The Yankees and Mets know plenty about great closers, even though the Yankees know a lot more, because they had Mariano Rivera, the best who ever lived. And it was just a few years ago that Edwin Diaz looked like the best the Mets ever had and the best in baseball that 2022 season, when the only thing louder than the blare of the trumpets was the sound of another fastball being buried into his catcher’s mitt.
So not only do our two baseball teams know closers, they know how mightily they matter, especially if you have big ideas — and maybe the biggest ideas — about the month of October.
We are a long way from there, obviously, not even a month into the regular season. But it was hard not to notice the other day that on a brutally cold April afternoon, in both the big, bad city and in Detroit, our two closers produced a couple of pretty awful 9th innings:
Devin Williams pitched two-thirds of an inning against the Tigers, gave up two hits, three earned runs, walked two. And got himself good and pulled from a game the Yankees did finally end up winning 4-3 after coming into the bottom of the 9th leading 4-0.
At that point, Williams’ small-sample earned run average for the season was a big, fat 12.00.
And at Citi Field? Diaz was brought into the top of the 9th and asked to keep a 2-0 Marlins lead right there. Instead he pitched the same two-thirds of an inning that Williams pitched in Detroit, gave up the same two hits and three earned runs and walked two himself. A 2-0 game for Miami turned into 5-0, just like that, before Diaz got himself pulled.
Two elite closers looking anything but on Wednesday afternoon, pitching the same lousy 9th.
“I was trying to hold [the ball] the hardest I could,” Diaz would tell the media about his performance on this 40-degree day.
In Detroit, Williams, who the Yankees landed in an offseason trade with the Brewers, said this:
“I’m still trying to figure stuff out.”
It’s still early, of course (it’s a rule that you have to point that out when discussing baseball in April). Still: By the time Aaron Boone was taking the ball back from him, Williams had pitched the way he had on Opening Day when he did everything except gift-wrap a game for his old team, the Brewers, after being handed a lead in that one.
Maybe when he talks about figuring stuff out he isn’t so much talking about pitching as trying to find his footing early in New York, with the big spotlight on him, on the great stage of the city and the Stadium and the New York Yankees.
For sure and for certain, not even 20 games have been played. Williams has the talent to pitch as brilliantly for the Yankees as he did for the Brewers. And Diaz, despite the drop in velocity we are seeing from him lately, will get his chance when the weather warms up (if it ever does) to show that he can still bring the kind of heat he brought at his best.
When his manager, Carlos Mendoza, was asked about the numbers he and everybody else are seeing from the radar gun, Mendoza said, “No concern at all.”
But closer is an essential job on teams believing they are good enough to go deep into the postseason and maybe even all the way. We all know that both the Mets and Yankees have concerns about starting pitching, the Yankees in particular without Gerrit Cole and with Luis Gil still hurt. Neither team wants to have to worry about the 9th inning, not after the way the two owners in town have spent on baseball players, and the bet they’ve placed on those players and themselves.
Williams had the chance to close the deal against the Mets in that Brewers-Mets wild card series last October, did he ever. The Brewers were a 9th inning away from advancing to the next round, but then Pete Alonso hit one over the right field wall and Williams had thrown the kind of season-ending pitch that Aroldis Chapman once threw for the Yankees.
Diaz did better for the Mets last October, around a theme park performance against the Phillies in the second round, when he gave up three runs in two appearances and had a bloated ERA of his own. But the Brewers didn’t score against him and neither did the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, where Diaz showed up with the same fastball we’d seen from him in 2022, and before he tore up his knee celebrating a save in the World Baseball Classic. Mets fans remember that the ’22 season was the one in which he struck out 118 batters in 62 innings.
This week he was asked to throw fastballs past hitters in conditions that must have felt to the players like the dead of winter, the same conditions in which Williams pitched in at Comerica Park. But it is a fact that Edwin Diaz is 31 now, and has been doing this sort of work for a long time in both Seattle and in New York. Say it again: Still early. Maybe he will start looking like the old Diaz before the Mets leave West Sacramento, where he nearly blew a save on Friday night.
And maybe Williams will do the same against the Giants at the Stadium; look like the guy the Yankees thought they were getting, with all that arm and all that mystery to his pitches.
By the end of last year, the Yankees closer had become Luke Weaver, a 31-year-old pitching for his sixth big league team. Without question, Weaver pitched admirably for the Yankees after Clay Holmes lost the job as Yankee closer. But when the season was over, Brian Cashman went after Williams, who came back from stress fractures in his back to record 14 saves in 22 appearances for the Brewers.
Williams is 30 years old now, a year younger than Diaz. But we’re talking about a job that can age more than your arm, unless your name is Rivera. You want to know how important Mo Rivera was to the Yankees? Any time he didn’t do the job in October, the Yankees lost, in 1997 to the Indians, in 2001 in that nightmare bottom of the 9th against the Diamondbacks, after he couldn’t close out Game 4 against the Red Sox in ’04. The rest of the time he was a gold standard for the ages.
Neither the Yankees nor the Mets are looking for the great Rivera. Just enough good 9th innings this season, ones that are supposed to be the opposite of what they gave us this week.
EXPECTING A FIELDS-DAY FOR JETS, STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN AT AUGUSTA & WHO BUILT THESE RANGERS …
If you are a Jets fan, there was nothing not to like about the way Justin Fields introduced himself to you the other day.
Put me down as someone who thinks the young man is going to win more games than he loses next season.
In major championship golf, you still write off players after the first round at your own peril.
It was 40 years ago that Curtis Strange — still great working golf for ESPN at the Masters — shot 80 in the first round at Augusta National.
By the back nine on Sunday, he had the lead before he hit it in the water on both Nos. 13 and 15.
It was too late for Curtis to recover from that.
But plenty of time for Rory McIlroy even after the way he rinsed his ball at No. 15 late Friday afternoon.
By the way?
Sunday at the Masters is still the closest thing golf has to Super Sunday, the feeling that the final round is like a town meeting of the sport.
And when this year’s leaders get to the back nine, it will be worth remembering all over again the words of the great Dan Jenkins, who always said there was an Atlantic Ocean of water between the 10th tee and a green jacket.
I want the Angels to be a real team again, because Mike Trout deserves to play on one of those.
If Ja Morant’s response to being fined $75,000 for making a shooting motion after making a shot is mimicking launching a grenade instead, it’s time for Adam Silver to suspend him again.
You keep moving the clown line for Morant, and he somehow keeps finding new ways to cross it.
It was pretty heartwarming the other day to see the smiley-face emoji everybody put on the Knicks’ overtime loss to the Celtics.
It turns out there actually are medals for trying.
Who knew?
Somebody still has to explain something to me, now that it looks as if the coach of the Rangers is going to take the fall for the way dreary season the Rangers have had to here:
Did this team assemble itself?
I don’t know if you were watching the first round of the Masters on Thursday, but if you did you were probably surprised to see Sergio Garcia dressed like a Kansas City Chiefs mascot.
I’m probably not as anxious about where Deion’s kid might go in the draft as I ought to be.
Watching the finals of men’s college basketball last Monday night, I was wondering how this Florida team would match up against Billy Donovan’s two championship teams.
Linda McMahon, our ball-of-fire Secretary of Education, referred to AI the other day as “A1.”
But come on:
Who among us hasn’t confused artificial intelligence with steak sauce?
Sometimes I think Joe Flacco and I graduated from college the same year.
Any NBA coaches get fired yet today?
Tariffs look like the best economic plan since the Browns signed Deshaun Watson.
