Before the New York Yankees knew they would lose Gerrit Cole to season-ending surgery on his right elbow and Luis Gil would miss extended time due to a right lat strain, Marcus Stroman declared himself to be a starting pitcher in the team’s rotation.
Stroman will make his season debut against the visiting Milwaukee Brewers on Sunday, one day after the Yankees set a franchise record with nine homers.
Stroman will pitch after Aaron Judge homered three times and drove in a career-high eight runs in Saturday’s 20-9 rout. Judge hit the Yankees’ third straight solo homer in the first inning after Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt went deep before he added a grand slam in the third inning and a two-run homer in the fourth.
“It was electric, from the stadium crowd to just the guys in the dugout locked in and fired up,” Judge said after the Yankees joined the 1987 Toronto Blue Jays and the 1999 Cincinnati Reds as the third team to hit nine homers in a game.
The Yankees are seeking a sweep of the three-game series.
Stroman, a right-hander, was 10-9 with a 4.31 ERA in the first season of a two-year contract that contains a conditional player option. He fared well early on, going 7-4 with a 3.51 ERA in 19 starts before the All-Star break.
After not appearing in any of New York’s postseason games, Stroman’s name was linked in trade rumors, especially after the Yankees signed Max Fried.
Instead, the Yankees lost Gil for at least three months and Cole underwent Tommy John surgery.
During spring training, Stroman was 2-1 with a 4.73 ERA in five starts spanning 13 1/3 innings.
“Good, sharp crisp,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said about Stroman’s spring training. “I feel like especially his last couple of starts (he) started to get the movement quality, especially on the sinker that he wanted. The cutter has been a really good pitch for him all spring. So I feel like his stuff has been crisp as we’ve gone. He’s getting the movement qualities, kind of where he wants.”
Stroman is 3-1 with a 3.10 ERA in eight career starts against the Brewers. His last appearance against them occurred in Milwaukee on April 28, when he allowed four runs in four innings in a no-decision.
After Freddy Peralta and former Yankee Nestor Cortes started the first two games of this series, Aaron Civale will begin his first full season for the Brewers on Sunday. The team will need some distance after Cortes lasted two-plus innings on Saturday.
“It’s very unfortunate,” Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy said after his team reached on five errors and totaled 13 hits. “What happened was we didn’t really have things go our way.”
Civale was 6-3 with a 3.53 ERA in 14 starts after being acquired from the Tampa Bay Rays on July 3. The right-hander allowed three earned runs or less in 12 outings. He finished the season 8-9 with a 4.36 ERA.
Civale is 1-4 with a 5.52 ERA in six career starts against the Yankees. He last faced them on April 21, when he allowed five runs on eight hits in 4 2/3 innings.
–Field Level Media
