Yankees Offense Muted by Diamondbacks in First Loss of Season

The Yankees suffered their first loss of the season, a 7-0 flop in Arizona as Nestor Cortes had another travesty of a first inning and the offense got shut down on three hits. And down below in Pinstripe Past, the Yankees will play their home opener Friday, so today we’ll turn the clock back to 1974 when they began a two-year stint at Shea Stadium, home of the Mets, while Yankee Stadium was being renovated. And on a cold day in Queens, there was a lot going on. Let’s get to it.

April 2: Diamondbacks 7, Yankees 0

OK, I guess it would have been unreasonable to think the Yankees would go 162-0 this season.

Loss No. 1 happened Tuesday night in Arizona, an ugly 7-0 defeat as Nestor Cortes again started the game by throwing batting practice to the Diamondbacks as he gave up three runs on five hits in the first inning alone.

In his two starts, Cortes has now faced 15 batters in the first inning and allowed six runs on eight hits and two walks. That computes to an ERA of 27.00 and a WHIP of 5.000. Flat out awful. In the other eight innings he has pitched, he’s given up one run for an ERA of 1.12.

“I thought I made a couple good pitches,” Cortes said. “Just gotta do a better job of limiting damage in that first inning. We’ve been coming from behind a couple times this year already. As for me, I can’t put my team in a hole like that, that often.’ Second time it happened already in the season, so just take care of the first inning and it would have been a nice night.”

He’s right, it would have been a nice night if not for the first inning, but hey, all the innings count, right?

On Opening Day in Houston Cortes got shelled for three runs in the first inning plus another in the second, but he settled down and pitched very well to get through five innings, giving the Yankees a chance which they ultimately capitalized on. Tuesday night, same thing as he blanked the Diamondbacks for the next four innings to keep the score at 3-0.

The difference between Houston and Arizona, though, was the Yankees did not have a rally in their bones as their Michael Kay loves, loves, loves to say. They were dominated by Diamondbacks ace Zac Gallen who pitched six innings of three-hit shutout ball, then watched as three relievers secured his second victory of the year by combining for three perfect innings to close the game.

Gallen, whose ERA dropped to 0.82, had everything working and the Yankees looked pretty helpless at the plate. “He was just hitting spots,” Anthony Rizzo said. “Especially with two strikes, he wasn’t really missing over the plate at all.”

“He threw really well (and) we didn’t make the adjustments,’’ said Gleyber Torres. “Tonight, it’s a night we didn’t do anything.’’

The Yankees wrap up their seven games in seven days season-opening road trip at 3:40 p.m. on YES and it’s Carlos Rodon, looking to be much better than he was in his first start, opposing another very good Diamondback starter, Merrill Kelly.

Here are my observations:

➤ The first inning was brutal. The Yankees had a chance to get to Gallen as he walked Torres to start the night but Juan Soto grounded into a double play. Gallen then walked Aaron Judge, but Rizzo grounded out to end it. And then in the bottom half, Cortes was so bad.

➤ Seven pitches into his night he was down 1-0 as Ketel Marte led off with a double and scored on a single by Blaze Alexander. After getting an out, three straight batters singled to make it 3-0, and Cortes was lucky it wasn’t more. With one out and runners on the corners, Arizona rookie Jorge Barrosa tried to squeeze home a fourth run but it was a terrible bunt and the Yankees wound up getting a double play. Oswaldo Cabrera tagged out Eugenio Suarez in a rundown at third, then wheeled and fired to Cortes covering first to nail Barrosa who had wandered too far during the rundown and couldn’t get back. Arizona had five hits in the inning after managing just four all night on Monday.

➤ Anthony Volpe and Cabrera hit back-to-back two-out singles in the second, but Jose Trevino struck out and the Yankees never came close to establishing another threat. Thereafter, Gallen gave up just a walk to Cabrera in the fifth (Trevino wiped him out with a double play) and a single to Soto in the sixth (Judge and Rizzo left him standing there). Then Arizona’s three relievers each pitched a 1-2-3 inning and needed just 35 total pitches to do so.

