One eventful inning boosts the New York Yankees over Astros

In his first 20 pitches, Justin Verlander gives up four runs, enough for the New York Yankees to beat the Houston Astros to force a game six.

Twenty pitches into what would become a 105-pitch outing Friday night, the New York Yankees had all the runs they needed off Justin Verlander.

Good thing, too, because Justin Verlander didn’t give them anything else the entire night.

New York’s 4-1 victory sends the American League Championship Series back to Houston for a sixth game Saturday night. Five batters into the game, the New York Yankees had their four runs. Verlander and reliever Brad Peacock one-hit them the rest of the night…not that it mattered.

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Those four early runs were good enough because Yankee starter James Paxton and his bullpen buddies limited the Astros to one first-inning run. Paxton outpitched Verlander through his six-inning stint, and three relievers held the Astros to a single base hit over the final three innings.

Any analysis of the key moments of this game has to begin with the first inning…both halves of it.

Top of the first. The Astros had a chance to jump on Paxton right away. Paxton jammed George Springer, who leveraged a weak grounder that he beat out. A passed ball moved him to second, a ground out sent him to third and – after Michael Brantley walked – Paxton wild pitched Springer across.

That brought up cleanup hitter Alex Bregman with Brantley in scoring position. But nothing more happened; Bregman managed nothing more profound than an easy fly ball to left, and Paxton ended the threat by getting Yuli Gurriel to fly out to center.

Bottom of the first. In those first 20 pitches, Verlander looked amateurish. His second pitch was a 94 mph thigh-high fastball that D.J. LeMahieu ripped into the right-field seats for a game-tying home run. Aaron Judge drilled his fifth pitch, this one a gut-high 94 mph fastball, into left field. Gleyber Torres dropped his eight-pitch on the left-field foul line, Judge stopping at third. And after Giancarlo Stanton fanned, Aaron Hicks rattled the right field foul pole with Verlander’s 20th pitch, a gut-level slider also over the center of the plate.

Strictly from a pitching standpoint, the interesting thing was how Verlander recovered so quickly and so thoroughly. The average exit velocity of Yankee contact following those first five batters was 98.45 mph. From that point until he left the game at the end of the seventh, the average exit velocity off Verlander was 10 mph slower.

The first inning balls by Judge, Hicks, and LeMahieu, in that order, were the three hardest off Verlander all evening.

And so on. From the second inning on, Paxton and his successors simply hunkered down and made those four runs stand up. After Brantley died at second to end the first, Houston only once moved a runner into scoring position.  The New York Yankees had it even tougher; they managed only one baserunner – Didi Gregorius’ fourth-inning single – after Hicks’ home run. Verlander retired 10 consecutive batters between the first and fourth, and again between the fourth and seventh.

It didn’t matter because Houston batters provided their worst offensive performance of the series. Paxton walked four, but he also struck out nine. Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman ran the team K total to an even dozen by the time Chapman got Springer on an easy ground ball to end it.

Sixth inning. The Astros mounted one last scoring opportunity against Paxton, but that opportunity died on the warning track.

With two out and Carlos Correa on first base due to a base on balls, Robinson Chirinos leaned into a first-pitch Paxton slider and sent it on a 100 mph, 373-foot ride toward the seats in left. Good thing for the Yanks that those seats are 374 feet from home plate; Brett Gardner caught it with his back brushing up against the wall.

Brantley vs. Carlson. Plate umpire Mark Carlson had a largely uneventful night, Yankee and Astro batters easing his workload by taking aggressive approaches at the plate. Carlson only made 122 balls and strike calls all evening, only 35 of them being called strikes.

By comparison, the more patient Yankee and Astro hitters stared down 51 called strikes just one night earlier.

Carlson missed 10 pitches on the night, giving him a 91.8 percent accuracy rate that is marginally but not significantly below average. Six of his misses came on what could be viewed as “even-up” calls, which is  a miss that occurs when an umpire minimizes either a batter’s or pitcher’s count advantage by a poor call that levels a count

Michael Brantley went to verbal combat with Carlson twice Friday, one of them on such an “even up” call. In the fifth inning, Paxton threw two wide ones to Brantley, then missed outside again by a few inches. But in that 2-0 count situation, Carlson widened his strike zone enough to see it as a strike. Brantley eventually struck out.

The same thing occurred during George Springer’s second-inning at-bat, which in retrospect might be viewed as the Astros’ last gasp. He came up with two on and two out took a fastball high and then stared at a cutter just off the plate. But Carlson called it a strike, balancing the count and unintentionally denying Springer count leverage.

Three pitches later, Springer was out on strikes and the Astros were through, even if they didn‘t know it yet.