Tonight the New York Yankees will again face the Boston Red Sox at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees will start Masahiro Tanaka who will have a herculean job trying to hold down this weak Red Sox team. Last year in three starts against the rivals, he gave up 22 earned runs.
It will be another nice night for baseball at Yankee Stadium. It should be partly cloudy with a temperature that will remain at about 80 degrees throughout the game with low humidity.
The Yankees head into tonight’s game with a 5-1 record which in a regular-season equates to 15-3. The Boston Red Sox are 3-5 and sit at the bottom of the AL East. Yes, the bottom, below the lowly Baltimore Orioles that the Yankees swept earlier this week. However, that being said, if the Yankees are to lose a game in this three-game series, it will be tonight due to Tanaka’s recent inability to hold down the Sox.
The Red Sox will face Tanaka tonight at 7:07 pm at Yankee Stadium. Tanaka will have to get ahead of hitters early in the game to have any chance of coming away with a win. Last year he had three starts against the Red Sox, in those three starts he only got past the second inning once. There was a time early in his career that he was a Red Sox killer, but it hasn’t been that way in the last few years.
In Tanaka’s career, he has pitched against the Red Sox for the most innings of any opposing team. The Tampa Bay Rays come in second for most inning pitched. If Tanaka is to have any success tonight, he will have to pitch as he did in his one game against the Sox in spring training. Then he pitched three shutout innings, did not give up a hit, didn’t issue a walk, and racked up five strikeouts. On July 4th Tanaka was hit in the head with a comebacker of the bat of Giancarlo Stanton. He has been under concussion protocol. This will be his first start of the season.
When the New York Yankees come to the plate at the bottom of the first inning they will face right-hander Zack Godley in his second game of the season. The Red Sox looking to shore up their depleted pitching staff picked up Godley in mid-July. His first game was in relief where he pitched four scoreless innings while striking out seven against the New York Mets on July 27th. This will be his first start of the season against a team that has little experience facing the rightly.
Godley has never faced an imposing lineup that he will face tonight. Several of the Yankees are hot and if the Yankees win this one, the long ball will again come into play. Aaron Judge will be looking to hit a homer to create a record hitting a home run in four consecutive games.
Prediction: Yankees 7-6.
Tomorrow night the New York Yankees will have their final game of the series with the Red Sox before traveling into the unknown with two, at the moment idle days before one game in Baltimore. If the Phillies are cleared to play, those two days may be replacement games with the Phillies. On Sunday James Paxton will take the mound against an unannounced Red Sox pitcher.
EmpireSportsMedia.com’s Columnist William Parlee is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. Follow me on Twitter @parleewilliam and join Yankee Fans R US!! Yankee fan group on Facebook. And join me in the call of games in their game thread!