Look Who’s Dominant Now!

The first game of the ALCS is in the books, and what a performance we saw by the Yankees! The starter, the bullpen, the hitting, the defense – just about everything went the Yankees way tonight. Perhaps what makes it all the more gratifying is the way most coverage has focused on how dominant the Astros are expected to be in this series. How the Yankees had to win at least one game in Houston to have a chance. Yes, mathematically the Yankees had to win at least one game in Houston to win the series. But if you believed what you heard on TV and on the radio, you would have thought winning last night or tonight were both longshots. Well, you find out how dominant you are when you face another dominant team. Last night, the Houston Astros and their fans found out.

After the first 3 innings, both Masahiro Tanaka and Zack Greinke had faced the minimum 9 batters. Both had given up a hit and benefited from a double play. Then Gleyber Torres lit it up; first with a double in the 4th scoring DJ Lemahieu from second. Then, he hit a solo homer in the 6th. followed by a 2-rbi single in the 7th. He finished them off with an infield dribbler to score Lemahieu from third.  Add to that solo home runs by Giancarlo Stanton and Gio Urshela, and the Yankees lived up to their hitting reputation with 7 runs on the board.

When I look at the other side of my scorecard, it’s pretty clean. Tanaka went 6 innings and faced the minimum number of 18 batters. You probably heard the announcers talk about that repeatedly. What they didn’t mention as much was that by the end of the game, Yankees pitchers only faced 2 batters over the minimum. In other words, the domination continued up to the final out. There were a few other indicators of domination. Like the fact that the Astros had a runner on third for a grand total of one pitch! That was right after Gleyber Torres and Didi Gregorius let a Jose Altuve grounder roll through the infield for a “single” that put Michael Brantley on third. One pitch and one replay review later, and Alex Bregman had hit into an inning-ending double play. That’s it.

I cannot say enough about how well Masahiro Tanaka pitched. Unless you’re counting foul balls, Kyle Tucker’s single in the 3rd was not only the first hit, it was the first time in the game that a Houston hitter hit the ball out of the infield. That feat would only be repeated two more times, once when Brantley flied out to Stanton in left in the 4th and once when Yordan Alvarez flied out to Aaron Judge in right in the 5th. He had outstanding control, allowing only one hit, one walk, and only got to ball 3 with three hitters. Against an offense touted to score 20 runs per game, that was almost superhuman.

The big takeaway, especially for the Astros, is that if they thought that all they had to do was show up, they found out how good the Yankees are. Just like we’ve been hearing about how good Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole are and what it will take to beat them, the same goes both ways. Houston is going to have to work hard and they’ll need to catch a few breaks to beat the Yankees. Suffice to say, I expect most of the coverage today to be about whether Houston will recover from last night’s beating, whether the Yankees can keep the momentum going, and about how critical Verlander’s start is tonight. Personally, I think the Yankees are gonna sweep the series. But we’ll see. In any case, the ALCS is living up to its billing of being an awesome series. Let’s go Yankees!