The New York Yankees lost to the Kansas City Royals on Monday, evening the ALDS at one game apiece. Kansas City scored all of their runs in the fourth inning on a Salvador Perez home run and three RBI singles. Meanwhile, New York left eight runners on base. Those facts led to third baseman Jazz Chisholm saying that the Royals got lucky in this game. Yankees’ manager Aaron Boone pushed back on that sentiment on Tuesday.
“I don’t think they got lucky,” Boone said. “I think they did a lot of really good things, and came in here and beat us last night.” That is per Brandon Kuty and Chris Kirschner of The Athletic.
Boone was also asked about Chisholm’s comments potentially becoming a rallying cry for the Royals. The Yankees’ manager shut that idea down as well with a quick “not really.”
Analytics back up Chisholm’s claim, as the deserve-to-win-o-meter showed that the Royals only win that game 20% of the time.
While the Royals may have lucked out in their win over the Yankees, there are still many problems to fix for New York. They struggled again against a left-handed starter in Cole Ragans. Their batting average against lefty starters was a measly .235 this season and they only managed three hits of Ragans.
Yankees must follow through on World Series expectations
The Yankees have never been to the World Series in Aaron Judge’s career because of the Houston Astros. Jose Altuve and crew have clipped the Bombers three times in the ALCS. This will be the first year since 2016 that Houston is not in the Championship Series, meaning the path should be clear for New York.
The first two games have not been a great start to the chase for 28. The Yankees won a very sloppy Game 1 6-5 despite not getting a hit from Judge. Their captain managed just one hit in Game 2 but missed out on an opportunity to break the game open in the first inning.
Ragans walked Gleyber Torres and Juan Soto to set up Judge with two on and no one out in the first inning. The slugger struck out and Austin Wells and Giancarlo Stanton could not do anything behind him. They should have been up at the end of the first but could not push a run across.
Things must change on offense while the series is in Kansas City. Ragans is waiting back in The Bronx for a potential Game 5 and the Yankees must do everything in their power to avoid that.
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