The Yankees’ 31-year-old closer seemed to be nearing the end of his MLB career last year. A change he kept secret from the team over the offseason turned him into an elite reliever.
New York Yankees catcher Austin Wells called for 139 pitches from six pitchers Tuesday in World Series Game 4. Each one arrived like dishes off the menu of a restaurant to a food critic. Some turned out exactly as planned. Some were overcooked, some undercooked. I had something very specific in mind when asking Wells which offering was his favorite out of the 139.
“He was doing this,” Wells said, mimicking how Betts, in taking two of those pitches, was leaning out over the plate with his head and torso. “I’ve got to be convicted to the pitch. I mean, it's such an easy pitch to—I did it early in the at-bat—to kind of yank. You don't want to hit somebody, but you know, you've got to be in that lane. And the human element sometimes can play a role, especially in a big moment where you feel like you’ve got to be really relaxed and fluid.
Betts’s hands are so fast that he is as likely to hit a home as he is to swing through a four-seam fastball. He had 23 of each all year. Betts had seen 774 four-seamers and struck out swinging on only seven of them. Basically, Betts is so hard to get a fastball past that he fans on a four-seamer roughly once every full moon.
But then Teoscar Hernandez and Max Muncy were no match for Weaver. Like Betts, they, too, struck out. So fully intending was Weaver to go back out for the ninth and finish off what would have been a seven-out save that he ran past Boone on the dugout steps without allowing his manager to speak to him. Yes, he blew off his manager so that Boone had no option but to leave him in.
Judge blasted a hard RBI single off Honeywell, perhaps just the kind of slump-busting swing the Yankees have been seeking.Punt formation gave the Yankees a full-throttle Weaver and way more confidence up and down the lineup. Last winter he set up a net at the end of his Florida driveway, marked off 60 feet 6 inches and plopped down a bucket of balls. First, he stood on one leg “and found the way you see where I flow with my leg over my other leg.”All winter it was just Weaver throwing into a net like this—with no leg kick.
“Because every single day I was just in this bubble and my driveway throwing into a net and just immersed into what I was doing. And it was just … The level of confidence kept growing and growing and growing and the joy of feeling good and feeling like, ‘Oh man, I can throw this ball wherever I want.’
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