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The Yankees look to the future

With the seventh game of the American League Championship Series scoreless and one out in the bottom of the second inning on Saturday, Houston first baseman Yuli Gurriel hit a fly ball to right field that appeared to be heading over the fence for a home run.

That is, until Aaron Judge, the Yankees’ fielder, leaped and extended his gloved hand over the fence to snare the ball and maintain the tie.

The catch was the second by Judge that preserved the postseason for New York.  In the third game of the AL Division Series, with Cleveland leading two games to none, Judge robbed Francisco Lindor of a likely home run in the sixth inning of a scoreless game that the Yankees won 1-0.

The skill that Judge shows on defense may not earn him the fandom that comes with hitting 52 home runs during the season – his first in the majors – or four in the postseason. But they underscore that Judge brings to the outfield the powers he shows at the plate.

Judge, 25, stands six feet seven and weights 282 pounds. Together with Greg Bird, a first baseman in his second season with the Yankees, and catcher Gary Sanchez, the runner-up for the Rookie of the Year Award last season, he forms a trio that earned the Yankees the moniker Baby Bombers.

Though youth alone could not propel the Yankees past Houston and into the World Series, the team, which battled from a wild card to Game 7 of the ALCS, exceeded expectations.

Judge likely will be the American League’s Rookie of the Year. He also could be named the league’s most valuable player. Or at least runner-up. Either way, the rookie made the Yankees a delight to follow this season.

In the locker room after Saturday’s game, Judge looked to the future. “We have a lot of young guys on this team,” he told reporters. “Getting as far as we did is going to be beneficial down the road for us, getting the taste and the feeling of this. We’re all excited for next year and what it holds for us.”

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For the Yankees, it’s win or stay home

The Yankees and Indians are set to square off in the Bronx on Sunday night for the third game of the AL Division Series in a matchup that has the potential to end the Bombers’ season.

On the mound for the Cleveland will be Carlos Carrasco, a 30-year-old right-hander who yielded six hits to the Yankees when the teams met in Cleveland on Aug. 6.

The Yankees will answer with Masahiro Tanaka, 28, a right-hander who had 13 wins in the regular season and no appearances against the Tribe.

Here are a few of the story lines that we’ll be following:

How the Yankees’ bullpen might perform

Yankees’ relievers struck out nearly one of every three batters they faced during the regular season, a performance that led the majors. The bullpen posted an ERA that was 24 percent below the league average.

Still, the Yankees on Friday night failed to stop Cleveland from scoring nine runs after starting pitcher CC Sabathia left the bullpen a five-run lead. The Indians tied the game on a solo home run by Jay Bruce off David Robertson, who had not yielded a home run since July 29.

The performance by Yankees’ relievers contrasted with the team’s relief pitching on Tuesday, when the bullpen got 29 outs that included 13 strikeouts on the way to an 8-4 win over the Twins.

How will Joe Girardi handle reviews of replays?

In the bottom of the sixth inning on Friday, home plate umpire Dan Iassonga awarded Indians batter Lonnie Chisenhall first base after ruling that a pitch from Chad Green brushed Chisenhall’s hand.

Replay showed the pitch should have been ruled an out – the ball glanced off Chisenhall’s bat and was caught by Sanchez – to end the inning. But Yankees’ Manager Joe Girardi failed to challenge the call. The next batter, Francisco Lindor, hit a grand slam that narrowed the Yankees’ lead to one.

Following the game, Girardi told reporters he did not request review of the replay because he hesitated to hold up play and possibly disrupt Green’s rhythm.

But on Saturday, after being flayed by the news media, the skipper apparently reconsidered. “I screwed up,” Girardi told reporters. “In hindsight, yeah. I wish I would have challenged it.”

Writing in the Times, Billy Witz called the mea culpa “a startling admission from a manager who takes great pride in being fastidiously prepared and always in search of an edge.”

Will Carrasco be able to silence the Yankees’ bats?

The silver lining for the Yankees: They’ve already faced Trevor Bauer and Corey Kluber.

A reunion with Carrasco holds the potential for the Yankees to build on their success against him in August, when the pitcher gave up a home run to Aaron Judge, a triple to Jacoby Ellsbury and a double to Todd Frazier.

