Gary Sanchez’s day began with some of the most serious questions he has had to face all year. It ended with him providing the exclamation point that emphatically punctuated another win for his rolling New York Yankees.
A day after one of his starting pitchers intimated his desire to continue pitching to a different catcher, cheap nfl authentic jerseys Sanchez played as if he was unfazed.
With yet another solid swing of Sanchez’s bat, and an unexpectedly long but quite strong night from the Yankees’ bullpen, New York got past the Houston Astros with a 4-0 win Tuesday. Including last season’s AL Championship Series, it was only New York’s second win at Minute Maid Park in the past year.
The win also came on the heels of a dominant 14-strikeout start for Astros pitcher Justin Verlander, who threw eight scoreless innings going toe-to-toe with a Yankees bullpen that was equally as tough to solve. According to Elias Sports Bureau research, this marked the fifth time in baseball’s modern era (since 1900) that a team lost a game in which the starting pitcher struck out 14 or more hitters across eight scoreless innings.
If there was a lesson for the Astros to learn following their ninth-inning collapse, it was this: Don’t pitch to Sanchez if you can help it.
That’s a lesson the teams slated to play the Yankees in the coming days (Cleveland, Boston and Oakland) would also be wise to heed.
“I’m sure they considered that,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said of the Astros. “But I’m sure they figured, pitch carefully to him.”
They didn’t.
Once Sanchez realized he wasn’t getting intentionally walked with first base open and runners on second and third, he was hunting a pitch in a spot that would let him do some damage.
“I thought they were going to throw some uncomfortable pitches,” Sanchez said through an interpreter. “I was looking for something that I could hit. He left something there for me.”
When Sanchez’s three-run homer off closer Ken Giles landed 423 feet away, china nike nfl jerseys cheap disappearing beyond the center-field fence, the Yankees took a late 3-0 lead they wouldn’t relinquish. The scary version of Sanchez the world has seen in recent days made yet another appearance.