The fastest I've ever thought one baseball team was going to lose to another: Red Sox-Yankees Wild Card Game 1

Wednesday 9/30/26

I don't much want to talk about this first Wild Card game from last night between the Red Sox and the Yankees, but this journal is so many books within the largest book ever written, and I've been thorough in writing about these baseball seasons on to their end and should see this 2026 campaign through.

Never in my life of watching, studying, and thinking about baseball have I ever considered a game to be over after one pitch until last night when Cam Schlittler poured in a 101 mph fastball and Roman Anthony took it for a strike. He then took another strike. There hasn't been anything in sports this year I've been more sure about before that game began than I was that Roman Anthony would start it with a strikeout.

I'm going to tell you something about this player. He isn't the guy. He will never be a great baseball player. I doubt he'll be an average baseball player. I have no expectation that he'll be an everyday big leaguer.

He came up again, and it was just as inevitable that he'd strike out, and so he did, apparently injuring his ever-brittle self in the process, because he left the game.

Staple this guy's ass to the bench. I don't want to see him out there again this year, which will most likely come to an end today. That he was leading off that game yesterday told me a lot about Chad Tracy, who had more to tell me later on in the game.

Payton Tolle was okay. He wasn't good enough. He wasn't on the level of their guy. He had one non-laborious inning. The others that he got through were a struggle. It was ballgame once the Yankees went up 1-0 in the second.

Tolle was still the best you had, though, and despite this, with Tolle having settled in, and a low pitch count, Tracy lifted him for the potbellied Erik Miller in the fifth, an inning that it seemed Tolle would be able to get through successfully.

Why this push to make Tolle the Game 1 starter if you're not letting him get through five with a pitch count in the 80s and having allowed but a single run?

Miller hasn't been good in, what, three weeks? He's pitched terribly. Why is this guy in the shape he's in? Why does he look like he's out of breath just standing there? Look at that physique. Is that professional?

Miller promptly served up a homer, which wasn't surprising in the slightest. Chad Tracy couldn't possibly have been surprised. So if you couldn't have been surprised, then what were you doing?

What was going on in Chad Tracy's brain?

I'll tell you: nothing. There is little to no thinking now. There is little true baseball, because instead, we have analytics ball. A chart says you do this, you do it. Like AI-ruled pod people.

Chad Tracy got his lunch eaten last night. He resembled a minor league manager. Didn't know what he was doing. The moment was too big for him. He had no feel for nor control of that game. He made Aaron Boone look like Connie Mack.

(Stray observation: the NBC booth was also horrible. Three annoying guys who wouldn't shut up. Constant yapping. Yap yap yap yap yap. We can't just have a game. The game can't breathe. Can't have any of the sounds of the game. It's like our society now, where every last interstice in which one might think, observe, enjoy, be, has to be filled in with noise and more noise. This isn't the game for noise. Unless you want to try and wreck it, or the watching of it in this case.)

Schlittler was less dominant as he went along, but it didn't matter. You could have given all these Red Sox batters tennis rackets in the Jarren Duran sense, and they weren't hitting him. His mechanics were off at times, he was misfiring, but you have a weak line-up for starters, and then you had a team that wasn't ready. (Speaking of Duran: his walk against Schlittler was like this moment of triumph for the Sox, relatively speaking. That's how bad it was.)

The Red Sox futzed about in September. They were locked in, basically, to a playoff seeding, and they kicked back. Willson Contreras and Cedannae Rafaela aren't prepared. You can't just sit out the games, "rest," and then show up for this kind of game and expect to do well. You'll fail. It's like the student who has two weeks to write the paper and then waits until late the night before it's due to start it.

In the end, the Sox were obliterated 9-0. Aaron Boone kept Schlittler in there for six and a third, which doesn't sound like much, but these days, people treat throwing 110 pitches like you've flown to the moon by flapping your arms and returned to earth in the time since the umpire first yelled, "Play ball!" I thought he was maybe 85% of his regular self. They can't hit him. He has your number in the classic sense of the phrase.

Sox batters let his most hittable pitches go right past them time and again. Taking that fastball down the middle. I hate the approach, or lack of an approach. They just really struck me as an ill-prepared team without a plan.

And while I like Tolle, maybe you should be a bit more serious. The "good time guy" thing goes too far. He gets out-pitched, then he's lifted not having made it through five, and he's having yucks and doing jokes in the dugout. That isn't professional. That's happy to be here. Happy to be here gets you sent home. He couldn't put batters away. The strikeout stuff wasn't there.

I don't see them winning today. I'm not sure they'll even score a run.

There are quite a few problems big problems at play. Organizational problems. Owner problems. This franchise is content making the Wild Card round and heading home before October hits. Sure, they'd rather get the gate and the concessions of a game or two or three at Fenway, but they're okay with this. It could very well be their preferred spot. Their happy place.

But I can't stress this enough: move the hell on from Roman Anthony. This is a losing player. The faster he's gone, the better. You won't win with him.

It's not just his lack of ability. His absence of any power. That he's this practically unsurpassable strikeout machine.

It's the energy, the attitude, the whole package. The entitlement. The bitchiness. You'll learn all you need to know--namely, that he isn't the person for the job, which I'm strongly suspecting anyway, not that any of these managers now are much more than corporate mouthpieces/puppets/dugout reps anyway, which makes them all the same--if Chad Tracy has him in the line-up tonight, never mind the leadoff spot.

That first pitch set a tone for the entire evening, the series. I knew he was going to stand there and take it, like he was so savvy, this worker of the count, which is what dumb fans think he is. He plays a part. He's not some strike zone master. It was so Schlittler, and so Roman Anthony, and so Red Sox.

I hope I'm wrong and the Sox come back and blast the Yankees today and send them to the golf course tomorrow, but that one pitch told me a lot about all that I think I need to know so far as this series goes. How could Anthony be your leadoff hitter after what you saw from him in his time back?

And in the spirit of the first TV ad of the night having been one for sports betting, because this is idiot, low class America, with 800 Liberty Mutual commercials to follow, I'll bet (figuratively) that if they don't play Anthony tonight they'll cover for him, saying he "tweaked" something, like there's no way it could be performance-based.