Dominance

BY KEVIN KERNAN

Let’s start with this. I am not a fan of Interleague play.

To me, it is just another marketing gimmick that cheapens the game, most importantly, taking away from the World Series. I’m so old, I remember the pure excitement and unpredictability of the World Series when those two teams, the American League champion and the National League champion, who had not faced each other in the regular season, faced off in the October sunlight. It was magical.

The World Series created a buzz, the kind of buzz not dreamed up in a conference room in New York City at MLB headquarters. And sure, it is interesting when the Dodgers face the Yankees or the Mets and Yankees tangle in regular season, but all those other Interleague stinkers are not worth watching.

If you are still going to go by American League and National League and have those two leagues meet in a “World Series’’ why in the world are you playing games in the season against one another?

Now if you realigned the divisions, I could buy Interleague play but that is not happening. Having said all that, the Dodgers have dominated the Yankees over the last two seasons.

Going into Sunday Night’s ESPN talk show that also featured a baseball game between players wearing mics on the field and every analytical metric being shoved down our throats, over the last two seasons and 10 games, the Dodgers had won eight of those games, outscoring the Yankees 68-41. Of course, the big victory was winning the World Series last October four games to one – including the master of disaster Game 5 loss for the Yankees.

Watching a guy who actually knows how to pitch is refreshing. Yarborough set up the hitters, imagine that.

During that time, Dave Roberts ran circles against Aaron Boone, plain and simple. Bashing Boone, GM Brian Cashman and owner Hal Steinbrenner is kind of a tradition for Yankee fans whenever the Yankees and Dodgers meet.

You see, it is one thing to beat the small market Guardians or Royals in October, but it is quite another to face another Big Market Monster like the Dodgers and the Yankees fell flat.

These Dodgers have flaws but are so deep that on Sunday they put reliever Luis Garcia on the injured list, the 15th pitcher this season to be placed on the IL by the Dodgers. As I wrote before the season, the Dodgers essentially have two pitching staffs and can survive pitching injuries like no other team in baseball because they have the money to survive those injuries.

Seems to me that the Yankees need to figure some things out against the Dodgers and maybe, just maybe they figured something out Sunday night at Dodger Stadium when soft-tossing lefty veteran Ryan Yarborough dominated the Dodgers. It was only one game, but it was only the Yankees third win against the Dodgers in their last 11 meetings.

And get this, Yarborough, 33, who was only starting because the Yankees wanted to get extra rest for Carlos Rodon, really dominated the two big lefty hitters for the Dodgers, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman, who went a combined 0-for-6 against Yarborough.

Watching a guy who actually knows how to pitch is refreshing. Yarborough set up the hitters, imagine that.

Making only his fifth start of the season, Yarborough pitched six innings, allowed one run on four hits while striking out five to move to 3-0 on the season in the 7-3 Yankees win. His ERA is 2.83. Yarborough was taken out after 93 pitches and hard-throwing Jonathan Loaisiga allowed two solo homers in the seventh.

Boone and the Yankees can’t help themselves. Even when Yarborough is making like Jamie Moyer out there, they have to take him out and go to the bullpen.

In the name of Driveline what is going on here?

Yarborough was pitching in the 70s and 80s – that’s MPH – and was getting hitters out by hitting his spots and changing speeds. He actually looked like a pitcher who would have pitched in the 1970s and ’80s, certainly not now in this era of firing the baseball as hard as you can in the upper 90s and higher with little or no command.

But that is exactly the point, today’s hitters are so locked into speed, they can’t adjust to soft pitching. Dodgers’ hitters sat back deep in the box as if they were seeing nothing but fastballs and Yarborough toyed with them.

I knew Yarborough when he came up with the Rays because he was friends with one of my son Corey’s friends and I was always impressed in our clubhouse conversations with how level-headed and competitive he was when he took the mound. He had a plan.

Unafraid is good word to use too to describe him – and he beat the mighty Dodgers. LA ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto could not make it out of the fourth. Yamamoto was clearly overhyped for his meeting with the Yankees, losing his composure on the mound, while Yarborough simply placed his pitches where he wanted to place them.

