Suddenly, the Yankees have dropped three-straight contests after losing two games at home against the Athletics then going down to defeat last night in St. Pete for the series opener. The good news is New York sends its ace to the mound tonight. The bad news is said ace cannot hit.* The worse news is neither can the rest of team, with a couple of exceptions.<\/p>\n
This will be Max Fried\u2019s fourth start of the season. The southpaw is coming off his worst outing thus far, one that was still perfectly cromulent, as Fried allowed three runs over 6.2 innings against Miami in an eventual 7-6 loss. Through 20 innings, Fried is varying his pitches with the effect of minimizing hard contact. He\u2019s thrown each of his four-seamer, sinker, cutter, curve, change, and sweeper between 10 percent and 23 percent of the time. Good luck sitting on any one pitch. Unsurprisingly, opponents\u2019 average exit velocity, barrel percentage, and hard-hit percentage all rest comfortably in the red on Statcast.<\/p>\n
Veteran right-hander Nick Martinez gets the start for the Rays, his third this season. Like Fried, he\u2019s thrown six different pitches at least somewhat frequently this season. Also, like Fried, the results have been good. Through 12 innings, Martinez has a 2.25 ERA and his Statcast has a bunch of red. One thing that jumps out: Yankee hitters will need to earn their way on base. Martinez has only issued one free pass so far, though he\u2019s also only struck out seven. We should see balls in play tonight.<\/p>\n
It might not matter how well Fried pitches if the Yankee lineup doesn\u2019t figure it out. The bottom of the order has been a wasteland in the opening weeks. Tonight, Jazz Chisholm Jr. boasts the best OPS among the hitters in those slots, with a putrid .469 mark. Exacerbating the issue is that the top of the lineup is not hitting to the back of their baseball cards either, except for Ben Rice and Giancarlo Stanton, though the latter\u2019s power is absent in the opening weeks of the year. Cody Bellinger, for example, has four hits in his last seven games. Aaron Judge has a singular home run in that stretch. And Trent Grisham has a .237 SLG this season. All told, the Yankees enter tonight with a .199 team batting average through 13 games, and five runs scored in their last three.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s get this turned around. A couple of crooked numbers in the run column tonight for the Yankees would be the bee\u2019s knees.<\/p>\n
Location: Tropicana Field \u2014 St. Petersburg, FL<\/p>\n
TV broadcast: YES\/Rays.TV<\/p>\n
Radio broadcast: WFAN 660\/101.9 FM, WADO 1280 \/ WDAE 95.7 FM, WQBN\/1300AM<\/p>\n
Online stream: MLB Network (out-of-market-only)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Suddenly, the Yankees have dropped three-straight contests after losing two games at home against the Athletics then going…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673569,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2376],"tags":[5,4,1690,62,2548,2547,7660,142,38538],"class_list":{"0":"post-673568","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-yankees","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-yankees","12":"tag-newyork","13":"tag-newyorkyankees","14":"tag-pinstripe-alley-discussions","15":"tag-yankees","16":"tag-yankees-game-threads"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116388271632944177","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}