Yankees Extend Win Streak to Four by Routing the Astros

The Yankees laid the wood on the Astros Monday night during a 10-3 laugher at Yankee Stadium. Luis Gil pitched very well and he was supported by an offense that churned out 13 hits including three home runs as they beat Houston for the fifth straight time this season. And down below in Diamond Rewind, I’m taking you back to 1968 when Catfish Hunter - before he joined the Yankees - was just beginning his career with the Oakland A’s and he pitched a perfect game against the Minnesota Twins. Lets get to it.

May 7: Yankees 10, Astros 3

What a pleasant experience this game was, watching the Yankees pummel the Astros and their longtime nemesis, Justin Verlander for their fifth straight victory against Houston this season, and eighth straight dating back to 2023 which is the longest they’ve ever had.

Verlander has inflicted serious pain on the Yankees through the years, especially since he moved from Detroit to Houston in 2017 and then proceeded to dominate the Yankees twice in the ALCS when he gave up one earned run in 16 innings while striking out 21.

He later started twice against New York in the 2019 ALCS, one great outing, one not so good, and he beat them again in the 2022 ALDS. In other words, he’s been a royal pain in the ass. But not Tuesday night.

The Yankees shredded Verlander for seven earned runs in five innings and he walked more batters (3) than he struck out (2) which does not happen too often to the future Hall of Famer no matter who he’s pitching against. That’s the most runs the Yankees have ever scored against Verlander in the 37 starts he has made against them counting the postseason.

“They had a good approach and I wasn’t very good,” Verlander said. “If I’m being really honest with myself, the last couple of games, particularly the walks, showed me I was a little off. And then sometimes it takes you facing a team that knows you intimately, and vice versa, to send you back to the drawing board. I think these guys told me today that I got some work to do, I’ve got to be more deceptive.”

Verlander threw 97 pitches, the Yankees swung at 53 and they missed only six times, including zero whiffs on his fastball. That is extremely rare for Verlander.

What I liked so much about this game is that the offense was relentless. It wasn’t one of their typical games where they have one big inning and then hold on for dear life. They came out swinging and scored runs in six of the first seven innings in building a 10-1 lead. That’s what we need to see from the Yankees, when just about everyone in the lineup (Gleyber Torres being the exception) produces something.

Here are my observations:

➤ Luis Gil always seems to battle command issues, and that was the case in this one as he walked four men in six innings, raising his walks per nine innings to 5.84 which is the worst in MLB. However, he also continues to be one of the least hit and least scored upon pitchers in MLB. He allowed just one hit, a Kyle Tucker solo homer in the first inning, and now has six starts out of eight where he allowed three hits or fewer while his ERA dipped to 2.92. Gil has been quite a story as the man who replaced the injured Gerrit Cole in the rotation. “He keeps on growing and he’s got a really high ceiling,” Aaron Boone said.

➤ There’s been a lot of attention focused on Juan Soto, and for good reason, but Alex Verdugo is turning out to be a very important acquisition for the Yankees. After a season when the Yankees went through left fielders the way I can go through a row of Oreo’s, Verdugo has solidified that spot with excellent defense including a pair of really nice catches in this game. And his bat has come around in the last few weeks as well. He’s hitting .329 with four homers and 14 RBI in his last 24 games. Verdugo answered Tucker’s homer with a three-run blast in the bottom of the first which set the tone for the night, and then he ripped an RBI single in the third to make it 4-1. “I love it. I really do ... honestly, I couldn’t be happier here,” Verdugo said.

➤ Aaron Judge is coming around, finally. He had a two-out RBI single in the sixth that pushed the lead to 8-1 and he also drew two walks. Anthony Volpe only went 1-for-5, but that one was big, a two-run homer in the fourth. He also drove in a run with a grounder in the seventh. And Giancarlo Stanton had only one hit, but it was a line-drive 118.7 mph homer to left in the fifth.

➤ As for the negative, the only starter who didn’t get a hit was Torres who continues to have the most miserable season of his career. His at bats are just completely feeble as he’s hitting .216 and has just one home run and four doubles among his 30 hits. His OPS is now .556 which ranks him 160th out of 173 qualified batters. With Jon Berti back, Boone needs to start thinking about benching Torres and playing Oswaldo Cabrera in his place, with Berti at third.

