Alexander Wilson
The New York Yankees snapped their five-game losing streak Monday night against the Los Angeles Angels in the most Yankees way possible, winning a chaotic 11-10 game that featured Mike Trout going off for two homers and five RBIs while the pitching gave up way more than it should have. Not exactly a clean victory. But a win is a win, and the reason they got it comes down to one player who has been waiting for this night all season.
Trent Grisham entered the game as a pinch hitter for Randal Grichuk, batting seventh, and proceeded to go 2-for-3 with two home runs and five RBIs. He launched a three-run shot in the fifth to give the Yankees a 7-4 lead, and when Trout answered with a three-run homer of his own in the sixth to tie things back up, Grisham was still in the middle of delivering one of the more impactful individual performances the Yankees have had all season. Caballero eventually scored the winning run on a wild pitch to push the lead back, and the Yankees held on for their ninth win.
This Was Always Coming
The Grisham situation has been perplexing all season because everything under the hood kept saying one thing while the surface numbers said another. Heading into Monday, he was hitting .152/.339/.283. That is ugly. But his Statcast data was telling a completely different story. His hard-hit rate ranked in the 98th percentile. His chase rate was elite. His walk rate was among the best in baseball. Every meaningful metric about how he was actually swinging the bat suggested he was one of the most disciplined, hard-hitting players in the lineup, and that the results were coming.
Monday was the results finally arriving.
That is how variance works in baseball. A player can do everything right for two weeks straight and have nothing to show for it because the baseball keeps finding gloves. Then one night the balls start landing in open grass and everything that had been building underneath the surface comes out all at once. Grisham was never actually the problem. He was getting crushed by bad luck at the worst possible time, during a team losing streak that put every underperformer under a magnifying glass.
What This Does for the Lineup
Grisham batting seven as a pinch hitter and delivering five RBIs in a 11-10 game says something important about the flexibility this roster has when it actually deploys its pieces correctly. Grichuk has been one of the most unproductive players on the roster this season, going 0-for-10 with nothing to show for any of his at-bats. Replacing him with Grisham in a key moment and getting that kind of production is exactly the kind of decision-making the Yankees need from Boone when the lineup is struggling.
The five-game skid is over. Grisham is the reason (can’t forget about Aaron Judge’s two homers, either). Now the Yankees need to make sure Monday night is the beginning of something rather than just a one-game correction before more of the same.
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