Judge has yet to get a hit in the ALDS. Ellsbury, who did not play on Thursday, went hitless on Friday in three tries as designated hitter. Frazier notched three hits on Friday after getting none a night earlier.

A win by the Yankees would allow them to host the Indians again on Monday, with the potential to return the series to Cleveland for a fifth game in the best-of-five series.

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Gift Ngoepe makes baseball history

This spring, a South African is playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which is giving baseball fans a thrill.

On Wednesday Mpho Ngoepe, who was born and raised near Johannesburg, become became the first African-born player to appear in a major-league game. It happened at PNC Park, in the bottom of the fourth inning.

Ngoepe, whose first name means “gift” in Sotho, singled off Jon Lester in his first at-bat en route to a 6-5 victory win over the Cubs.

“To accomplish this only for me but for my country and my continent is something so special,” Ngoepe later told reporters. “There are 1.62 billion people on our continent. To be the first person out of 1.62 billion to do this is amazing.”

It was 2:49 a.m. in South Africa, where sport usually means soccer, cricket, rugby or golf. But as Gary Smith detailed in a profile of Ngoepe eight years ago for Sports Illustrated, Ngoepe grew up beside a baseball diamond.

His mother, Maureen, raised Gift and his brother, Victor, who plays for the Pirates’ Gulf Coast League team, in a seven-and-a-half-by-nine-foot room adjacent to the clubhouse of the Randburg Mets, an amateur baseball club in Johannesburg’s northwestern suburbs.

“The Mets’ shower became Gift’s scrubbing room; their baseball field, 40 yards from his bed, his front yard,” writes Smith. “The new and larger tuck shop that was added later became Gift’s kitchen, its refrigerator became his family’s.”

Ngoepe became water boy, batboy and, eventually, player for the Mets. From there he advanced to baseball’s European Academy in Italy, where the Pirates signed him.

Though Ngoepe impressed scouts with his defensive skills, he struggled at the plate until he focused on hitting right-handed after years as a switch hitter.

Ngoepe later said he almost cried as a trotted out from the dugout to take his position at second base. I told myself not to cry because I’m in the big leagues and I’m a big guy now,” Ngoepe said. “(Catcher Francisco) Cervelli hugged me and I could feel my heart beat through my chest.”

In his first big-league start, on Friday night in Miami against the Marlins, Ngoepe notched three hits in three at-bats, including a run batted in. In all, the Pirates scored 12 runs to the Marlins’ two.

Ngoepe journeyed through the minor leagues for nearly nine years before his appearance in the big leagues. His mother died four years ago. On Thursday, Deadspin asked him what he misses about South Africa.

“I just miss the people,” he said. “In South Africa, we’re more like a family. We call it a braai, but you call it a barbecue. And we just braai anytime. It’s just like, you can call a friend and be like, ‘Hey, Hannah, we’re having a braai right now, come on over.’ And you’d be coming on over at this very moment. For no current reason. We’re just having a braai.”

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New York set to ban smokeless tobacco from ballparks

It may be time for the Mets and Yankees to buy more Bazooka.

The New York City Council this week is expected to vote on a bill that would ban smokeless tobacco from sports arenas throughout the five boros. The bill, which would take effect upon being signed into law by Mayor de Blasio, would make both Citi Field and Yankee Stadium tobacco-free.

The measure also would make New York the fifth major league city to prohibit use of smokeless tobacco at ballparks. In the past year, Chicago, San Franciso, Los Angeles and Boston have enacted similar bans, which are backed by Major League Baseball, as well as by both the Yankees and Mets.

The main sponsor of the measure says distinguishing tobacco based on how players consume it reflects stereotypes about snuff that no longer hold sway.

“I couldn’t imagine us being OK as a city or society as a whole with a baseball player standing in left field smoking a cigarette while the game was going on, on national television,” Councilman Corey Johnson, a Manhattan Democrat who chair’s the council’s health committee, told the Daily News in February. “But… just because of culturally what has existed for a long time, it’s OK for professional athletes to stand in left field or in the dugout and chew wads of smokeless tobacco.”

