Aaron Judge’s home run in the eighth inning put the Yankees ahead to stay in a 4-3 win at Citi Field on Saturday night. Glayber Torres hit his 11th home run in the third inning, and Miguel Andujar tied the game with a two-run blast off Steven Matz in the sixth.
But the win wouldn’t have been possible if Domingo German didn’t settle down after allowing three runs in the first inning to a slumping Mets team. Over his last five innings, German shut out the Mets on two hits, while striking out nine.
“Really good,” Aaron Boone said when asked about German’s performance. “Didn’t buckle. Obviously ran into some trouble there in that first inning, but made the necessary adjustments and pitched really well, and kept us in the game and gave us a chance and let us eventually scratch our way back into it.”
German made five relief appearances early in the season before being moved into the rotation. In his first start, he pitched six no-hit innings against the Indians.
He had several underwhelming starts and could probably get along well with the Mets starters considering he received one or zero runs of support in three of his first five starts.
After giving up home runs to Todd Frazier and Asdrubal Cabrera, German settled down. The 25-year-old would give up no more.
“It says a lot,” Boone said. “I think he’s done a great job since he’s been here and since he’s moved into the starting rotation of kind of compartmentalizing things and handling the successes and the struggles that go with it, and really being able to turn the page.”
This was not the first time the Mets was German, having faced him in the first week of March, when he gave up two unearned runs over 2.2 innings.
“He settled in and threw a pretty good game,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said. “The kid’s got good stuff. We saw him in spring training, and he was really effective against us in spring training. He made a couple of mistakes early in the first inning, we got to him. Yeah, it would’ve been nice to keep on adding on but it seemed like he got some momentum and he started making some pretty good pitches.”
When he pitched against the Mets in March, it was a Grapefruit League game. This was a Subway Series game on national television against a desperate Mets team. And although German didn’t pick up his first career victory, he deserves some credit for the Yankees win.