NYY @ BOS
Starting Pitchers: Jameson Taillon v Michael Wacha
On Friday night the Yankees took a 2-1 lead into the 9th only to have their bullpen blow another game with closer Clay Holmes blowing his 5th save. That’s 3 blown saves and 2 losses since the AS break. Newcomer Lou Trevino then lost it in the 10th. However, last night it was the Red Sox pen that gave it up in the 9th, turning a 2-2 tie into a 3-2 loss.
Offensively, both of these teams can, but in this series, neither has. That said, the overall numbers say that the Yanks have the better offense. The numbers also say the Yanks have the much better bullpen. I’ve been questioning the Yanks pen for some time now and it’s performance has vertainly tailed off, but the Red Sox pen has been bad all season. That leaves the two starting pitchers.
Jameson Taillon was having a pretty good season for the Yankees, but has struggled over the last couple of months. Taillon has now started 22 games with 11 grading as above average and 11 grading as below. He has given up 3 earned runs or less in 117 of his 22 starts. However, he has given up 4 or more in 3 of his last 7, posting a 5.55 ERA over that span. His overall WHIP is good but his ERA is now mediocre as are his ERA metrics, his wOBA and xwOBAwith a passable, but not great K rate, and low walk and hard contact ratew. The bottom line is that until recently, Taillon had mostly pitched well and for the most part had kept the Yanks in almost every game that he started, and with their, more often than not, that was good enough.
Michael Wacha, has been sidelined since late June by a shoulder injury, has been cleared to rejoin Boston's rotation after a two-game rehab stint with Triple-A Worcester. Wacha threw 79 pitches over 4.1 innings frames during his final rehab outing, so he shouldn't face any significant workload limitations in his first start back. Still, it was a shoulder injury, so I’m skeptical. Wacha had pitched surprisingly well for the Red Sox before the injury this season with 8 of his 13 starts grading as above average and 5 grading as below. His WHIP and ERA were both very good, but his ERA metrics were mostly about 1-2 runs higher than his ERA. We see the same pattern emerging with Wacha’s xwOBA, which was more than 60 points higher than his than actual wONA. We can attribute than to Wacha’s extremely low .240 BABIP which is almost 60 points lower than his career average, and Wacha’s very high 80.9% strand rate which is more than 7.5% higher than his career rate. Both of those number will almost certainly regress. A mediocre K rate and a fairly high walk rate for a guy who doesn’t miss that many bats doesn’t help either.
The Yanks should be the better team here and Taillon the better pitcher with Wacha not have pitched in an MLB game since late June.
Pick – NYY 1st 5 ML (-125 for 1 unit) and full game ML (-127 for 1 unit)