SAN DIEGO — The day after one of the Yankees’ most confounding on-field decisions in decades, one question sticks in my craw:
Didn’t they use the opener wrong?
As an analytics enthusiast, I have embraced the deployment of openers — as the alternative to throwing a replacement-level starter to the wolves. In the Yankees’ final game of 2019, they went to an opener, and while it didn’t work — Chad Green started and immediately gave up three runs — I thought it made more sense than going with a diminished J.A. Happ.
In other words, I support using the opener as a defensive move against your own inadequacies, as invented by the Rays and utilized by pitching-challenged teams in the postseason like the 2018 Brewers and this year’s Padres. Certainly not as an offensive move against your opponent’s strengths when you weigh that potential reward against the potential risk of disrupting your pitching plans as well as your clubhouse.
The Yankees contended that they tried the strategy they did in Tuesday night’s American League Division Series Game 2, starting rookie right-hander Deivi Garcia and switching to the veteran left-hander Happ at the start of the second inning, as an attempt to force the hand of Rays manager Kevin Cash concerning his deep and talented roster. That move backfired rather spectacularly with a 7-5 loss, as the southpaw Happ, entering a 1-1 game, allowed two-run homers to a pair of righty batters — Mike Zunino and Manuel Margot — in the second and third innings, respectively. Happ, while taking accountability for his lousy performance, didn’t hide his disappointment with the Yankees’ decision-making, conceding that he would have preferred to start.
He had earned that right in the wake of a resurgent 2020 regular season that saw him cut down on his gopher balls and drop his ERA from 4.91 to 3.47 (and his FIP from 5.22 to 4.57). Garcia, it appeared, had earned the same right after looking very impressive in his first six big-league starts. If you look under the hood on Baseball Savant, you will see that Garcia could have gotten hit a little harder in those outings; opponents slugged .420 against him and that should have been .459 based on hitters’ exit velocity. OK. Masahiro Tanaka’s expected slugging for 2020 stood at .439 against an actual .455, not a huge difference. And Garcia, who uses his changeup second most often after his four-seam fastball, actually performed better against lefty hitters (.579 OPS) than righties (.817) during the regular season. The run he gave up Tuesday was a homer to amazing Rays rookie Randy Arozarena, a righty hitter.
Asked Wednesday, before Game 3, whether he would consider letting Garcia and Happ work as traditional starting pitchers should the Yankees advance beyond this series, Boone said, “I would expect that. I think [Tuesday] night this team, a little bit unique in that sense. I would probably assume they would be in a starter’s role.”
Then there sure exists a case to be made that the Yankees used the opener wrong. What started out as a brilliant series for them now becomes a mess of their own making, with two of their most important pitchers disrupted and their options for the rest of the week compromised; Jordan Montgomery, the starting rotation’s weak link, will start Game 4 and ace Gerrit Cole will go in Friday’s Game 5 on three days’ rest. If they don’t clean it up, this one will sting for a very long time.
