Four 'What Ifs' Yankees fans will spend the winter asking themselves
Thanks to a heart-stopping, 4-3 win at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night, the Red Sox are moving on. Over the course of four games, Boston proved that it was the better team -- it won 108 games in the regular season for a reason, after all -- and a blockbuster ALCS matchup with the Astros awaits.
For the Yankees and their fans, though, the next few weeks (heck, the next few months) are going to be full of nothing but what-ifs -- what-ifs that, in the interest of catharsis, we've broken down in detail below.
We'll get through this together, guys.
What if they came up with the big hit in Game 1?
Five early runs against
The opportunities are almost too numerous to list.
The seventh was much of the same: two singles and a walk put the tying run on first with no one out, but all New York could manage was a strikeout, another fielder's choice and a groundout.
In all, the Yankees went 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position, made even more painful by the fact that they wound up losing by just a run. If any of those at-bats go the other way, does New York steal Game 1 and put the pressure on Boston? Do they take a 2-0 lead back home to a raucous Yankee Stadium? And if they do, would Games 3 and 4 have panned out differently?
What if Aaron Boone pulled
Even in his age-38 season, Sabathia was a steady hand in New York's rotation, so you can understand why Boone wanted to stick with his guy. Still, after a shaky first two innings, it was clear by the third that the lefty just didn't have it -- three hits, a hit-by-pitch and a wild pitch gave the Red Sox an early 3-0 lead and put the Yankees in a position they desperately wanted to avoid in an elimination game.
What if Boone had gone to the bullpen sooner -- say, after
What if
Even Porcello thought it was out off the bat:
The Yankees hit a few balls hard that just couldn't find fair territory (or avoid Boston's frankly unfair outfield defense), but none loomed larger than that.
What if literally anything about the ninth inning of Game 4 plays out differently?
Yankees fans will probably spend the entire offseason replaying that sequence of events, and it's hard to blame them. Elimination games rarely go quietly, and sure enough,
Then things really went off the rails:
New York, whenever you're ready to move on from the grieving process, allow me to draw your attention right here.