CLEVELAND — Aaron Boone admitted there were times he “wasn’t quite sure how he was going to get to the finish line.” His bench coach, Brad Ausmus, conceded, “Yes, it goes through your mind” that they might not have a pathway to 27 outs.
Boone, Ausmus and pitching coach Matt Blake were as much an improv troupe as the dugout leadership of the Yankees. And their little bit of Second City ad-libbing helped move the Yankees closer to bringing the World Series back to the First City.
Boone never said out loud that he had no idea how he could tag-team pitch this game, “But it was on my mind.”
The Yankees did get to the end, 8-6 winners in ALCS Game 4 over the relentless Guardians. They did so because their power bats came out with Juan Soto, Austin Wells and yet again Giancarlo Stanton all going deep.
And they won because they do have fortitude. They had suffered a gut-punch, gut-wrenching Game 3 loss when they thought the power of Aaron Judge and Stanton was going to carry them to a three-games-to-none lead only to see the best of their bullpen collapse and the Guardians win in extra innings.
And they won Friday in what Boone called, “Not a perfect game, but a gritty, tough, winning game.”
They blew the 6-2 lead Stanton created in the sixth with a three-run homer. They had Mark Leiter Jr. and Anthony Rizzo team on a how-many-mistakes-can-we-make-on-the-same-play mishap to allow the Guardians to tie the score in the eighth inning. And at that moment, with 35,263 at Progressive Field full-throated and the Yanks on the cliff of blowing yet another game and seeing the ALCS get tied at two apiece, they found something.
It was part that Boone and Co. orchestrated well enough and part that the Guardian pen is even more on fumes than that of the Yankees.
Judge and Stanton had homered off Emmanuel Clase, the majors’ best reliever, on Thursday night. Stanton hit his three-run homer off Cade Smith, arguably the best set-up man. And the Yankees delivered two runs in the ninth inning off Clase to create the margin in Game 4. Clase allowed five earned runs this regular season and five combined in Games 3 and 4.
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But while all of that was going on in Game 4, the Yanks were pen-ning their own drama. Boone and his staff meet before each game to discuss who is available and for how much and what is the ideal scenario to deploy guys and what is the fire-alarm counter if chaos breaks out. But as Ausmus said, “It is an imperfect science.”
The Yankees knew they could get maybe 75 pitches out of Luis Gil, who had not pitched since Sept. 28. Boone said he was thrilled that Gil got the Yankees 12 outs with a 3-2 edge. The Yankees do not often warm two relievers simultaneously, but they did it multiple times Friday, in part because the Guardians pinch hit so frequently to try to gain a platoon edge. The Yanks wanted to have options. At one juncture, for the first time this year, the Yankees were warming up two lefties because if a ground ball were needed to escape a jam, Boone wanted to be able to go to Tim Mayza.
But he had in mind that if he could get Tim Hill in for a top of the order heavy with lefties — Steven Kwan, Kyle Manzardo (Game 3 hero David Fry would pinchnhit for him), switch-hitter Jose Ramirez and Josh Naylor — that would be ideal. And he got a scoreless fifth that way.
Jake Cousins, who had only appeared once in the postseason, was next and worked a scoreless sixth and Boone wanted to see if he could “steal a couple of outs” in the seventh. But the first two reached. Boone was not going to use Luke Weaver, who had been in the Yanks’ first seven playoff games and allowed the tying homer Thursday, but was fine going to Clay Holmes for the eighth time in eight games after he gave up the walk-off blast to Fry the previous day. But Holmes did not have it, allowing three of four to reach in what was now a 6-5 game.
So Boone turned to Leiter, who wasn’t on the postseason roster until earlier in the day, replacing the injured Ian Hamilton. He escaped the seventh before having his folly with Rizzo in the eighth that brought in the tying run. But he struck out Josh Naylor with two on and two out to close the eighth. The Yanks then scored two off Clase. And Boone was able to go to Tommy Kahnle, his plan all along to close because he absolutely, positively was not going to use Weaver.
Except two got on with one out, and Boone warmed Weaver because in the fine line of discipline to protect a player and desperation to get a step closer to the World Series, desperation won. But ultimately, so did the Yankees as Kahnle recorded just his second save this year.
The improv worked well enough to move the Yankees one win away from their first AL pennant in 15 years.