So often in his career, when it has gone wrong for Carlos Rodón, the people around him have seen it coming. First he slumps and glowers. Then he barks in frustration. He starts to miss his location. He turns his back on a coach or kicks a bat in the dugout. He starts out as among the most electric pitchers in the game; he ends frazzled, his wires snapped.
So in some ways, it was strange that on Monday, when he lasted only 3⅔ innings for the New York Yankees in a 4–2 Kansas City Royals victory that left the American League Division Series tied at one game apiece, he did not come undone.
“I thought I was fairly under control,” the 31-year-old lefty said afterward at his locker in a quiet clubhouse.
For better or for worse, on Monday, it just came down to pitching.
He had worked in the days leading up to Game 2 on channeling his emotions into fuel, knowing that the 48,034 screaming fans filling Yankee Stadium would bring him plenty of energy. Before the game, he tried to take it all in as they cheered for him.
And at first, he gave them plenty to cheer. He threw 12 pitches in the first, 10 for strikes. He stuck his tongue out, grinned and roared as he charged off the mound. He took a liner off his glove hand in the third and earned an ovation when he waved off the trainers. He overpowered the Royals through three. His velocity was up more than a mile and a half an hour on every offering.
The Yankees took a 1–0 lead in the third on a Gleyber Torres walk and singles by Austin Wells and Giancarlo Stanton. Then, perhaps, Rodón started overthinking. Up came Salvador Pérez, who has hit .462 with three home runs in 27 plate appearances against Rodón.
“The way that I got good success against him, he got a lot of strikeouts against me, too,” Pérez said before the game. “I think we’re 50/50.”
Fifty-fifty for a hitter is, of course, a Hall of Fame number. Pérez had seen one pitch in his first at bat—a fastball he popped to third base. Rodón wanted to see how he would approach this meeting. Pérez laid off a pair of sliders at his ankles. Rodón decided to throw another one. He left it across the middle of the plate.
“I wanted to be in the zone, or I wanted to be around the zone,” he says. “And, I mean, he made a great swing and crushed that ball.”
The next hitter, Yuli Gurriel, singled on a 2–2 slider low in the zone and took second on a slider that bounced off the plate. But Rodón did not fall apart. He struck out Michael Massey and got to 1–2 on Tommy Pham. Then Rodón threw a slider that didn’t slide, and Pham whacked it to right to drive in another run.
“They hit some pitches that were good, and some pitches that were not so good,” says Rodón. “That 1–2 slider should’ve been buried. I should’ve been better with that.”
Pham stole second. Here Rodón started to slump a bit in the shoulders, to slam his left hand into his glove, to squeeze the baseball as if trying to extract juice. But he took a deep breath and struck out Hunter Renfroe, then went up 1–2 against the No. 9 hitter, Garrett Hampson, who had rapped a single to center his first time up. Rodón threw two four-seamers well above the zone.
“I was probably trying to do too much with some fastballs, and they were up and sprayed out of the zone, so noncompetitive,” he muses.
But his last slider was fine, below the zone. Hampson lined it to left anyway, and because third baseman Jazz Chisholm is a natural middle infielder playing only his 47th game at the position, he was in the wrong place to cut the ball off. Pham scored; Hampson took second.
Manager Aaron Boone trudged to the mound to take the ball from Rodón, who had thrown 39 pitches in the first three innings and—somehow, gradually and then suddenly, 33 in the fourth alone. Rodón stalked off the field, shaking his head at himself.
“Everything was going pretty well,” he says. “And it was just kind of one of those things where—not that I lost the focus, but I just should have just stayed aggressive and going at ’em.”
He adds, “I feel like there’s some moments I was too fine, and I could have been more aggressive with some stuff, and I could have been better, but I’ll learn from it [when] I’m going over the game—which I have a thousand times already and I will the rest of the night.”
Perhaps it will be a relief to find that the answer, for once, is simply: Pitch better.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Carlos Rodón Must Pitch Better for Yankees After Game 2 Loss.