“You’re not going to out-Tampa the Tampa Bay Rays. They’ve been doing this for decades and you can’t outsmart them.”
The words of Suzyn Waldman, who, in an appearance on the Moose & Maggie Show on Wednesday, admitted that the Yankees’ decision to use Deivi Garcia as an “opener” for JA Happ in Game 2 of the ALDS was “baffling.”
“There’s a lot of stuff we didn’t know, and this is the problem with not having people down there and not knowing, but we thought Deivi was going to go through the lineup at least once,” Suzyn said. “I don’t like treating your prize prospects like they’re expendable, and if you’re going to have someone pitch one inning…they have 150 righties in that bullpen, why not someone else? I get the premise with all of Tampa’s lefties, but if you’re going to have the kid pitch, let him go through the lineup! The execution was really faulty, and it was baffling.”
“Saving” Masahiro Tanaka for Game 3 is defensible, as Suzyn harkened back to how Joe Torre would always have Mike Mussina pitch Game 3 of the Yankees’ Division Series appearances in the 2000s – “it’s a pivot game and you want your best guy on the mound” – and also noted how Tanaka is the perfect person in terms of temperament and ability to have in this situation.
Doesn’t make the way Game 2 was navigated any more defensible, though, and is, to Suzyn, a bad example of how baseball operations in 2020 may be taking the players out of the game, so to speak.
“What we didn’t know is that J.A. Happ was not on board with this, as he had ever done this and seemed uncomfortable. I’m sorry, but he’s a human being, and that’s what gets me with a team being run by operations,” she said. “He’s a human being in the mid-30s, and he hadn’t pitched in 10 days. I’ve seen him for years not be effective on long rest. You have to take human beings into account. I don’t think the premise was wrong, but the execution was baffling, to have your top prospect go one inning, and have Happ warming up before Deivi even took the mound.”
That’s when Moose jumped in with his take on the situation.
“You can look at Happ, and he’s a professional who has to execute, but it didn’t make sense to me for the same reasons,” he said. “I don’t care what it looks like on paper – this is not Strat-O-Matic Baseball. You’re dealing with the here and now, and things sometimes work better in theory than reality.”
“They know Happ, he is as classy a human being as there is, and he was trying hard not to say anything – but it’s hard for him, too,” Suzyn replied. “Some guys are very precise, and when they’re not on schedule, they’re on trouble. If he’s been successful for 15 years, and all of a sudden you want him to do something he has told you he’d rather not? Why not let him start?”
And, poor Aaron Boone is the one who has to answer for the execution when it goes wrong.
“I felt bad, and I texted someone in San Diego to say, 'tell the baseball ops people to go into the Zoom room; get one of the guys with the iPads tell me what they were thinking.' It’s all going to be on Boone, and you know this was a collaborative decision,” Suzyn said. “He signed up for it, but the things we didn’t know beforehand are a product of how this year is going. I get the premise, but Tampa Bay, if you’re going to play that game with them, you’re not going to win; they’ve been doing it for a long time because they’ve had to. One team is playing checkers and the other is playing chess.”
The game, however, is still baseball, and Suzyn will have a front row seat (sort of, from Yankee Stadium) to see how the Yankees bounce back tonight.
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