The record will show that Ron Marinaccio will wear the loss, that his record will fall to 4-4 thanks to Cubs 7, Yankees 4 on Sunday afternoon.
And make no mistake: Marinaccio earned his portion of it, allowing all three of the hitters he faced to reach base in the eighth inning, on a hit and two walks, setting the Cubs up on a tee.
But there are games when you wish that somehow baseball could alter the rules a little bit and assign losses the way teams do postseason shares: a full share for some, a half-share for some, a quarter-share for some.
And if that were allowed maybe we give Marniaccio a half-share of this loss.
Then we could give Gleyber Torres a quarter-share.
And we could give Aaron Boone a quarter-share.
And that sounds like it would be just about right, and a fair way to assess blame for this dyspeptic final game heading into the All-Star break, a loss that once again knocks the Yankees out of playoff position, sitting fourth in the wild-card race.
But don’t take my word for it.
Let’s listen to Torres: “I made a mistake. And it cost us the game.”
He did. And it did.
There was one out in the seventh. Domingo German had pitched brilliantly for six-plus innings and 74 pitches — more on that in a few paragraphs — but Chicago’s Christopher Morel bounced one right to Torres for a textbook 4-6-3 double play. But Torres booted it.
The bases were loaded. And soon a 4-1 breeze of a game would be a 4-4 tie. And … well, you already know the final score.
“Part of the game is, you’re going a make a number of errors,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “He makes that play all the time. He didn’t today. It can happen.”
So give a quarter-share L to Torres.
And now for Boone. Look, he had his reasons for lifting German, and they all make perfect sense, they are perfectly logical, absolutely reasonable.
German’s workload has been large his last two outings. The last day before an All-Star break, you like to give your bullpen arms as much work as possible. And the Yankees bullpen has been terrific.
Good reasons, all.
But sometimes it helps to simply trust your eyes. And the fact is that if German wasn’t quite as on-point as he’d been in Oakland two weeks ago, he was still awfully good.
He faced the minimum across the first four innings, allowed zero hits. He was still sitting on one hit allowed — and 74 pitches, with the Cubs looking utterly helpless — when he walked Ian Happ leading off the seventh.
Out of the dugout came Boone. Out of the game came German.
Out of luck, soon enough, were the Yankees.
“It’s understandable to question the decision,” Boone said afterward.
“It’s a fair question,” he added later. “Domingo obviously threw great.”
It was exactly the kind of maneuver that the faction of Boone detractors — an assembly that grows larger by the week — leaps on gleefully.
Nor is that segment of decriers terribly enthused by Boone’s ever-Pollyanna attitude, even in the face of a loss that’s going to sting for a few days.
“We’re in it, man!” Boone said with a cheerful smile when asked to assess what is by all measures a disappointing first half of the season. “This is the arena! Let’s go!”
An aside: Nothing about Boone’s upbeat rose-colored observations offends me all that much. In times of trouble fans will always yearn for Billy Martin to bench everybody on the field and then kill them all in the newspapers later on. That doesn’t fly in 2023 (and, in truth, it didn’t fly in 1988 or 1985 or 1983 or 1979 and it barely flew in 1977). This is who Boone is for better or worse. A lot of fans despise that. Yankee brass enables it.
Of course, maybe an hour after Sunday’s final out that Yankee brass also opted to send a few chunks of red meat to angry, hungry masses, dismissing hitting coach Dillon Lawson. It’s the first time the Yankees have dismissed a coach in-season in almost 30 years, first time Brian Cashman ever has.
You can argue that firing is on merit. You can certainly make a case that something had to be done to shake up a team that has been limping on a treadmill for a good long while. You can also argue that Lawson is nothing more than an easy scapegoat. The next 2 ½ months will tell us.
“We’re still in position to do something special and reach all our goals,” Boone insisted, and he’s right. And the Yankees have a nice launching-pad starting Friday, with series against Colorado, Anaheim and Kansas City beckoning. But, then, the Cubs should’ve been just as user-friendly a landing spot heading into the break. And then a funny thing happened.
