Joe Girardi admitted the obvious after Wednesday night’s 5-1 win over the Red Sox: He spent at least part of the game paying attention to the score with the Tigers playing in Cleveland.
“It’s impossible not to look,” the Yankees manager said after his team managed to slice a game from Detroit’s lead in the race for the second AL wild-card spot to four games. “It’s human nature.”
The Yankees victory over Boston snapped a devastating three-game losing streak as they try to prolong their relevance in September. But even with the win, the Yankees improved to just 71-66. And with how the AL is shaping up and 25 games left, it seems like 89 wins will be needed to get to the postseason.
Seven excellent innings from Hiroki Kuroda and four hits and three RBIs from Brian McCann at least got them one win closer to a number that the manager declined hazard a guess on.
“A lot,” Girardi said when asked how many victories he thought the Yankees had to have in order to play in October. “If I could predict what the other teams would do, I could, but I can’t.”
Fair enough, but whatever it is, there is still a large hole to climb out of — especially since they remain tied with Cleveland and also have to pass Seattle.
“Obviously, you know what’s going on,” Girardi said of what the Tigers and Indians were doing. “You look at the teams that are ahead of us and it becomes very important to try to gain ground on them, especially because we don’t see them anymore.”
McCann said he understands the predicament, as well.
“At this point, our mindset is, just win as many games as we can,” the catcher said. “We’ve got one month to turn it on, and we plan on doing that.”
McCann’s two-run homer in the second was his 17th home run of the season and 15 of those have come in The Bronx. The blast deep into the right-field seats provided the Yankees with a much-needed lead after they had yet another Keystone Kops routine on the basepaths in the first.
After Derek Jeter and Brett Gardner had one-out singles, they attempted a double steal.
Gardner, though, stopped before he got to second. He got caught in a rundown and Jeter tentatively headed off third, where he was tagged out by third baseman Brock Holt before Holt fired to first baseman Allen Craig, who got Gardner as he tried to get back to second.
“Gardner did not get a good jump and he has to stop,” Girardi said. “Running into two outs, I wasn’t real happy about it. But we made up for it. That mistake didn’t cost us dearly, fortunately.”
Kuroda took care of that.
He delivered his fourth consecutive solid start, featuring a splitter that the Red Sox couldn’t touch. He fanned five of the first seven batters he faced and didn’t walk a batter.
The only run the right-hander surrendered came in the sixth. After he drilled Jemille Weeks with one out, Holt followed with a line drive over Gardner in left that Gardner took a poor route on. It eluded him for a run-scoring double.
But Kuroda recovered and got Mookie Betts to fly to right before David Ortiz flied out to deep left to avoid further damage.
“You can go on runs in certain months and if it’s the right month, it can become the run that gets you into the postseason,” Girardi said before the game. “And that’s what we need to do. We need to go on a really good run here and it needs to start tonight.”
We’ll see if it did.