Though the sight of players dipping has marked baseball for decades, the habit takes a toll. Two years ago, Tony Gwynn, a Hall of Fame outfielder, died from cancer of the salivary glands that he attributed to chewing tobacco.

Curt Schilling, the retired pitcher for the Red Sox, blames smokeless tobacco that he chewed for three decades for cancer of the mouth that he has battled since 2014.

“You will develop sores, you will lose your sense of taste and smell,” Schilling wrote last year in a letter to his younger self that was published in The Players’ Tribune. “You will develop lesions. You will lose your gums — they will rot. You will have problems with your teeth for the rest of your life.”

Smokeless tobacco contains nitrosamines, which form during the curing of tobacco and can cause cancer and heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As many as one-third of major leaguers use smokeless tobacco despite the dangers.

Efforts to ban smokeless tobacco have met with pushback from the players’ union, which asserts that baseball cannot ban snuff so long as it remains legal. As the union sees it, smokeless tobacco presents no danger to others from second-hand smoke.

Still, the union supports efforts to persuade players to quit the habit. “It’s definitely an addiction and it’s a tough addiction to get away from, because you’re always around it and there’s certain triggers,” an unnamed player for the Mets told the New York Post. “But I think if they apply a rule, we should abide by it.”

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Goose Gossage rails against ‘nerds’ who run baseball

At a reunion on Friday of three of the four inventors of Moneyball, Michael Lewis, who wrote the book, discussed the innovation that Bill James, who pioneered statistical analysis of baseball, brought to the game.

As James saw it, the baseball diamond “was a field of ignorance,” Lewis told an audience at MIT’s Sloan Sports conference in Boston. James, who self-published his analyses starting in 1977. (He also pioneered blogging, you might say.)

James’ work formed a foundation for the use of statistical methods by Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta after Beane became general manager of the Oakland A’s in 1997. Since then, front offices throughout sports have adopted (and refined) statistical tools to inform everything from scouting to strategy.

So it was with amusement that we greeted comments by Goose Gossage, the former Yankees pitcher, who on Thursday unleashed a diatribe against teams’ reliance on math.

“The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it,” Gossage told ESPN. “I’ll tell you what has happened, these guys played Rotisserie baseball at Harvard or wherever the f— they went and they thought they figured the f—ing game out.

“They don’t know s—,” he added.

Whatever you think of the state of baseball, Gossage has impeccable timing. This weekend marked the 10th anniversary of the MIT event, which opened with the aforementioned reunion of Lewis, James (who did not attend Harvard) and DePodesta (who did).

Grousing by the Goose aside, it helps to appreciate how baseball operated before James, now a senior adviser to the Red Sox, began studying the game. In 2002, the average draft, which lasted 50 rounds back then, produced one everyday major league player, according to DePodesta, who now serves as chief strategy officer of the Cleveland Browns.

“We aimed to be wrong 48 out of 50 times, instead of 49 out of 50,” DePodesta recalled.

Gossage, it seems, goes with his gut, though even he acknowledges there is a role for statistical analysis, according to Andrew Marchand, who covers the Yankees for ESPN.

Still, it makes you wonder what Gossage might think of “Tracking pitcher performance with instantaneous component ERA and moving averages” or “zWins, an alternative calculation of wins above replacement in baseball,” to cite two of the papers presented at the gathering in Boston.

The tirade, in which Gossage also blasted Jose Bautista as a “f—ing disgrace to the game” for flipping his bat upon hitting a home run in the playoffs last October, earned Gossage, who is at Yankees’ training camp this spring as an instructor, a talking-to from General Manager Brian Cashman and Manager Joe Girardi.

In the end the nerd had his revenge. “That’s what’s changed since 2002,” said James. “You used to have to pay attention to those guys [like Gossage]. Now you can just ignore them.”

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Mets’ Herrera hits inside-the-park home run

Dilson Herrera may give Mets fans a reason to care less that Daniel Murphy moved on.

Herrera, in his sophomore year with the club, hit an inside-the-park home run on Friday to tie an exhibition in the bottom of the ninth against the Marlins.

As it happens, Herrera is the top prospect to replace Murphy, who in January signed with the Nationals. Murphy walked and grounded into a double play in two trips to the plate on Thursday as the Nationals topped the Mets in the spring opener for both teams.

