Chris Paddack arrived in The Bronx as one of the season’s breakout stars. The 23-year-old departed his first game at Yankee Stadium looking like a rookie for the first time.
Entering Wednesday having allowed four home runs all season, the Padres right-hander allowed three solo shots, and surrendered a career-worst four earned runs and six hits over five innings, in a 7-0 loss to the Yankees.
“I think the guys were excited coming in with an opportunity to face this guy who’s kind of taken the league by storm,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “He is, and is gonna be, a great pitcher, so they were excited. … For us to be able to go out and those guys to be able to execute in a big way against a big pitcher, the energy was high in a day game after a night game very early on in the dugout.”
It took just three pitches for the Yankees to get on the board, with DJ LaMahieu hitting his third career leadoff homer on an 0-2 changeup. Two pitches later, Paddack stared out to left field in disbelief again after watching Luke Voit smash another homer. It was the 10th time in franchise history the Yankees opened a game by hitting back-to-back home runs.
Gio Urshela added his third homer of the year in the second inning to give the Yankees a 3-0 lead, becoming the third right-hander hitter of the game to go deep against Paddack, who previously had only allowed homers to lefties this season.
Entering with a 1.93 ERA, Paddack (4-3) has been just the third pitcher since 1908 to allow five or fewer hits in each of first nine career starts, and had given up the fewest hits in the majors of anyone who’d thrown 50 innings this season.
“We tried to jump on him early,” LeMahieu said. “He’s a really good pitcher, he’s got great numbers, but he made a couple mistakes and we took advantage of it.”
After Gleyber Torres added a two-run bomb in the seventh, the Yankees had reached 90 home runs just over one-third of the way through the season, putting them almost right on pace to best last year’s all-time mark of 267 home runs.
Last year, Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Aaron Hicks, Didi Gregorius and Miguel Andujar accounted for 146 homers. This season, they’ve combined for six.
It doesn’t seem to matter who comes to the plate. It doesn’t seem to matter who is on the mound.
“We did a good job of making him throw pitches in the zone,” Voit said. “The guy pretty much went from high Double-A to the Show. … He was gonna come out and prove that his first month and a half wasn’t [a fluke]. For us to get out to that lead, and score four off of him, it’s the big leagues. It’s hard to pitch here. He’s got good stuff, but we had a good gameplan.”
