NEW YORK — With the best pitcher in baseball facing one of the worst lineups in baseball, last night’s matchup between the Yankees’ Masahiro Tanaka and the Red Sox looked unfair.
Mike Napoli, with the support of Jon Lester’s lights-out, Tanaka-like start, turned conventional wisdom on its head, thanks to an unexpected but much welcomed high fastball that Tanaka threw to Napoli.
“What an idiot!’’ is what Fox microphones caught Napoli yelling to his teammates as he crowd-surfed into his dugout after muscling Tanaka’s poorly placed pitch over the right-field wall in the ninth inning to give the Red Sox their 2-1 winning margin.
“I was pretty surprised (to see a fastball up in the strike zone),” said Napoli, “but I was down to two strikes. I was just trying to see something up. My mind was saying ‘hang a splitter,’ but I just got something up in the zone that I could handle.”
Tanaka had already struck out Napoli twice on his most devastating pitch, his split-fingered fastball, which “looks like it’s going to be a strike and the bottom falls out of it,” said Napoli.
The surprise gift meant that in Game 81, the official halfway point to this massively disappointing season for the 37-44 defending champions, the Red Sox were able to mount an all-around gem just when they needed it the most.
A rare error from shortstop Stephen Drew led to the Yankees’ only run in the third inning but otherwise the defense was solid. A double play in the eighth inning that started from Dustin Pedroia’s knees when he stopped Derek Jeter’s hard-hit grounder and glove-flipped the ball to Drew was key. It enabled Lester (9-7) to complete eight full innings and be the worthy recipient of a victory courtesy of Napoli’s late heroics.
Lester was appreciative that the sinking two-seam fastball he threw to Jeter sank like it should have.
“I felt pretty good with that pitch pretty much all night and was able to get just a bad-enough hit (ball) to where Pedey was able to get his glove on it to Stephen,” said Lester, who spread out five hits with two walks and the one unearned run to go with six strikeouts. “It was a hell of a play by those guys to bail me out right there.
“I don’t think you can give in in that situation — eighth inning, tie ball game. You’ve got to get outs as best as you can.”
The Red Sox scored first in the third inning, when David Ross launched a home run over the left-field wall for a slim and brief 1-0 lead.
The next frame began with Drew muffing Brian Roberts’ ground ball. Lester hit the next batter and both runners advanced on a sacrifice bunt. Jeter’s groundout scored Roberts to tie the game, but from that point on both Lester and Tanaka were at their best. Lester posted five more scoreless innings, while Tanaka posted 52⁄3 spotless frames between the two home runs.
“Knowing who we were going against tonight, that was going to be needed,” said manager John Farrell of Lester’s effort. “The one thing you’ve seen over time is Jon’s maturity to stay in a moment and make key pitches with runners in scoring position.”
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