Herrera, who turned 22 on Thursday, hit .211 with three home runs in 90 at-bats for the Mets last season after starting the season with the team’s triple-A affiliate in Las Vegas. Last May, in his first game in the majors, Herrera turned a double play with a backhand flip to the shortstop.

The Mets have “a viable alternative from within the organization” to succeed Murphy at second base, general manager Sandy Alderson told reporters last fall, referring to Herrera.

Herrera’s homer on Friday bounced off the left field wall and rolled to the foul line. He churned around the bases and dove head first across home plate.

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Cespedes signing affirms Mets’ approach

The Mets got their man on their terms.

The National League champions announced late Friday they had reached a deal with Yoenis Cespedes following an offseason in which it appeared the center fielder might sign elsewhere.

The pact calls for the Mets to pay Cespedes $75 million over three years, including $27.5 million for the first year, after which he can opt out.

https://twitter.com/MLB/status/691086807333613569/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

That means Cespedes, 30, can test free agency again next winter, and that the Mets will have a center fielder who hit 35 home runs last season and batted .328 with runners on base.

On paper at least, the pact vaults the Mets back to the top of the league. In addition to Cespedes, the Mets added second baseman Neil Walker, who hit 16 home runs last season while batting .269 for the Pirates, to go with a starting rotation that may be the best in baseball.

Re-signing Cespedes also seems to validate the Mets’ approach this offseason.

Earlier this month, general manager Sandy Alderson dismissed “as populism involving Cespedes” suggestions that the Mets were not spending enough to win another championship.

Cespedes reportedly sought a deal for six or seven years that would pay him about $22 million a year, which the Mets refused. As recently as Thursday the Nationals were said to be offering him a pact worth $100 million over five years that also contained an opt-out clause.

So why did Cespedes accept the Mets’ offer? “Perhaps he also figures that if an opt-out from the Nationals would enable him to become a free agent after say, two years, he might as well just accept the shorter deal from the Mets,” Ken Rosenthal at Fox Sports speculated on Thursday.

Indeed. By the end of next season, Cespedes will be 31 years old, or three years past prime for a position player, as measured by wins above replacement (WAR), which tries to sum up a player’s contribution to his team in one statistic.

Cespedes’ WAR with the Mets last season was 2.3, compared with 4.0 a year earlier in Detroit and 3.9 in 2012, his first season in the league, with Oakland. Position players tend to peak between the ages of 26 and 28, according to an analysis last year by Alex Speier at The Boston Globe. As Speier wrote:

“Meanwhile, after turning 30, players experience a clear and steady decline in the likelihood that they’ll be productive offensive contributors, with 33-year-old players delivering 2.0 WAR with less than half the frequency of players 26-29. The picture gets progressively uglier from there.”

The deal also highlights the significance of an opt-out clause, a provision that allows a player to walk away from the pact and releases the team from its promise to pay him. Though such clauses would seem to benefit players, they benefit teams, too.

“The seasons at the end of a contract that a player would abandon are precisely the years in which he expects to be paid more than he is worth,” the Economist concluded recently in an analysis of contracts that are known to contain opt-outs.

Based on the data, Cespedes had no reason to delay his opt-out another year. Of course, the Mets know that too, which may explain why the prospect of their rival signing Cespedes failed to rattle them.

Ten days ago, when it appeared that Cespedes might sign elsewhere, Mets captain David Wright told The New York Post that he has learned to trust Alderson.

“I don’t know what the situation is with Cespedes and the Mets, but I do know that Sandy has earned the right to make these type of decisions,” Wright said.

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The Mets at midwinter

Eleven Sundays from now the Mets open their season at Kansas City. But the hot stove league has reached its midpoint.

The Mets are investing to win, according to general manager Sandy Alderson, who told reporters recently that the team is on track to boost its payroll to as high as $120 million, or about $35 million more than two years ago.

Alderson dismissed as “populism involving Cespedes” the idea that the team is failing to spend enough to compete for the pennant. That was a reference to outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, whom the team shows little interest in signing.

“We know Cespedes was instrumental in getting us to the postseason,” Alderson said. “But I think along the way we learned a few things about ourselves and the team.”

