I don’t want to spill too much ink on the sorry state of the Yankees offense at the risk of sounding like a broken record. Instead, let’s focus on the positives they have provided us in recent days, namely an improbable series win over the Braves. As much as the pitching largely carried the day, a certain young shortstop provided a handful of bright sparks on either side of the ball, and so George Lombard Jr. earns his first appearance on At-bat of the Week.
We join Lombard leading off the bottom of the seventh of the middle game against the Braves on Saturday. The Yankees are clinging to a 3-2 lead courtesy of a Spencer Jones RBI single in the second and RBI triple in the fifth, Austin Wells then driving him home with a double. Lombard enters this AB having struck out and drawn a walk against Chris Sale, the latter result requiring a pair of impressive, successful ABS challenges. However, Lombard now faces the hard-throwing righty reliever Victor Mederos, a very different look from the sidearming southpaw Sale.
Mederos starts Lombard with a first pitch sinker at 96 looking to tie the hitter up on the inner half.
This is a really good take from Lombard. The sinker looks like a strike on the upper ledge of the strike zone for much of its path toward home. It exits Mederos’ hand aimed pretty centrally, yet Lombard is able to diagnose it immediately as a fastball and understands that the foot-and-a-half of arm side run will carry it all the way off the plate and out of the zone inside for a ball.
That was a pretty good pitch that Mederos just threw, so it makes sense that he sticks with the inside sinker as it’s a pitch that can really eat up a hitter when buried in on the hands.
This is exactly why we don’t bunt unless it is absolutely necessary. When you’ve got a reliever coming in and throwing upper-90s, a middle-middle sinker in a 1-0 count might be the best pitch you’re gonna get to hit. Not only did Lombard miss a golden pitch to hit, but he lost his count leverage without making the pitcher work for it. Yes, I understand the third baseman was playing back and the Yankees are struggling for base runners at the moment, but Lombard was brought up to swing the bat (and for his glove) and bunting in this spot amounted to giving away a pitch.
Now that Mederos has shown Lombard a pair of fastballs that break toward him, he switches to a cutter breaking away from the batter, hoping he can get him to chase something off the plate outside should he mistakenly assume it is another sinker breaking in.
Mederos yanks this pitch way out of the zone, the pitch passing through the lefty batter’s box and off the catcher’s mitt to the backstop. It’s one of the easier takes Lombard will get, though it was still informative for him to see a fastball that breaks in the opposite direction from the first two he saw.
After missing so wildly with that cutter, Mederos breaks out his third different fastball of the encounter, the four-seamer. His four-seamer breaks a little less down and a little less arm-side than his sinker, but the two pitch types otherwise aren’t all that distinguishable from each other.
Mederos nails the outside edge with this 97 mph heater. He’s partially able to catch Lombard looking by sequencing this pitch directly following a fastball that breaks glove-side, this pitch starting well off the plate away before tailing back into the zone, but mostly it’s just a well-executed fastball that Lombard is more than justified to watch for a called strike.
Mederos now tries to leverage that called strike on the outside edge by sequencing a cutter that, as we mentioned, moves in the opposite lateral direction as his sinker and four-seamer. Lombard just watched a pitch that looked like a ball away end up as a called strike on the outside edge, so he effectively has to protect against anything that starts aimed away. This should make him susceptible to chasing a pitch that breaks glove-side.
Instead, Mederos grooves this cutter up and out over the plate. It doesn’t have any of the cut of the first one he threw and flies straight as an arrow toward home. Lombard fires a beautiful swing lining this pitch into the seats in right for a leadoff home run to give the Yankees an invaluable late insurance run that they would need by the time the final out was recorded. I’ll be honest, I did not realize Lombard had opposite field home run power, short porch or not. However, I love his approach, staying behind the baseball and allowing the velocity on the pitch to supply the power off the bat, knowing that with solid contact in the air, there’s always a chance to leave the yard in right.
Here’s the full sequence:
Courtesy of Baseball Savant
Without getting ahead of ourselves from a five-game sample, it is all the same assuring that Lombard has not looked overmatched facing big league pitching according to the eye test. We were always told that the defense was MLB-ready and indeed Lombard already looks way more rangy and self-assured at short than Anthony Volpe. However, I was not expecting him to have such an immediate impact with the bat. The power is certainly a welcome surprise, but it’s his advanced pitch recognition and plate discipline that have really caught the eye and could be the keys to maintaining this form down the stretch.