Yanks lose to Indians 5-4 in 16 innings

There's two ways to look at this.  One is that you could probably not take a more depressing loss than the one the Yankees endured tonight.  The unblemished Andrew Miller picked the worst game possible to blow his first save, the offense failed to correct itself from this past weekend and the Blue Jays continued their torrid play with a win over the A's.

But you can also look at it like this....at least it's over.  I mean that was a brutal game to watch.  I love baseball.  It's my favorite sport.  But games like tonight are awful.  It's not good baseball when teams go inning after inning without scoring off of middle relievers.  Once you hit the 12th inning of a regular season game the result is pretty much going to be a coin-flip based on which team's last bullpen guy will blink first.  If this wasn't such a big game I would have been asleep hours ago.


But it was a big game and tonight was really discouraging for a number of reasons.  The first is that this offense is in a serious funk.  Ellsbury and Gardner continue to be just fucking awful (0-13 combined with 5 K's.  Brett actually had an opportunity to make an impact play in the 9th with A-Rod up and predictably got thrown out trying to steal second).  But it wasn't just those two.  A-Rod and Tex haven't been great lately but they also haven't had any opportunities to bat with runners on. 

Meanwhile, the Blue Jays cannot stop winning.  They beat Oakland tonight and have now won nine in a row and 12 of 13.  The lead in the division is now just two in the loss column and no, I'm still not panicking.  Not yet.

PS - It's easy to forget but Severino pitched tonight and he had another really solid performance.  Early on it felt like it was going to be a short night for the kid but he settled down, gave up a couple runs in the first two innings and was able to get through six having allowed just the two runs and retired 10 of his final 11 batters. 

PPS - Didi is becoming one of the better players on this team.  He's become so dependable in the field and he's hitting better than pretty much everyone in this lineup right now.