One of those lessons may be that it’s better to first see how the team comes together on field and then add players as you go. Think back to June, when the Mets were at the bottom of the league in runs scored. The Mets needed a big bat, which Cespedes, who hit .328 last season with runners on base, brought.

But in the postseason, Cespedes hit just .232 with runners on base, which may explain the Mets’ reluctance to open their wallet for the outfielder, who reportedly is seeking a seven-year deal for about $25 million a season.

A similar phenomenon may have led the Mets to part ways with second baseman Daniel Murphy, who in December signed a three-year, $37.5 million contract with the Nationals.

Despite homering five times in the Mets’ win over the Dodgers in the NL Division Series, Murphy committed an error in the eighth inning of Game 4 of the World Series that allowed the Royals to tie the game, which they later won.

The Royals also silenced Murphy’s bat. After hitting seven homers in the playoffs, Murphy hit zero in the series. The Royals varied the pitches that Murphy faced, with fewer fastballs and more pitches up and away.

So why are Mets fans freaking out? Because eight National League rivals each have shelled out more for free agents this offseason. Of course, much of the outlay was for pitching, of which the Mets have a bullpen full. (“The Mets have the best rotation in baseball now, and there really isn’t a close second,” writes ESPN’s Buster Olney.)

It didn’t help that on the same day Alderson addressed the media the Giants announced the signing of center fielder Denard Span. But the Mets don’t need Span, who led the league in hits two years ago but who missed nearly two-thirds of last season with the Nationals because of injuries, in the leadoff spot.

Nor does it help that Paul DePodesta, the analytics whiz who oversaw player development for the Mets, left the team recently to take over as chief strategy officer for the NFL Cleveland Browns. Still, one has to imagine that DePodesta influenced Alderson’s thinking about both Cespedes and Murphy.

Meanwhile, Cespedes remains a free agent. Which means the Mets may yet offer him a deal, albeit one for two years.

We learned on Monday that the Mets have scouted Kieran Powell, a cricket batsman from the West Indies. The Mets, one of 11 teams to have watched Powell work out, reportedly have encouraged him to pursue center field.

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Happy Birthday, Willie Mays

Willie Mays turned 84 years old on Wednesday.

Over a career that spanned 22 years beginning in 1951, the “Say Hey Kid” amassed a .302 batting average and 3,283 hits, the fifth most of all time in the National League and 11th overall in baseball.

Mays smacked 600 home runs, third best in the league and tied for fourth best of all time.

According to Leo Durocher, who managed the Giants during Mays’ first four years with the club:

He could do the five things you have to do to be a superstar: hit, hit with power, run, throw, and field. And he had that other magic ingredient that turns a superstar into a super superstar. He lit up the room. He was a joy to be around.

As one who lives five blocks from the site of the former Polo Grounds, I feel a connection to Mays, who played the first six seasons of his professional career there before the Giants decamped to San Francisco.

On autumn days, one can imagine the crowd spilling out of the Polo Grounds in 1951, after Bobby Thomson’s walk-off home run to win the National League pennant. Or “The Catch,” Mays’ over-the-shoulder grab in deep center field in the first game of the 1954 World Series.

Mays, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1979, also logged:

1,903 runs batted in, fourth best in the league and 10th best of all time

2,062 runs, fourth best of all time in the league and seventh best of all time

1,323 extra base hits, fourth best of all time in the league and fifth best of all time

2,992 games, fourth best of all time in the league and ninth best of all time

10,881 at bats, fourth best of all time in the league and 12th overall in baseball

6,066 total bases, third best of all time in both the league and in baseball

12,493 plate appearances, sixth best of all time in the league and 12th best of all time

11 consecutive NL Rawlings Gold Glove seasons starting in 1958

Mays also holds the record for hitting home runs in the most different innings.

On July 15, 2009, Mays accompanied President Obama aboard Air Force One for a flight to St. Louis, where the president threw the first pitch for the All-Star game.

“I’m so proud,” Mays told the president, referring to Obama’s election. “I didn’t go to bed until maybe 7:15 that morning. I just want to thank you.”

“Let me tell you, you helped us get there,” the president replied. “If it hadn’t been for folks like you and Jackie [Robinson], I’m not sure I would get elected to the White House.”