➤ At 24-13, the Yankees are 11 games over .500. Last year, that was the highest they would get as they were 36-25 on June 4, the day after Judge smashed his toe and went on the IL for two months. The season began to crash and burn right there and they played nine games under the rest of the way.

A Perfect Night for Catfish Hunter

OAKLAND (May 8, 1968) - Moments after the final, historic pitch had been thrown, and Minnesota pinch-hitter Rich Reese had swung feebly and struck out, the Oakland Athletics were jubilantly mobbing pitcher Catfish Hunter in the clubhouse.

Center fielder Rick Monday, who always possessed a wonderful sense of humor, surveyed the scene and quipped: “A guy goes 3-for-4 and look how they treat him.”

Hunter had indeed gone 3-for-4 and driven in three runs during the A’s 4-0 victory over the Twins at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, a pretty impressive batting feat for a pitcher.

What was a bit more impressive - and the reason for the A’s celebrating as if they’d just won the World Series - was Hunter’s performance on the mound. He faced 27 Twins, and he got every one of them out to record the first regular-season perfect game in the American League in 46 years.

Hunter’s was just the ninth perfect game in major league history, and in the intervening 56 years, only 15 more have been registered, making it one of the rarest of all baseball feats.

Hunter won 224 games during his 15-year career, he won at least 20 games in five straight seasons (1971-75), and when he bolted Oakland via free agency to join the Yankees before the 1975 season, he became, at the time, the highest-paid player in major league history. He played on five world championship teams, three in Oakland and two in New York, won five World Series games and the 1974 Cy Young Award.

The inscription on Hunter’s Hall of Fame plaque appropriately reads: “The bigger the game, the better he pitched” and for the most part, that was true. The exception was his masterpiece against a talented bunch of Twins hitters. It was a nondescript early-season game, the A’s first in Oakland after their controversial move from Kansas City, attended by only 6,298 fans - which sounds very much like a 2024 Oakland crowd in what looks to be the A’s last year there. There was nothing “big” about it, but never did Hunter pitch any better.

He threw 107 pitches and went to a three-ball count on only six hitters. He piled up 11 strikeouts including three of slugger Harmon Killebrew, and he zipped through a Minnesota batting order that also included Rod Carew, Cesar Tovar and Tony Oliva.

“He didn’t throw more than five curveballs,” said Oakland catcher Jim Pagliaroni. “He had an outstanding slider and threw only one changeup. He only shook off two of my signs. He made my job easy.”

Pagliaroni might have thought it was an easy night of work, but the other A’s - particularly left fielder Joe Rudi - had to work to preserve the gem. Rudi, who had just been recalled from Triple-A Vancouver earlier that day, made two sparkling catches. The first came in the fourth inning when he snared Tovar’s sinking liner at his knees, and then in the seventh when he robbed Carew who had sliced one into short left. In between, third baseman Sal Bando made a difficult stop of a hard grounder by Bob Allison in the fifth and threw across the diamond for the out.

Much of Bando’s willingness to do anything to preserve the no-hitter was because it was special for a player to be part of such a game. But there was also a common love and respect the A’s had for Hunter, one of the finest men to ever play.

Born in the backwoods of North Carolina, Hunter learned how to pitch while throwing to his brother on the family farm. It was said that his legendary control was a product of those sessions because he was afraid a wild pitch might damage his father’s smoking shed which served as the backstop.

He threw five no-hitters in high school and was wooed by major league clubs before finally signing a $75,000 bonus baby contract with Charlie Finley A’s.

“I saw his curve and I couldn’t believe it. It was better than any of the pitchers on my own team had,” said Finley. “After we signed the contract, I told him we had to have a good nickname for him. Looking around this country setting, I came upon ‘Catfish.’ I told him we would tell the press that he had been missing one night and that his folks found him down by the stream with one catfish lying beside him and another on his pole. He looked at me and smiled and said in that drawl of his, ‘Whatever you say, Mr. Finley, it’s OK with me.’”

During his first three years in Kansas City Hunter was a mundane 30-36 for mediocre to bad teams. He went 13-13 in 1968, 12-15 in ‘69 and 18-14 in ‘70 before starting his streak of 20-win seasons as the A’s became the dominant team in baseball.

