David Lennon: Angels expose Yankees' troubling trends in the Bronx
The Angels' Mike Trout, left, and Oswald Peraza, a former Yankee, both homered on Thursday at Yankee Stadium. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
For the record, the Yankees split this week’s four-game series with the Angels, the result of being on the wrong end of Thursday’s 11-4 beatdown in the Bronx, and that doesn’t sound half bad.
A deeper look reveals a few sobering truths, however, which Aaron Boone & Co. weren’t in the mood to come clean about afterward.
If not for the Angels’ charitable closer, Jordan Romano, and a pair of clueless infielders botching a pop-up that’s caught 99.999% of the time, the Yankees very likely would have gotten swept.
After a 7-1 start, they’ve dropped to 10-9 after the Angels bludgeoned them for 13 homers in the series, including five by Mike Trout that amounted to a whopping total of 2,127 feet.
“Obviously, we haven’t been playing to our standards,” said Max Fried, who was charged with five earned runs in 5 1⁄3 innings, ending a personal nine-game winning streak that stretched to last season. “We’re going to get back to it.”
First, the Yankees might need some smelling salts, because they were knocked around their own building for the past four days. One of the indelible images was Ryan Weathers giving up three straight first-inning homers (in a span of five pitches) in Tuesday’s 7-1 loss. But there were plenty of other troubling takeaways, many involving a hapless bullpen that was dented for 14 runs in 17 innings.
Too often, this was batting practice for the Angels, who either dunked timely hits between defenders or blasted pitches over the wall.
What had to make this particularly painful was the Oswald Peraza Revenge Tour, as the former Yankees prospect — traded at last season’s deadline — smacked a two-run homer off Fried in the first inning and finished him with a tying RBI double in the sixth.
Peraza, who hit .152 in 158 at-bats for the Yankees last season, went 5-for-10 with a pair of homers and four RBIs in the series, playing third base at a time when the Yankees can barely afford to use the struggling Ryan McMahon — owed $32 million through next season — at the same position. McMahon, who sat Thursday, is batting .119 without an extra-base hit.
“He looked like what we were excited about several years ago,” Boone said of Peraza, “and then obviously went through a couple of years of really struggling. So he’s super-talented, always has been. Clearly he’s in as good as a place as he’s been in a few years and he absolutely hurt us this series.”
Not quite as much as Trout. No one did more to humiliate the Yankees’ pitching staff this week, as the Angels’ three-time MVP outshined the one wearing pinstripes by becoming the first visiting player to ever go deep on four consecutive days in the Bronx. He’s reached base in 31 of his 34 career games at Yankee Stadium, with 13 homers, 26 RBIs and a slash line of .346/.433/.731.
“My at-bats felt great,” said Trout, who went 6-for-16 with nine RBIs in the series. “They felt better as each game went on.”
There’s a reason why Aaron Judge referred to Trout as the “greatest of all time” after the two future Hall of Famers each hammered a pair of homers in Monday’s 11-10 slugfest, a victory the Yankees lucked into when Romano spiked a wild pitch that allowed the winning run to score in the ninth.
But the Angels are not a team that should be pushing around Boone’s crew, especially in the Bronx, and definitely not by throwing a bullpen game in the series finale.
The Yankees erased Fried’s early 2-0 deficit in a blink when Judge drilled a one-out homer in the first inning and Giancarlo Stanton followed with a 446-foot two-run blast in the third. Once that happened, with Fried retiring 13 of 14, the Yankees seemed to be in good shape, considering they were 53-7 (including the postseason) in games in which Judge and Stanton both homered.
But not this time. All they got the rest of the way was Ben Rice’s leadoff homer in the sixth after the Angels already had taken a 6-3 lead. What followed was Angel Chivilli throwing one too many changeups to Trout, who hit a 446-foot blast on the third one of his at-bat in the seventh, and Ryan Yarbrough teeing up Jo Adell’s grand slam that iced it in the eighth.
It was a strange sight, seeing the Yankees repeatedly throttled by the long ball in their own building and ultimately unable to throw enough punches to counter.
“Losses are losses,” Stanton said of the beatings the Yankees absorbed. “However, it’s done.”
They all count the same in the standings. But some are more revealing than others, and Boone evidently had seen enough when he got tossed for arguing a balk call in the eighth. All the balk did was free up first base so the Yankees could intentionally walk Trout anyway, and Adell followed with the slam, adding insult to injury. Who could blame Boone for being steamed?
“I still haven’t got good clarity,” Boone said later, “because of course they got overly sensitive when I was as calm as could be.”
If the Yankees don’t snap out of this recent funk, which has contaminated nearly everyone not named Judge, things are going to get bumpy in the Bronx with this weekend’s visit by the Royals. Maybe the ultra-upbeat Boone will stay cool, but the Stadium could be boiling around him.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