To the Yankees’ credit they made an adjustment with his changeup, and he is getting more depth on that pitch now, but this is about a mindset. That kind of soft-tossing pitching gets in a team’s head, too. It was fun to see and perhaps the Yankees learned a lesson here that maybe, to beat the Dodgers, the Yankees will have to change it up a bit.

“The art of pitching,’’ one former pitching coach told BallNine, “is really about messing with the hitters’ timing. Messing with their heads. Change speeds, hit your spots. Command the baseball.’’

That is exactly what Yarborough did.

Consider that in Freddie Freeman’s 26 regular season games against the Yankees over his career, prior to Sunday night, Freeman had a .327 average, .366 on-base percentage and a .693 slugging percentage. Then in the World Series last October he hit .300 with a .364 on-base percentage and a 1.000 slugging percentage, thanks to the four home runs he hit, including that Game 1 walkoff grand slam when Aaron Boone and the Yankees Nerds tried to outsmart the Baseball Gods by bringing in a rusty Nestor Cortes to face Freeman. You can’t be that rusty against the Dodgers. You have to hit your spots.

By the way, looking at the Knicks’ ouster by the Pacers in six games in the NBA Eastern Conference finals, their Game 1 choke job at the Garden was essentially the same thing as the Yankees Game 1 loss to the Dodgers in the World Series. I also found it interesting that the Yankees somehow lost by 16 runs to the Dodgers on Saturday night while the Knicks were eliminated by the Pacers by 17 points.

None of that mattered to Ryan Yarborough.

Yankees pitchers must do a better job against Freeman if they ever want to be better than the Dodgers. Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge kind of cancel each other out in superstar ways, so Freeman doing his thing is a huge negative for the Yankees. Shohei wasn’t healthy and his numbers showed it with a slash line of .105, .227, .158 in the World Series while Judge was at .222, .391, .444. Teoscar Hernandez hit .350 for the Dodgers too in the World Series, so there is that. The only Yankee to hit over .300 was Juan Soto, who batted .313. Juan is not a Yankee anymore, if you haven’t heard.

Yarborough held the top four Dodgers hitters – Ohtani, Teoscar Hernandez, Freeman and Will Smith hitless through those six innings, so it can be done by pitching to your spots.

These Yankees are without Gerrit Cole, but the Dodgers are without injured pitchers Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki, Michael Kopech and 12 others. Oh yeah, Mookie Betts (toe) missed the Yankees series as well. So, Yankee fans can’t use the old injury excuse in losing two of three.

Plain and simple the Dodgers have their number; Dodgers Dominance is a thing, but Yarborough turned out to be dominant in a different way and it was fun to watch. He has started five games this year and the Yankees have won four of those starts. He has pitched for five teams, including parts of two seasons with the Dodgers where he was 8-4. Nerds don’t care about wins, though, they only care about velocity and spin.

They will care about this number. The side-arming Yarborough had 17 swings and misses Sunday night from Dodgers hitters. The only pitcher to get more swings and misses from the Dodgers this year is future Dodger Paul Skenes, who had 18. Maybe the Dodgers were just plain worn out from scoring 18 runs on Saturday night, after all, Shohei actually fell asleep on the bench in that Saturday game but there is no denying Yarborough earned this victory.

The win also kept the Yankees streak alive of not being swept in a three-game series this year and they completed their last west coast trip of the regular season at 6-3.

Yes, the Nerds have made the game all about velocity from the pitcher and exit velocity from the hitter, but there is something to be said about a pitcher having the ability to keep a big-hitting team off-balance at the plate. That’s a weapon.

The Nerds have stolen all the numbers to make those numbers fit their agenda, but there will always be a place in baseball for the craftsman pitcher, if he is allowed to pitch. It is fun to watch and when a lefty craftsman is at his best, a la Jamie Moyer or Jimmy Key, that pitcher can be dominant too against a dominating team like the Dodgers.