➤ The Diamondbacks put the game out of reach in the seventh. The first two men reached against Victor Gonzales so Aaron Boone sent in newcomer Jake Cousins for his Yankee debut. He induced a pop out but then served up a three-run homer to Christian Walker. Cousins then ate the eighth inning so Boone didn’t have to waste another reliever. After getting the first two outs, he gave up a single, then Austin Wells - who had replaced Trevino behind the plate - allowed an inning-ending third strike to get past him. Cousins walked a man to load the bases, then threw a wild pitch that scored the final run.

➤ Volpe had another single but he also struck out twice. Still, he’s batting .529. Cabrera (.409) and Soto (.417) had the other hits, but here’s the thing: Even though the Yankees have started 5-1, their offense outside of those three guys has been terrible. Look at these averages: Torres .174, Judge .125, Rizzo .182, Giancarlo Stanton .150, Alex Verdugo .143, Trevino .111, Wells .200. It’s too early to worry, but the 5-1 record is overshadowing the fact that this team is not hitting. What it’s doing is being opportunistic, coming up with clutch hits here and there in comeback victories. But the Yankees can’t keep falling behind and expect they’re going to have a rally every night.

➤ Stanton has been as bad as ever. The guy is washed, new body or not. He has already struck out 11 times in 21 plate appearances.

➤ On the ever-active transaction wire, lefty reliever Nick Ramirez, who was designated for assignment the other day, was traded to the Dodgers for cash considerations. Ramirez was trimmed from the roster to make room for Tanner Tully who was called up from Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Tully lasted a day before he was DFA’d to make room for reliever Jake Cousins who was acquired in a trade from the White Sox. Got all that?

In 1974, Shea Stadium in Queens Was the Home Borough for the Yankees

NEW YORK (April 6, 1974) - There was something strangely amiss on this afternoon - the Yankees wearing their classic home white uniforms with the distinctive navy blue pinstripes but doing so not in the Bronx but over in Queens.

Even more strange was this comment, made by Yankees coach, all-time great and recently inducted Baseball Hall of Fame member Whitey Ford who said of the team’s first “home” game at Shea Stadium, a 6-1 victory over the Cleveland Indians, “The crowd here was livelier than they were at the Stadium.”

If anything told you how things had been going for the Yankees since their last visit to the postseason a decade earlier, that statement from the Chairman of the Board said it all. And he wasn’t wrong, even though only 20,744 showed up on a cold afternoon.

With the Yankees still in the midst of a down period unmatched since Yankee Stadium opened for business in 1923, Yankee fans had expressed their displeasure by not going into the Bronx to watch a team that routinely played under .500 baseball. Things were so despondent that in 1972, they drew a mere 966,328 across 81 dates, lowest since the World War II years.

But another reason was that the glorious 50-year-old stadium was falling apart and many didn’t want to attend games in a relic of a park that was located in what was certainly at that time a not-too-safe borough of New York.

George Steinbrenner knew this which is why in his first year as owner of the team in 1973, he threatened to build a new stadium and move the Yankees across the river to New Jersey if the city didn’t work with him to renovate and modernize the House That Ruth Built.

Obviously, Steinbrenner got his way, but in order to essentially rebuild the place at River Avenue and 161st Street, the Yankees needed a place to play home games in 1974 and 1975 and a deal was worked out with the crosstown Mets to share Shea Stadium.

“There weren’t many options short of playing out of town altogether,” Marty Appel, who handled publicity for the Yankees from 1968-1977, told the Queens Gazette in a story that ran in 2014 on the 40th anniversary of the Yankees first season there. “The city and Mets helped make it happen. The city got us office space in Flushing Meadows Park, and the Mets were very cooperative during our time, plus of course, they realized additional revenues from the arrangement.”

Not everyone shared Ford’s enthusiasm about the place that, even though it was barely 10 years old was already falling into disrepair.

“I remember the terrible shape it was in,” Yankees reliever Sparky Lyle told the Gazette. “The bullpens were just awful. They were filled with flies by the thousands. It was like a nightmare. And it took getting used to the airplanes flying over (from nearby LaGuardia airport) every three minutes. We just wanted to get out of there.”

Unfortunately for Steinbrenner, he missed Opening Day because just a day earlier, he had been indicted on charges that he made illegal contributions to President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. Because of that, he decided to stay away from the ballpark to avoid creating a distraction, but also to dodge the ravenous press.

