Inside Yolk

The ALCS will begin on Sunday night in San Diego, but the preseason American League favorite will not be taking part. That’s right, the New York Yankees were eliminated from World Series contention on Friday night in Game 5 of the ALDS. The Tampa Bay Rays play a perfect foil for the Yankees because they’re a small-market team with a limited budget and few die-hard fans. Yet, thanks to their brilliant management, they compete, and in this case defeat, the super popular and star-studded pinstripe brigade.

The deciding game figured to be tight with aces Gerrit Cole and Tyler Glasnow going head to head. However, Glasnow gave way to Nick Anderson with one out in the third inning as part of Tampa Bay’s unorthodox pitching strategy. The Rays split nine innings between their top four pitchers with Glasnow and Anderson covering the first five before Peter Fairbanks and Diego Castillo took over for the final four. The idea was to make sure no Yankees hitter saw a Rays pitcher more than once, and it worked with New York scoring just one run on an Aaron Judge home run off of Anderson in the fourth.

Tampa Bay threatened in the first inning when Cole walked two batters and hit another, but they didn’t score until the fifth when Austin Meadows came through with a solo home run to tie the game. There weren’t many opportunities for either side after that. In fact, the entire game featured a total of just six hits and seven walks with all the runs coming on three solo shots.

Wednesday was an interesting day for baseball fans. As the second day of the 2020 Postseason, it was also the only day with all 16 playoff teams in action. The March Madness of baseball. There was excitement throughout the slate with the Braves starting the day by outlasting the Reds in a 13-inning pitching duel that remained scoreless for four and a half hours and the Yankees wrapping it up by scoring two runs in the ninth off of Brad Hand to take the lead for good in a rain-soaked marathon slugfest.

So why was it an “interesting” day for baseball and not a great day? Because it looks like Rob Manfred is using the COVID-19 crisis to make the 16-team bonanza a permanent part of the baseball calendar. You can tell by the way MLB is pushing the expanded postseason as the wave of the future. You can tell by the way the media got a little excited about the national pastime for the first time since 1998. There were Wild Card game on network television, for goodness’s sake. Here’s the official hype video for the playoffs.

REMIX! “Same game, whole new attitude.” Can you tell that MLB is trying to be hip and cool like the NBA? One way to be like the NBA is to reduce the meaning of the regular season that’s not moving the needle anyway by letting half the teams in the playoffs, allowing for more national TV games and more revenue. As much as the promo feels like another iteration of the Steve Buscemi “hello fellow kids” meme, the way it links baseball’s hot young stars to the expanded format is clever advertising.