THE NEW YORK TIMES SPORTSTUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019 0 N B9CALENDAR
Baseball 1:00 p.m. Chicago White Sox at Detroit (Game 1) MLB
5:00 p.m. Little League Southeast Regional,
second semifinal, teams T.B.D. ESPN
7:00 p.m. Little League Southwest Regional,
second semifinal, teams T.B.D. ESPN
7:00 p.m. Miami at Mets SNY
7:00 p.m. Yankees at Baltimore YES
8:00 p.m. Oakland at Chicago Cubs MLB
11:00 p.m. St. Louis at Los Angeles Dodgers (in progress) YES
Tennis 11:00 a.m. Rogers Cup, men and women, early rounds TENNISTV Highlights
HOME
AWAYWED
8/7SUN
8/11SAT
8/10TUE
8/6FRI
8/9MON
8/12THU
8/8This Week *Doubleheader
METSMIAMI
7 p.m.
SNYMIAMI
NOON
SNYWASHINGTON
7 p.m.
SNYWASHINGTON
7 p.m.
CH. 11WASHINGTON
1 p.m.
SNYYANKEESBALTIMORE
7 p.m.
YESBALTIMORE
7 p.m.
YESTORONTO
7 p.m.
YESTORONTO
7 p.m.
YESTORONTO
3 p.m.
YESTORONTO
1 p.m.
YESBALTIMORE*
1 p.m./7 p.m.
YES/CH. 11LIBERTYCHICAGO
8 p.m.SEATTLE
3 p.m.
NBA TVL.A.F.C.
RED BULLS 10 P.M. SUNDAY FS1HOUSTON
N.Y.C.F.C. 7 P.M. THURSDAYGIANTS (PRESEASON)
JETS 7 P.M. THURSDAY NBC, NFL NETJETS (PRESEASON)
GIANTS 7 P.M. THURSDAY NBC, NFL NETPARALEGAL
Mid-size Park Avenue law firm seeksa paralegal with experience in finance
transactions, including preparation andfiling of UCC financing statements and
filings with US Patent and Trademark
searches, supervising and managingOffice, ordering and managing lien
closings, and review and distributionof loan documents. Familiarity
with UCC required. Email Resumeto: [email protected]PROPERTY MANAGER
Established New York City Real Estate
Owner/Management company seeks
an experienced Property Manager
with proven leadership skills and
knowledge on building certifications,
local laws and construction. competi-
tive salary with full medical benefits.
Email resume at:
[email protected]PUBLIC AUCTION SALE
RE: NYC Parking Violations Bureau
Vs. Various Judgment Debtors,
Stuart Medow, CAI Auctioneer #0821057
& Kenneth Giachetta City Marshal will
sell on August 8, 2019 at 9:00AM at
Five J's Towing 2505 Bruckner Blvd.,
Bronx, N.Y.,10465
R/T/I in & to the Following Vehicles:
08CHEVY 1GNHG39K981122454Lien
17NISSAN 1N4AL3AP6HC238539Lien
05CHEVY 2CNDL73F756012688
14NISSAN 3N1AB7AP2EL696005Lien
15NISSAN 1N4AL3AP6FN342448Lien
13BMW WBAYF8C57DDE59287
04HONDA 1HGCM56684A011579
15NISSAN KNMAT2MV1FP553172Lien
03SATURN 1G8JU54F83Y537445Slvg
03HONDA JHMES96613S009166
12NISSAN 3N1AB6AP1CL614577Lien
00ACURA 19UUA5664YA040709
06FORD 1FBSS31L06HB26399
12NISSAN 1N4AA5AP1CC822664Lien
05TOYOTA 2T1BR32E45C359356Slvg
04FORD 1FAFP34344W102812
05ACURA 19UUA66275A023952Lien
17BMW 5UXWX9C50HOT15103
09JEEP 1J4GA59179L751414Lien
08HONDA 1HGCP36878A043913
05NISSAN 1N4BA41EX5C854870
09CHEVY 1GNER23DX9S161096
06FORD 1FMCU93136KD33988
16PGO RFVBFBF91G1000687
00VOLKS WVWGC21J3YW682597
16BMW WBA7F2C57GGE12322
16TOYOTA 4T1BF1FKXGU591264Lien
03JEEP 1J4GW48S03C533554
07SATURN 1G8AJ55F47Z189635Slvg
00TRAILER 13ZHD1429Y1002144
15FORD 3FADP4BJ0FM147893
01CHRYLS 2C4GP54L31R326829Slvg
04NISSAN 1N4BA41E94C823804Lien
08JEEP 1J8FF28W68D547042Slvg
02FORD 1FTNX21L52EC68831
04NISSAN 3N1CB51D14L457935
CASHONLY Inspect ›Hr. Prior to Sale
K. Giachetta, City Marshal
Badge #80 Tel: 718-351-4515557476Help Wanted 2600MARSHAL /
SHERIFF
SALES
(3650)BASEBALL
ago and be like, the numbers are
close, but there’s a different feel-
ing with it, to an extent, with the
baseballs.”
