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Anthony Volpe Leads The Way as The March to 162-0 Continues
A 5-2 victory over Arizona gives the 5-0 Yankees their best start since 1992
Good morning everyone. As some of you saw in the survey I sent out last weekend, I’m trying something new this season, and today is the debut edition. When the Yankees play their weekday series, I’m going to put out a newsletter on each game the morning after to try to keep things more immediate. And then for the weekend series, I’ll do the traditional recap edition that will come out Monday morning.
For the weekday newsletters, I’ll also be including a section titled Box Score Briefs which will be a spin around MLB, highlighting some of the best games and performances of the previous night, with the exception of Wednesday morning. That will still be devoted to the Pinstripe Past stories, but there will also be a change to that. Occasionally, I’m going to stray from the Yankees and give you stories from non-Yankee historical games or performances in MLB. Saturday will still be the day for 2009 Yankees: The Last Championship.
Because much of this weekday format has to be written in the morning, you won’t receive the newsletter at its normal 7:30 a.m. time. I’ll try to get this out by 9 a.m. so in the future, look for it then. In the survey, nearly 95% who responded said your reading time is flexible and getting Pinstripe People a little later would be fine. Speaking of the survey, so far about 20% of you have filled it out, so for those who haven’t, again, I’d really like to get your thoughts. It takes less than five minutes. Here’s the link: https://forms.gle/iCHc8ant3ZVBHz8e9
OK, lets get to it. While you were sleeping, the Yankees’ march to 162-0 continued Monday night as they won their fifth straight game to start the season, 5-2 over the Angels. And in Box Score Briefs, the Cubs won their home opener behind their rookie Japanese pitcher, and we have our first no-hitter of the season.
April 1: Yankees 5, Diamondbacks 2
Anthony Volpe spent Sunday in Houston either on the toilet or hovering his head over it while battling a fierce stomach bug which forced him out of the lineup. Reporters asked him how sick he was and he smiled and said, “Really bad. Hopefully one more good night and I’ll feel 100 percent.”
My guess is he was feeling pretty good once the first game against the defending NL champions was over because Volpe went 4-for-4 with a pair of doubles, two runs scored and one RBI to continue his torrid start to 2024. This was the first four-hit game of his career and he’s now batting .571 with a .667 on-base percentage as the swing changes he made in the offseason seem to be paying off in a big way.
Through his four games and 18 plate appearances, he has seen a whopping 87 pitches and has swung and missed only three times. He’s showing a new command of the strike zone - Juan Soto must be rubbing off on him - and he’s not only putting the ball in play, he’s drawing walks while striking out just three times.
“I just feel like I’m setting myself up to cover a lot of different pitches, different speeds, different locations,” Volpe said. “I can kind of match up. I have confidence that where I’m landing and where I’m getting to is going to help me back up my approach.”
“I just think he’s a way better hitter,” Aaron Boone said. “Results can be fleeting, especially this time of the year, but the fact that he is getting results and the quality of each at-bat, it’s been impressive. This is a different guy now. I think it’s definitely the swing adjustments he’s made. Certainly the experience and his aptitude, baseball IQ. But swing-and-miss was an issue for him last year. As I’ve talked about since early in the spring, you can clearly see he’s worked hard to plug some holes that the league exposed a little bit at times last year.”
Stomach bug aside, Anthony Volpe has gotten off to a blazing start.
Here are my observations:
➤ Luis Gil made his season debut as the fifth starter and he was terrific. Against an Arizona team that scored 34 runs in its first four games against the Rockies, Gil stymied them for 4.2 innings allowing one run on one hit and three walks with six strikeouts. He threw 84 pitches and came one out shy of qualifying for the win because Boone pulled him with two outs and nobody on base in the bottom of the fifth.
➤ Boone drives me nuts, as most of you know. Why he couldn’t let the kid pitch to one more batter so he could possibly get the win escapes me, but if you didn’t already know, managers care exactly zero percent about pitcher wins these days. The Yankees were up 5-1 at the time and Gil was still dealing. Lefty-swinger Corbin Carroll was the next hitter, but Boone didn’t bring in a lefty; he went to righty Luke Weaver. Picture me shaking my head. Weaver then pitched the next 2.1 innings so I assume the plan was to piggy-back those two to get the game into the late innings. That plan worked, but Gil deserved the win, not Weaver.
➤ Alex Verdugo left the bases loaded in the first inning so that was a frustrating start. Soto got it started with a walk, Aaron Judge singled and Giancarlo Stanton walked, but Verdugo popped out to third to kill it. Undaunted, the Yankees struck for two runs in the second as Volpe led off with a double, took third on a deep fly by Austin Wells, then scored on red-hot Oswaldo Cabrera’s single. Then, the not-so-hot Gleyer Torres ripped a double to left-center and Cabrera raced around to score.
➤ The Yankees tacked on their last three runs in the third with some help from error-prone Arizona. Anthony Rizzo and Verdugo walked and Volpe singled to make it 3-0. Wells followed with another fly ball to left fielder Lourdes Gurriel, the NL player of the week (Soto was named the AL player of the week). Gurriel tried to nail the tagging Verdugo at the plate but threw way wide and the ball skipped past pitcher Ryne Nelson who was backing up the play. Volpe saw that and ran from first to third, Nelson stupidly tried to gun him down and he threw the ball back to Gurriel in left field, so Volpe got up and scrambled home well ahead of Gurriel’s second throw home. That made it 5-0.