In a statement released by Appel as the PR chief, Steinbrenner explained that his absence was in order to “… avoid any possible embarrassment to his guests.”

He eventually pleaded guilty to those charges in August 1974 but avoided jail time. Still, in November, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn levied a two-year suspension on the Boss, so he wound up not seeing very much baseball at all when the Yankees were at Shea.

So yeah, there was a lot going on even before Mel Stottlemyre threw the first pitch on his way to a complete game victory. And then Gaylord Perry took the mound for the Indians, and there was more.

Perry was the master of the modern day spitball, a pitch that had been outlawed more than 50 years ago, but one he still managed to get away with on a routine basis. However, a new rule had been passed before the 1974 season that decreed an umpire didn’t have to find any “foreign substance” on the ball or the pitcher to call an illegal pitch, if, in his judgment, the ball behaved abnormally.

In that case, he can call an automatic ball and warn the pitcher, with two such calls resulting in an ejection. Umpire Marty Springstead wasted no time implementing the rule with Perry who long after he retired admitted he threw the spitball all the time, and even described the ways he not only lubed the ball but also defaced it so it would act crazy.

Graig Nettles hit a two-run homer off Perry in the fourth for the first runs of the game, and in the sixth, Nettles came up with Bobby Murcer at second. Perry threw a pitch that darted down and Springstead immediately threw his arms up and called a ball and warned Perry.

Indians manager Ken Aspromonte was furious. “My man throws fork balls and he has been throwing them for 12 years,” he said. “The umpires don't know the difference between a fork ball and any other pitch. I can name 25 guys in the American League who throw malicious sinkers, and I can't call them spitters. Why should my man be singled out when there are 25 guys who throw like he does? I know Stottlemyre is a sinkerball pitcher, and we can question his pitches, too.”

No word on whether Aspromonte was smiling when he said this because he knew damn well “his man” threw a spitter almost his entire 22-year Hall of Fame career.

Perry was asked if he might take legal action against the umpires if they persisted. “I'll wait and see if it happens twice in a game; i's a possibility,” he said. “The opposing teams definitely will be yelling at the umpires when a batter misses a changeup or a fork ball.”

Murcer eventually scored in the sixth on a sacrifice fly by Gene Michael and the Yankees put the game out of reach by scoring three times on four hits and two walks in the seventh off Perry and reliever Tom Hilgendorf.

In their two years at Shea, the Yankees fared well, but not well enough to end their playoff drought. They finished second in the AL East, 89-73 and just two games behind the Orioles in 1974, then slipped third, 12 games behind the Red Sox at 83-77.

And then in the first three seasons in the new Yankee Stadium, they won three pennants and two World Series titles.

“Very little attention is paid to those two years, even though the Yankees almost won the Eastern Division in 1974,” Appel said. “In retrospectives about Shea Stadium, there was hardly any mention of the Yankees playing 162 games there – although the Beatles, playing two concerts, got a lot of attention. Mets attendance was better, but remember, they were coming off a 1973 World Series team.”

⚾ April 1, 2008: The Yankees set a major league record by winning their 11th consecutive home opener. The Bombers beat the Blue Jays on Opening Day of 2008. Chien-Ming Wang allowed two runs over seven innings in the win over Hall of Famer, Roy Halladay. Oddly enough, the record was previously held by the 1945-1954 Pittsburgh Pirates, a team that lost 100 or more games three times over that span.

⚾ April 2, 1996: New Yankees manager Joe Torre won his first game as the manager of the New York Yankees, as the eventual World Series champs won their Opening Day game against the Cleveland Indians by a score of 7-1. During that game, Hall of Famer Derek Jeter became the first rookie shortstop since 1962 to start Opening Day for the Yankees at the position; he also recorded his first home run. Nobody knew it at the time, but the latest Yankees dynasty had begun.

⚾ April 3, 2005: Less than six months removed from their historic collapse in the 2004 ALCS when they became the first team in history to blow a 3-0 series lead, the Yankees opened the 2005 season with an emphatic 9-2 blowout of those same - and now defending World Series champion - Boston Red Sox. Randy Johnson made his Yankees debut and allowed just one run, while Hideki Matsui homered, part of a 15-hit assault, the first 10 of which came off ex-Yankee David Wells who was Boston’s Opening Day starter.