Oswaldo Cabrera, Yankees simply ran out of time vs. Cardinals
Yankees third base Oswaldo Cabrera reacts after being called out on a pitch clock violation during a game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Yankee Stadium on Saturday. Credit: Ed Murray
The Yankees dropped Saturday’s game to the Cardinals by the slimmest of margins. One run. A few inches here. A couple of feet there. A matter of seconds on the pitch clock.
But ultimately, all that snowballed into another frustrating loss to a weaker opponent, and the misses, however minuscule, added up to a 6-5 loss just the same — along with the first victory for St. Louis in the Bronx since Bob Gibson won Game 5 of the 1964 World Series.
Nobody had ever imagined a pitch clock back then, as the average length of a nine-inning game in ’64 was a mere 2 hours, 34 minutes — or four minutes quicker than this season, baseball’s second year on a timer. And the commissioner’s clock definitely had an impact on Saturday’s result, dealing an immediate blow to the Yankees’ ninth-inning comeback effort when Oswaldo Cabrera led off by being called out on a third-strike penalty before a 3-and-2 pitch could be thrown.
The versatile Cabrera made his second start of the season at first base, keeping the position warm for Anthony Rizzo’s expected activation Sunday, and found himself in that pivotal at-bat after pinch hitter Giancarlo Stanton’s three-run double off the centerfield wall (inches from being a tying grand slam) cut the Yankees’ deficit to 6-5 in the eighth. The Bronx still echoed with the crowd’s roar generated by Stanton’s blast when Cabrera stepped to the plate in the ninth to face Cardinals closer Ryan Helsley, but soon it would switch to bewildered groans of disgust.
Talk about a buzzkill. Cabrera worked the count to 2-and-2 before the hard-throwing Helsley spiked a slider in the dirt for ball three, and the No. 9 hitter wandered outside the box to collect himself for the payoff pitch. His short meditative break, however, took a bit too long. Although Helsley took his time climbing the mound and catcher Ivan Herrera also settled slowly, Cabrera got distracted by their pace and evidently didn’t keep a close eye on the clock.
So when Cabrera wasn’t back in the box ready to engage with Helsley by the eight-second cutoff on the 15-second clock, plate umpire Ben May had no choice but to ring him up with the automatic third strike on the violation. The agitated Cabrera argued his case with May, and manager Aaron Boone swung by for a brief conversation, but the rule is the rule. Cabrera was out.
“Obviously, I thought I was on time,” Cabrera said. “I don’t know if I was or not, but at the same time, I know it was my fault, so I have to get better in that situation. It’s completely my fault.”
At least Cabrera didn’t make excuses or try to blame the rule for his own negligence. The pitch clock no longer is new. It’s not as if it showed up last week or two months ago. We’re almost through Season Two of the pitch-clock era, and aside from the timer being the sport’s greatest invention since the universal DH, it shouldn’t be sneaking up on people anymore — especially in Cabrera’s scenario, down to his last strike with the Yankees trying to rally in the ninth.
Boone, notorious for going nuclear with umpires, didn’t even get to simmer on this occasion. Afterward, when asked by a reporter about a more practical application of the rule, he begrudgingly went along with that concept, but he didn’t protest that much.
“Sure, right now,” Boone said, smiling. “I mean, you’d like to think in certain situations, in the spirit of it, if there’s no time being held up — which clearly there wasn’t. If anything, the pitcher is holding it up. Yeah, that’s a better part of it. But that said, we know the rules. We’ve all played with them for a couple years. So it’s on all of us.”
Would that ninth inning have turned out differently? Impossible to say. And the Yankees still set themselves up with a golden opportunity when Juan Soto ripped a two-out double into the rightfield corner. With Aaron Judge up next and first base open, the Cardinals held a mound summit to plot their course of action.
Typically, Judge being Judge, it’s a no-brainer to walk the presumptive American League MVP. But he was 1-for-8 with four strikeouts in the series to that point while Austin Wells was 2-for-4 Saturday with a double and single after Friday’s two-homer, four-RBI performance.
Still, the Cardinals chose to give Judge the four-finger treatment — putting the winning run on base — and with all 41,454 fans on their feet, Wells wound up striking out on a nasty full-count slider.
“I felt pretty good in the box,” he said. “He made a good pitch there at 3-and-2 with a low-percentage kind of pitch for him. I was looking for a heater, but he made a good pitch.”
That made up for the hanging slider Cardinals reliever Andrew Kittredge threw Stanton in the eighth inning, when he hammered the first pitch toward Monument Park, but the 417-foot missile dented the top of the wall, roughly six inches shy of clearing it. And while Stanton’s heroics didn’t go the full distance in the Bronx’s biggest canyon, the Cardinals’ Brendan Donovan took advantage of the Stadium’s cozy rightfield porch for a game-turning three-run homer off Will Warren in the third inning.
Donovan’s fly ball traveled 334 feet, according to Statcast, and was a home run in only one ballpark. That turned out to be the wrong place Saturday for the Yankees, who came up a few feet short and a few seconds too long.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