The normally measured Tanaka
offered a pointed response when
asked about his feelings on the
current ball.
“If you changed the ball, then
just say you changed it,” he said.
“That would make everybody feel
better, in a sense.”
Then his focus turned inward.
“The frustration for me is that I’m
not being able to adjust well
enough to the ball,” he said. “So it’s
toward me right now, and it
started at the beginning of the
season. You want the ball to do a
certain thing, but you’re not able
to really make good enough ad-
justments to do that.”But change is hard. For two
months, the Yankees’ pitching
coach, Larry Rothschild, has
talked with Tanaka about altering
the grip on his splitter.
“We’ve just got to get comfort-
able with it,” Rothschild said.
Tanaka said he had tried
tweaks, but they have been minor.
Against the Arizona Diamond-
backs on Wednesday, he used a
drastically new grip for the first
time, setting his index and middle
fingers across the seams instead
of along them.
He threw 27 splitters and
matched a season high by induc-
ing six whiffs, according to
BrooksBaseball. He allowed just
two runs in four innings, baby
steps for him and for a sputtering
Yankees rotation that needed to
improve from within since no ad-
ditions were made at the July 31
trade deadline.
“I had to tinker a little bit here
and there during the ballgame as
well,” Tanaka said of the new split-
ter. “But I feel like it’s heading in
the right direction.”
Zack Britton, the Yankees relief
pitcher who uses a seam to throw
a mid-90s sinking fastball, said he
had heard from other pitchers
who had struggled to adjust to the
balls and tweaked their grips.
“Over the years, I’ve felt like I’d
had to do something a little differ-
ent to make the ball move as much
as maybe it did like four years
ago,” Britton said. “There’s been
some pitches I throw and I rip one
off, and I’ll go look at the data and
then look at that pitch three years“It’s not giving you the vertical
drop,” he said.
Tanaka’s splitter dips less
downward and more sideways
this year compared with previous
seasons, according to Brooks-
Baseball, a pitching analytics site.
“It looks more like a two-
seamer,” Tanaka said, referring to
an entirely different pitch.
The result: Before Monday’s
game, opponents were hitting .292
against Tanaka’s splitter, a career
high. They hit .191 against his fa-
vorite pitch in 2017 and .220 in- Of the 21 home runs Tanaka
had allowed this season before
Monday, eight came off splitters,
more than off any of his other
pitches.
He managed to earn an All-Star
spot, but his performances since
the break have slipped, and his
confidence in the splitter has
clearly wavered, too. In his July 25
start in Boston, Tanaka surren-
dered a career-high 12 runs in
three and one-third innings. He
threw only four splitters, match-
ing a career low, and the Red Sox
whiffed at none of them.
Tanaka, a right-hander, has re-
lied more on his four-seam fastball
and his slider, which has been his
best pitch this season and does not
require him to rely on the seams.
“We need to adjust to the ball,”
Tanaka said. “That’s what we’re
given to play, and you’ve got to
find your way to get accustomed
to the ball right now and be effec-
tive enough to get outs.”
Pitchers Are Suddenly Losing Their Grip
From First Sports PageEvery day is fraught with
worry for the Yankees. They
made no trades at last week’s
deadline. Their rotation is ordi-
nary, their bullpen exhausted,
their lineup crum-
bling. When Gio
Urshela fouled a ball
off his right thigh in
the sixth inning
Sunday night, the
most predictable
thing happened a few moments
later: a foul off his left shin, of
course.
“I was going up and down the
dugout saying, ‘He’s going to hit
a home run right here, it’s just
bound to happen,’ ” Aaron Judge
said. “The whole crowd was
chanting his name. But this
whole team’s tough. We know
what we’ve been through.”
Urshela did not hit a home run,
alas — he bounced to the pitcher
— but by then he had already
gone deep off David Price in a
7-4 Yankees victory that sealed a
four-game sweep of the Boston
Red Sox. At 73-39, the Yankees
have the American League’s best
record. They opened a stretch of
11 games against the lowly Ori-
oles and Blue Jays with a 9-6 win
on Monday in Baltimore.
