When a guy hasn’t pitched in 18 days, you usually try to find them a relatively soft return.
That certainly would’ve been the ideal scenario for Yankees manager Aaron Boone on Friday night, but the game had other plans.
With things knotted up at three apiece, the skipper turned to right-hander Luke Weaver to make his highly-anticipated return from a two-week stint on the injured list, and things didn’t quite go as planned.
Baltimore’s offense welcomed the All-Star closer back rudely, as third baseman Ramon Urias cracked a go-ahead solo homer over a leaping Aaron Judge into the short porch leading off the top of the eighth.
“It was a good at-bat,” Weaver said postgame. “I threw a solid pitch, he just put a pretty good swing on it and I was pretty devastated to see it go over — obviously not the start that I was looking forward to, felt like I let the team down in that moment.”
The Orioles would knock him around a bit more from there — picking up two more hard-hit singles before ultimately chasing him from the game with just two outs recorded.
Sidearming left-hander Tim Hill entered and allowed another run to score on a Gunnar Henderson single, but was able to avoid further damage thanks to some shoddy base running.
Still, the damage was done and the Yanks ended up dropping another frustrating one.
“The whole outing was just about two strikes,” Weaver said. “It was just about trying to put them away and it’s hard sometimes to find that just line where that swing-and-miss is and they’re putting together good at-bats and having good takes.
“When you’re not quite where you want to be it gets hard, you feel like you’re pitching defensive and it gets hard to get that swing-and-miss from there.”
While the results weren’t there, the most important thing was that the 31-year-old felt healthy.
Weaver is expected to jump back into the mix in the later innings alongside Devin Williams — who stepped up tremendously with four saves and a 1.35 ERA in his absence.
“The only thing that hurts is my head and my heart,” Weaver said following the loss. “At the end of the day my leg feels great, the velocity is there, all of my pitchers were there — I had everything I needed to be successful, it’s just a game that didn’t happen.”
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