!
The Yankees are going to stumble into the playoffs, and a messy and dramatic first couple rounds it promises to be, and I am going to resent every minute of it. I think I'll be busy blogging hockey that month.