➤ Gil got himself into a jam in the bottom of the third. The first two men reached on a single and a walk, and he wild-pitched them to second and third with no outs. But after a sacrifice fly by Ketel Marte, Gil retired two excellent hitters, Carroll and Gurriel, to end the threat. Weaver gave up the other run in the seventh when Gaby Moreno led off with a triple and scored on Marte’s second sacrifice fly.
➤ Nick Burdi continues to look great. He pitched a perfect eighth with one strikeout, and then Victor Gonzalez was given the save opportunity in the ninth because Boone needed to give Cardiac Clay Holmes a breather. Gonzalez allowed a double, but finished it off on just nine pitches.
➤ Soto did not have a hit but he drew two more walks; Torres had a pair of hits which he needed after his poor series in Houston; Judge continued to struggle as he made four outs after his single and is now hitting .143 in the early going; Stanton whiffed twice and is hitting .176.
⚾ Some of you know that the team I root for in the National League is the Cubs. I’m old enough to remember a time when there was no such thing as interleague play so there was no crossover between AL and NL teams until the World Series. The Cubs have always been my NL team, though they will never surpass the Yankees. When these teams play each other, I’m on the Yankees’ side of the tracks.
Still, I want the Cubs to succeed and I can tell you that their historic 2016 world championship which ended their 108-year drought is still my favorite baseball season ever. Seriously, better than any Yankees championship. That’s how cool it was, and how invested I was in that team. Of course, their rise also came in a year when the Yankees did not make the postseason, so my focus was solely on the north side of Chicago. In fact, the Yankees helped the Cubs win that title because they traded Aroldis Chapman at midseason - and yes, back then, Chapman was a dominant closer. That deal also helped the Yankees because Gleyber Torres came to the Bronx.
Anyway, all that to say, I’m into the Cubs, so Opening Day at Wrigley Field on Monday was exciting because rookie Shota Imanaga - the far less expensive of the two big Japanese pitchers who came to America this year - made his MLB debut.
Imanaga faced the Colorado Rockies, so yeah, they suck. Still, Imanaga had a no-hitter two outs into the sixth inning before ancient Charlie Blackmon broke it up. Brendan Rogers then singled and I thought for sure manager Craig Counsell would pull Imanaga because the game was still scoreless at that point. Instead, unlike quick-hook Boone, Counsell let Imanaga face Nolan Jones and he struck him out to finish off six scoreless innings.
It looked like he’d get a no-decision because to that point, the Cubs hadn’t scored against Rockies starter Dakota Hudson. But alas, these are the Rockies. Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki singled, and after an out, Christopher Morel grounded a single to Jones playing in left. Happ scored easily, and ultimately, do did Suzuki and Morel. That’s because Jones completely whiffed the ball and it rolled all the way to brown ivy. By the time he retrieved it Morel was pulling into third, but then Jones made a terrible throw that got loose in the infield so Morel kept going and completed a Little League home run thanks to the two errors by Jones.
Cody Bellinger tacked on a two-run single later and the Cubs won 5-0, sending the faithful home happy. They lost their first two in Texas with the Rangers still celebrating their World Series title with a banner raising the first night and the ring presentation the next, but Sunday the Cubs broke a 5-5 tie with four runs in the ninth. Now they’ve won two in a row.
Imanaga is a 30-year-old lefty who went 64-50 with a 3.18 ERA in eight seasons in his native Japan. He doesn’t overpower hitters, but he’s got a craftiness to him which allowed him to whiff nine with no walks on 92 pitches, 65 of which were strikes.
“It was clear that this is a player who has been in big moments and has been through this before,” Counsell said. “He quickly got into compete (mode). What he did really well today is something that he’s always done well, he threw a ton of strikes.”
⚾ Things were good on the north side of Chicago, but on the south side, wow, the White Sox are pathetic. Seriously, they might be the worst team in MLB, even worse than the A’s. They lost 9-0 to the Braves so they’re 0-4, all the games at home, and they’ve been outscored 20-8. Austin Riley hit a three-run homer, Ronald Acuna doubled, drove in one and scored two, and Orlando Arcia had a two-run double to back Charlie Morton who combined with three relievers on a three-hit shutout that included 11 strikeouts.
⚾ And down in Houston, I guess it’s a good thing the Yankees didn’t have to face righty Ronel Blanco. In his first start of the year, the 30-year-old threw a no-hitter against the Blue Jays as the Astros won their first game, 10-0. Blanco threw 105 pitches, walked two and struck out seven including three against Vlad Guerrero Jr.
Blanco was working at a car wash in the Dominican Republic when he was discovered by an Astros scout and given a $5,000 signing bonus when he was 22, even though he had only been pitching since he was 18.
Since then he has toiled in the minors while also pitching winter ball back home, mostly out of the bullpen, but with the Astros missing Justin Verlander and Jose Urquidy, Blanco is being given a chance in the rotation, just like the Yankees gave Gil his chance with Gerrit Cole out. This was just his eighth big-league starter since he first debuted with the Astros in 2022.
“It’s been a very long road traveled for me,” Blanco told reporters in Houston. “A lot of ups, a lot of downs, a lot of falls, a lot of me getting back up. But I think all of that has been worth it for me to be able to get to this moment.”