Luis Gil’s start in Game 4 will be his first game appearance in almost three weeks, since the final Saturday of the regular season, although he threw a 70-pitch simulated game Sunday to prepare. Marcus Stroman hasn’t pitched since before that, as he wasn’t on the Division Series roster, but he, too, has kept throwing while out of action.
And, of the seven true relievers the Yankees have carried on both the ALDS and ALCS rosters, three – Tim Mayza, Jake Cousins, and Ian Hamilton – made just one appearance each in the DS, accounting for 2 1/3 of the 15 2/3 innings the bullpen threw, and none of them appeared in the first two CS games at Yankee Stadium.
That’s a lot of time in between outings, especially adding the Yankees’ Wild Card Round bye into the equation, but, as the skipper said in theory and our play-by-play voice says often to his partner, that’s baseball.
“A few of our relievers that were on the Division Series roster that either barely pitched or didn't pitch, they got a live inning in that sim game. They'll get off the mound when they haven't for a couple days, just to try and stay as sharp as you can,” Aaron Boone said Thursday. “Nothing is perfect this time of year just with how the series go, and that's part of it. You're not always going to have everyone on their fifth or sixth day for the starters, or relievers aren't always going to get used, or you're getting used a lot and you've got to go to the whip a little bit more. That's just the nature of October baseball. You've got to be prepared as best you can mentally for it, and we do all we can to keep them as sharp as possible.”
As another famous Yankee once said, baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical, and yeah, that sounds about right for Boone.
“(Mental balance) is part of it, without question, but also I feel like our pitching group does a really good job with making sure that these guys are getting some volume in what they do, especially for the guys that maybe haven't worked in a handful of days or something,” Boone said. “You want to try to keep them as sharp as you can with things they're doing physically, but there's certainly a mental component to that, too.”
You can’t anticipate a sweep, so thinking ahead to a possible Game 5, that would be the first time the Yankees played three games in a row since the end of the regular season – but that wasn’t going to change Boone’s philosophy on deploying his bullpen, which had seen Clay Holmes and Luke Weaver pitch in each of the first six games, and Tommy Kahnle and Tim Hill in four of six.
“It's Game 3, so we'll see what's available to us as we go through our catch play and all that, and I'll circle up with our pitching group and try and come up with a plan of striking that balance between making sure guys are fresh,” Boone had said prior to that game. “But we spend the whole season, too, being real vigilant on making sure we're protecting guys and monitoring their workloads and things like that. When we get to this time of year, hopefully there's a couple weeks left, but here we go, and guys understand that.”
All four pitched in the extra inning loss, as did Mayza (22 pitches) and Hamilton (seven), but the latter also left Game 3 due to an apparent injury, which complicates things at least for the next 48 hours.
"We'll see what we've got," Boone said after Game 3. "You try and preserve as many bullets as you can, but it's that time of year."
So, behind Gil today, perhaps the secret weapon is…Stroman? Whether it’s eating innings late like Tylor Megill did for the Mets in NLCS Game 3, or a clutch middle-innings situation, Boone is confident in him.
“Yeah, that's certainly one of the things he'll bring. Again, he's been now for a few weeks off his normal routine, and he's one of those guys that we try to keep as sharp as possible,” Boone said. “He's had a couple of sim game scenarios to try and keep his volume of pitches up as best we can because he wasn't on the Division Series roster, too, so he threw in the middle of that. But yeah, it's certainly something that he could potentially bring to the table that may become very valuable in this series.”