“A little swollen,” said Urshela,
whose legs were heavily band-
aged after the game, “but I think
I’m good.”
These would not be the Yan-
kees, though, without some kind
of troubling news: The All-Star
infielder Gleyber Torres had a
core muscle issue, Manager
Aaron Boone said after the game,
and was taken to a hospital for
tests.
Torres turned out to be fine
and was back in the lineup on
Monday — he went 0 for 5 — but
the Yankees have already sent
Luke Voit (sports hernia), Edwin
Encarnacion (broken right wrist)
and Aaron Hicks (right flexor
strain) to the injured list in the
past week. They have 16 players
on the major league injured list,
the most in the game.
“It’s been a crazy year in that
way, with the amount of things
that have happened to guys
physically,” Boone said. “But it’s
also been a real rallying cry for
us. It’s not just brought a level of
physical toughness to the room,
but it’s forced guys to be men-
tally tough as well. It’s part of the
hunger that exists with those
guys, because they have the
mind-set of: Nothing’s going to
get in our way and nothing’s
going to stop us.”
The Yankees would surely
welcome Encarnacion, Hicks,
Voit and the other injured start-
ers, Giancarlo Stanton and Gary
Sanchez, back to the offense.
They would love to add Luis
Severino and Dellin Betances,
who have been hurt all season, to
the pitching staff. Some combina-
tion of that group will return
down the stretch.
But the Yankees expect suc-cess either way — and while
every team likes to say that,
Boone’s team lives up to it. The
Red Sox have their health, but a
middling record (60-55). The
Yankees are chronically injured
but soaring.
In the clubhouse after Sun-
day’s win, the Yankees played
“More Than a Feeling” — by
Boston, naturally — and got a
pep talk from the winning
pitcher, J. A. Happ, the players’
pick for star of the game.
“He won the belt tonight, for
what a performance he did
against a really good offense,”
Judge said. “Anytime Jay speaks,
he controls a room. He’s a vet-
eran, he’s been around the game
for a long time, done a lot ofgreat things in this game. ‘Keep
moving forward,’ that was his
biggest message, just keep mov-
ing forward no matter what.”
Happ, 36, blanked the Red Sox
for a while on Sunday before
giving up four runs in the fifth
and sixth. Boston knocked him
out early in the playoff opener at
Fenway Park last October, but
the Red Sox are sinking fast now.
“A sweep is hard against any
team, especially a four-game
sweep and especially against
these guys,” Happ said. “Anytime
you can put a little distance from
a team in your division, it’s
huge.”
After humbling Chris Sale
twice in a week, the Yankees
leveled Price this time. Thoughhe buried his big-game demons
with a sterling World Series last
fall, Price is 1-7 with a 9.61
earned run average for Boston at
Yankee Stadium. The fans dialed
up a classic for him after Judge’s
homer in the first: “Who’s your
daddy?,” the old Pedro Martinez
salute.
The Red Sox are five and a half
games out of a wild-card spot
and 14½ behind the Yankees in
the East, with Tampa Bay in
between. The Red Sox can hit,
but their pitching has abandoned
them. Their five starters have a
combined E.R.A. of 4.80, and
only a true die-hard could name
more than two Red Sox relievers.
Of course, the Yankees’ pitch-
ers looked just as vulnerable atFenway at the end of July, when
the Red Sox flattened them for 38
runs in the first three games. The
Minnesota Twins and the Hous-
ton Astros, both leading their
divisions, also have slugging
contact hitters and present simi-
lar problems.
The Astros added two starting
pitchers, Zack Greinke and Aar-
on Sanchez, at the deadline, plus
a reliever and a catcher. Sanchez
was 3-14 for Toronto but fired the
first six innings of a combined
no-hitter in his Houston debut on
Saturday.
The Yankees chose not to
strengthen their pitching at the
deadline, passing up every possi-
ble deal that could have helped
the major league team. The
prices were too steep, said Gen-
eral Manager Brian Cashman,
who deserves the benefit of the
doubt. Without the depth Cash-
man and his staff have assem-
bled since last summer, this
season would be a fiasco.
