Yankees 1, Brewers 4: Miserable offense downs club in game two

This is another one of those games that’s hard to write about. The Yankees didn’t just play badly, they played boringly. If this was some titanic, 10-8 back-and-forth affair, or if someone forgot how many outs there were and tossed the ball into the stands allowing a run to come across, that’s at least interesting and something worth talking about. There’s really no greater sin in my eyes than being boring, fail spectacularly if you must fail, don’t bore me.

Instead, the starter tonight was bad but not horrifically so, the lineup was wholly uninterested in doing anything, and Aaron Judge had one of the few nights this season where he wasn’t the star of the show, and it all added up to a 5-1 Yankees loss.

After Frankie Montas burst into flames last night, there was some fair conversation around whether you’d rather have him, or tonight’s starter Jameson Taillon, on the hill in a playoff game. We’ll need to wait and see about Montas’ health, but Taillon did himself no favors in his outing tonight.

He wasn’t as bad as he could possibly be, but he threw way too many pitches and struggled with any kind of putaway pitch. He got just seven whiffs all night, only one on his four-seam fastball, as every single plate appearance seemed to take 5-6 pitches, and seemingly every Brewer getting one pitch to drive.

Not all of them did, and indeed, the real difference in the game was a single mistake to Willy Adames:

Christian Yelich added an RBI double to give Taillon his four earned runs against, but the four strikeouts against the two walks was the real problem. Taillon can’t have both — he’s sacrificed some swing and miss in order to avoid walks, but if he walks guys AND allows barrels, that approach falls apart really quickly. Montas was worse yesterday, but Taillon had a chance to move up in the pecking order tonight and couldn’t do it.

Marwin González left the game in the third after a rather bizarre injury:

Marwin went down immediately and was evaluated for some time. After leaving last night’s game with dizziness, you hope there wasn’t some kind of serious head injury, but taking a ball off the unprotected side of your head is definitely a scary thing.

Brandon Woodruff is a very good pitcher, but he is not so good that you can’t pull the trigger on 97 center-cut. Giancarlo Stanton, and indeed, the rest of the lineup, disagreed, with Stanton in particular having a terrible night, with the golden sombrero. Gleyber Torres had a double in the first inning, Judge had a double of his own, and Josh Donaldson homered for the second straight game.

After that, there was almost nothing done at the plate, as Woodruff carved through the order with 10 Ks against a single walk. The Yankees didn’t even have an inning with multiple runners on base at the same time, and bounced into a pair of double plays and nearly a third. Awful, listless performance.

Gerrit Cole is going to be called upon to be the stopper tomorrow. The Yankees need to find a way to salvage a game in this series, but the big trouble with Cole this season has been the long ball, and only two teams in baseball hit more home runs than Milwaukee. The final game of this series kicks off at 2:10pm Eastern tomorrow, and hopefully is far less boring.

Box Score