Well, for all the talk about the many golden arms that have slipped through the Yankees’ fingers these past few years, their 2019 season now rests on a high-end pitcher who Brian Cashman actually did acquire.
How will James Paxton perform in what becomes a final exam for the entire Yankees organization?
The Yankees find themselves in profoundly deep trouble after dropping American League Championship Series Game 4 in grotesque fashion to the Astros, 8-3, Thursday night at Yankee Stadium. The ugliness of four Yankees errors and zero hits in seven at-bats with runners in scoring position was topped only by the sadness of CC Sabathia’s epic career very likely ending with him walking off the mound in agony, accompanied by head athletic trainer Steve Donohue, when his left shoulder didn’t hold up after throwing an eighth-inning cutter to George Springer.
Forget about winning three straight games to reach the World Series for the first time since 2009. The Yankees’ primary assignment becomes avoiding the embarrassment of ending their exciting and promising season by dropping three straight games at home and four consecutive contests overall. Winning Game 5 on Friday night in The Bronx, and sending the series back to Houston, would claw back a sliver of dignity for the Yankees.
And the primary responsibility for that task falls upon Paxton, the Big Maple, whom the Yankees received from the rebuilding Mariners in a trade last November.
“I’m gonna go out there and let ’er rip,” Paxton told The Post after the game. “Go battle.”
“He’s got to go out and pitch well and set the tone for us,” Aaron Boone said. “Because we want to get on that plane to Houston now, and that starts with Pax.”
After experiencing some predictable turbulence in adjusting to the Big Apple, Paxton came on strong in the last couple of months, earning the right to start the Yankees’ playoff opener, AL Division Series Game 1 against the Twins. Alas, in two postseason starts, he has totaled just seven innings, putting together a 5.14 ERA and looking as jumpy as Cliff Clavin trying to flirt with a woman on “Cheers.”
“There’s a higher intensity,” Paxton, who had never pitched in the postseason prior to this year, acknowledged on Thursday afternoon regarding the playoffs. “But overall, it’s the same game. You have to treat it the same way. It’s just being able to mentally treat it the same way even though there is that extra intensity and what we’re playing for.”
What the Yankees are playing for now is their very survival, and they’ll have to do that in Game 5 against future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander, who would’ve loved to have joined the Yankees in the summer of 2017, only for the team to pass in order to assure it would get under the luxury-tax threshold in 2018. The Tigers instead traded Verlander to the Astros, and the right-hander proceeded to win ALCS Most Valuable Player honors that fall, when his new team outlasted … the Yankees, in seven games.
That the Yankees traded for the less useful and more expensive (by total commitment) Giancarlo Stanton the subsequent winter and still achieved their luxury-tax goal added salt to the wound. In a related story, Stanton has missed the past three games of this series with a right quadriceps injury.
If they can somehow defeat Verlander and then prevail in a Game 6 battle of the bullpens on Saturday at Minute Maid Park, the Yankees would advance to a Game 7 against Gerrit Cole, arguably the best pitcher in the entire industry right now. The Yankees drafted Cole but couldn’t sign him in 2008, then tried to get him from the Pirates yet fell short to the Astros in 2018.
That’s a whole lot of ghosts for the Yankees to slay just to get back to the Fall Classic.
The mission begins with Paxton. The weight of a storied franchise rests on his left arm. It represents quite a final exam for a guy who, in pinstriped years, is a mere freshman.
https://nypost.com/2019/10/18/yankees-season-rests-on-james-paxton-the-pitcher-cashman-did-get/
2019-10-18 08:16:00Z
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