Game 1 against Boston

First, it was great to see the Yankees and Red Sox honor the Genius Maker by wearing his number for this game! 

...And it worked as the Yankees breezed to victory

...And before I get a lot of mail, yes, I know it was for Jackie Robinson.

Paxton came out throwing 98 and hitting spots well.  Sale came out and threw roughly 96 (harder than he has thrown this year) and was mixing his pitches well.

The difference was Paxton kept hitting spots and even threw a great pitch 99 MPH up and in and barely out of the box and then followed with a perfectly placed slider just off the plate to get us out of a key moment of the game.  This moment was set up by a poor play by Judge who cruised after a high fly ball and misjudged it enough where he jumped and didn't get to the fly and hit on top of the wall for a double making it 2nd and 3rd with nobody out in the 4th inning.  Judge then made up for it with his arm as two shallow flyballs were not tested because of his arm; someone with a lesser arm would have been tested on the 1 out fly.  That set up the K by Paxton on the great slider after the 99 MPH fastball.

The Yanks kept tacking on runs.  Frazier hit a HR on a slider that was similar to the Judge play, but Betts play was harder because he was running faster, didn't have the home field advantage of knowing the stadium as well and just couldn't get there.

Even Tauchman got into the offense with a double on a slider right down the middle and later hit a HR on a slider.  He has his OPS at .773 and maybe this will get him some confidence, but he has not looked good at the plate to me.  The fact we are starting him in LF against a tough lefty (the HR was off a righty) shows how injured we are.

A few other notes:

Judge was heavily involved today.  Outside of the above, he got 2 hits,  a well-earned walk, a SB and then got to 3rd on the bad throw to go along with 2 not heads up plays.  One was on a line drive by Voit with 1st and 2nd and Judge was on first.  Bradley retrieved the ball and then threw weakly to 2nd base where Judge had rounded the base and dived back safely because the throw bounced away from the 2nd baseman.  The throw beat him and he would have been out ending the inning before the run scored.  Could have been a really bad play, but we got lucky the Red Sox didn't execute.  Later, he should have tried to score on a shallow fly ball to JD Martinez, who doesn't throw well, and he would have scored if he tagged up correctly; he ended up leaving too early and stopped (not sure what happened there?)  The outcome ended up being a blowout but any of those could have been bad.

CC came back and looked good.  He may have some "old age games" but he looked just like CC and that was very encouraging

Bird went on the DL.  Bird is actually one of those guys that could make us a better team if he could give us some sild lefty protection in the lineup, but he has not played well (.550 OPS) and he only hurt our depth based on his lack of production

Urshela has really helped us a lot at 3rd base.  Not only has he played really well defensively, but he has also hit well in his 27 plate appearance (.867 OPS)

Paxton was excellent!

Gardner has his OPS above .700, as he has been more productive of late (.742 OPS over his last 15 games)

...and Congrats to the NY Islanders for sweeping Pittsburgh!