But you have to wonder why
outfielder Clint Frazier remains
in the organization. He was
passed over again for a promo-
tion when the Yankees placed
Hicks on the injured list Sunday,
and Boone said the Yankees did
not even consider him. Frazier
posted a cryptic but sad-looking
photo on Instagram on Sunday
night — he is hanging his head
under a red hoodie, with a
“Scranton Life” sign lit up in the
background — but he can hit and
should be on a major league
roster. If the Yankees truly have
no use for Frazier, they should
have dealt him, if only to improve
around the margins.
Then again, the biggest lesson
from this season is that, improba-
bly, the Yankees really do have
the answers within. Whenever
one sturdy piece falls, another
sprouts in its place.
The questions the Yankees
absorb every day are real, and in
October they might struggle to
overcome all the issues. But for
now the evidence keeps mount-
ing, right there in the won-loss
record: With this team, in this
season, the obstacles have not
mattered.In East, Yanks Have a Swollen Lead to Match Their Limbs
Gio Urshela, who fouled a ball off each leg during Sunday’s win, said he would be fine. “This whole team’s tough,” Aaron Judge said.ADAM HUNGER/ASSOCIATED PRESSTYLER
KEPNER
ON
BASEBALLJ. D. Davis, Michael Conforto
and Pete Alonso homered in an
electric seventh-inning rally, lift-
ing the Mets over the visiting Mi-
ami Marlins, 5-4, on Monday night
for a double-
header sweep
that moved
them above
.500 for the first
time since
early May.
The Mets
won the opener
by 6-2 as Jeff
McNeil wel-
comed Robert Dugger to the ma-
jor leagues with a home run on his
first pitch, Amed Rosario broke a
1-1 tie with a third-inning homer
and Jacob deGrom gave himself a
three-run cushion with a two-run
single.
The Mets (57-56) had not been
above .500 since they were 16-15
before play on May 3. They
dropped to 40-51 after losing their
first game of second half but are
17-5 since, winning 11 of their last
- The Mets trailed by eight
games for the second National
League wild-card spot before play
on July 25 but started the double-
header just three games back.
“We know we’re far from our
goal,” Mets Manager Mickey Call-
away said. “We have to continue
to climb and climb and climb, and
scratch and claw.”
Also on Monday, Mets second
baseman Robinson Cano went
back on the injured list, this time
with a torn left hamstring. He hurt
himself while rounding first base
during a game at Pittsburgh on
Sunday. The team said an exam
had determined that surgery was
not necessary but did not give a
timetable for Cano’s return.
In his first season with the Mets
after being acquired from Seattle,
the 36-year-old Cano was limited
to one game between May 22 and
June 16 because of a strained left
quadriceps. He is hitting .252 with
10 homers and 32 R.B.I., including
nine hits in his last 15 at-bats.
Curtis Granderson gave Miami
a 4-2 lead against his former team
in the nightcap with a tiebreaking,
two-run double in the fifth against
Robert Gsellman.
Davis homered off Jeff Brigham
(1-1) leading off the seventh, and
Conforto hit a 440-foot drive with
two outs that went over the sec-
ond deck seats in the right-field
second deck, just inside the foul
pole. Alonso followed with a low
laser shot just inside the left-field
pole for his 35th homer, his first
since July 26, giving the Metsthree home runs in an inning for
the first time in exactly two years.Jeurys Familia (3-1) pitched a
hitless inning, and with the crowd
of 29,645 roaring, Seth Lugo got
six outs for his second save this
season and the fifth of his career.
Conforto hit a two-run single in
the first.
Dugger (0-1), brought up de-
spite a 9.34 earned run average in
seven starts at Class AAA, gave
up six runs, five hits and four
walks in five innings, striking out
three, hitting two batters and
throwing a wild pitch.
Dugger, a 24-year-old right-
hander, became the first starting
pitcher to give up a home run on
the first pitch of his debut since
the Yankees’ Derek Jeter — the
Marlins’ current chief executive
— went deep off the California An-
gels’ Jason Dickson as a rookie on
Aug. 21, 1996, according to the Eli-
as Sports Bureau.Michael Conforto, right, after tying the second game with a solo home run in the seventh inning. In
the very next at-bat, Pete Alonso, left, put the Mets ahead with a solo home run of his own.
ANDY MARLIN/USA TODAY SPORTS, VIA REUTERSDoubleheader Wins Lift Mets Above .500
By The Associated PressRobinson Cano is back on the injured list with a torn hamstring.
He hurt himself in a game at Pittsburgh on Sunday, above.GENE J. PUSKAR/ASSOCIATED PRESSMETS 6
MARLINS 2
Game 1
METS 5
MARLINS 4
Game 2