The New York Blown Saves
Last night, was the worst night of the season by FAR for me. So bad, that I just typed “saeson” i.e. cuncel da saeson, which by the way I am far from doing. Just a Freudian slip. But last night reminded me of one of my fondest baseball memories, the last day of the 2011 regular season. Except last night wasn’t fun. At all.
The Yankees blew a five run lead to lose in a walkoff 9th inning home run. I stayed up till 1 am to watching that. I stayed up to have a dagger shoved through my heart. And when it’s that late, you start getting overtired and a little delirious, which only makes it that much worse, which you’ll know if you saw my twitter rant. So I bitch slapped my fridge. So what? It happens.
To make things worse, the Sox won in the 293480923 inning against Toronto. The second we lost I knew that meant Boston would win. Just how those things go. But we were SO close to 1.5 games out. SO CLOSE. And now it’s back to 3.5. If anything it should’ve stayed at 2.5. In September, you can’t lose games like that.
That brings us back to the Yankees biggest problem this season: blown saves. As of October 20th (that was the stat I could find, deal with it), we had 20 blown saves which was the second highest in the MLB after Seattle (22). That’s 20 more wins that we could have under our belt. If the Yankees only blow half of those, we’re up at least 5 games on the Sox right now. Sure, it’s easy to console yourself with a blown save in May by saying there’s plenty of time left in the season. But now it’s September, and there's no more time for this bullshit. We have three guys who are top caliber relievers, and all options to close out games. There’s no reason for this to continue.
I personally, think it’s obvious to go with Robertson. He’s proven himself way more than Betances or Chapman. He is not part of the disastrous bullpen statistics, as we only re-acquired him recently. He has an unshakable quality that the other two don’t. He doesn’t get nervous. In fact, I think he thrives with men on base, aka why we call him Houdini. Chapman is out there sweating his tits off every game because he always dresses like they’re playing in the arctic so I’m convinced that’s part of the issue. Betances just gets shook easily. I saw someone put it well. Betances does better with a fresh inning and Robertson is great at coming in mid-inning with guys on. Sure, that’s correct. But I’d still prefer the top guy closing out games.