Hunter drove in the first run of the game in the seventh with a beautiful bunt single that scored Monday from third, and then the A’s scored three in the eighth to put the decision to rest. Danny Cater drew a bases-loaded walk to make it 2-0, and now it was Hunter’s turn to bat, and given the perfect game, manager Bob Kennedy obviously couldn’t pinch hit for his pitcher. “Some of the guys were joking to Kennedy about putting in a pinch-hitter for me in the eighth,” Hunter said.

No need. Hunter slashed a single to right which scored Pagliaroni and Monday, increasing Oakland’s lead to 4-0.

All that was left to decide was Hunter’s fate. He got the first two outs, fell behind 2-1 to Reese, then Reese fouled off four straight pitches. “For a while there I thought I was never going to get him out,” Hunter said. “That boy kept fouling off everything I threw up there.”

Hunter’s eighth offering to Reese looked like a strike but umpire Jerry Neudecker disagreed and called it a ball. Neudecker, who was behind the plate in 1967 when Joel Horlen of the Chicago White Sox threw a no-hitter, was asked if nerves got the better of him on that call and he replied, “I wasn’t excited. I have a job to do and I have to bear down just as much as the pitcher.”

Finally, Hunter reared back and threw one more fastball and Reese waved at it unsuccessfully. “There was no chance that I was going to take a pitch that was even close,” Reese said. “If it was anywhere near the strike zone I was going to swing and I did.”

After the game, Hunter received a phone call from Finley who had been listening to the game on radio from his home in LaPorte, Indiana.

“I just lost $5,000 on that game,” Finley told Hunter. “Who got it?” Hunter asked. “You did,” answered Finley. “I’m tearing up your contract and giving you one for $5,000 more.”

Following their third straight World Series title in 1974, Hunter entered free agency and a massive bidding war ensued for his services as 22 clubs made offers. Amazingly, Finley could have retained Hunter had he not been so mule-headed.

An arbitrator ruled on Dec. 13, 1974 that Finley had breached Hunter’s 1974 contract by not paying $50,000 of the pitcher’s $100,000 salary on a deferred basis to an insurance company for an annuity. This decision set Hunter free, and Finley later recalled, “It was one of the two biggest mistakes I ever made in baseball, the other being moving the A’s from Kansas City to Oakland (after the 1967 season).”

George Steinbrenner won the bidding war for Hunter, lavishing him with a record five-year, $3.75 million contract. “I thought I had seen everything (with Finley),” said Hunter, “but I was to find out I hadn’t seen anything. I would have gone back to the A’s. I hated leaving the players there. But then, when I couldn’t, I couldn’t believe the offers.”

Hunter went 23-14 in ‘75 and then 17-15 in ‘76 as the Yankees won their first AL pennant since 1964. Injuries began to slow Hunter and when the Yankees won the Series in ‘77 and 78, he was only a combined 21-15 those years, but he was the winning pitcher in Game 6 of the ‘78 Series clincher over the Dodgers. Shoulder miseries forced Hunter to retire following 1979.

For much of the next two decades he lived quietly back in North Carolina, but he was back in the news in 1998 when it was revealed he was suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Sadly, he passed away in September 1999 at the age of 53.

⚾ May 6, 2018: The kids came through during a thrilling 7-4 victory over the Indians at Yankee Stadium. Domingo German, making the first start of his MLB career, pitched six hitless innings, but Dellin Betances and Jonathan Holder gave up four runs in the eighth inning to break a scoreless tie. But then Aaron Judge delivered a two-run double in the bottom half to get the Yankees within 4-3, setting the stage for a four-run rally in the ninth which was capped by rookie Gleyber Torres’ first career home run, a walk-off three-run shot. At 21 years old, Torres became the youngest player in team history to hit a walk-off homer, 41 days younger than Mickey Mantle when he hit his first walk-off in 1953.

⚾ May 13, 1985: The Yankees pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in franchise history. They fell behind the Twins 8-0 in the first two innings and were still down 8-1 through five, but then in the sixth they erupted for five runs, the big blow a three-run homer by Butch Wynegar. And then in the bottom of the ninth against former Yankee reliever Ron Davis, Ron Hassey and Ken Griffey drew walks and Don Mattingly ripped a two-out, three-run walk off home run. “When you’re down 8-0, it’s natural to say ‘Whew, we can’t come back from this,’” Wynegar said. “Billy (Martin) started telling us, ‘Let’s see what we’re made of.’”