Yankees pitchers are super erratic. Rodon is always a time bomb waiting to explode. Cole is generally consistent but has blowups from time to time. Gil is probably the wild card because he’s young and may not be able to handle late season runs.

And Gil and rodon will force the Yankees to tap into the bullpen which really lacks depth.
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I think this is the presumed pitching order. Only alternative would be if they had Ragans pitch on short rest Saturday. That would mean that Ragans/Lugo could cover 4 of the 5 starts. Not sure if that's an option, but Ragans did only throw 80 pitches on Tuesday.
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Wacha is the perfect guy for game 1 imo.

I think Judge is probably starting to feel the pressure to get to the World Series.

If Wacha can settle the Royals down early, you never know.
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Short rest starts are historically iffy as hell in the post-season.

All in the name of maybe getting an extra start for Lugo instead of Wacha? Eh, I probably wouldn't go that route. Especially when, as noted, Rodon and Gil are prone to blowups.

Ultimately if those turn into pitching duels, y'all are probably in trouble anyway.

So I'd just stick with my ordinary rest. And really, Wacha is essentially Lugo with a little less stamina and consistency anyway. Very similar pitcher.

I wonder if he might just try to be really off-speed heavy and try to steal a game pitching backwards. Sometimes in a one-off matchup you can get away with that.

Bottom line is that the Yankees need Juan Soto to be the best player in the series. Better than Judge and better than Witt. Because Soto, when he's locked in, can hit ANYTHING. He can take your best pitchers best pitch and deposit it into RF.

If he's a complementary part in this series, that's just not going to be good enough. If his fingerprints aren't all over this series, NYY could well lose it. And if they are, I just don't think the Royals have the lineup depth to overcome it.

Salvy can be a bit of a nightmare in the postseason when he faces a lot of guys with power breaking pitches. Pasquantino is a good, not great, player who's probably still knocking rust off.

The rest of the lineup is just a little mis-cast. They're all 1, maybe 2 spots further up the order than they oughta be. I mean Massey, Melendez, Garcia, Isbel, Renfroe and Velaquez isn't exactly a post-season ready group. That's a bunch of guys with a sub .700 OPS and that's gonna be tough to carry 2/3 of the offense. I guess y'all are starting DeJong and Pham now? Both guys are streaky as hell but can really bring some juice when they're hot. And can both be complete black holes when they aren't.
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Yankees haven't seen him yet this year. They only faced him once last season and he pitched well. He faced them twice in 2022 and pitched even better then.

Anything before that's probably worthless. So they don't have much experience against him, especially of late, and what little experience they do have has been largely negative.

He could get 'em. I don't think you want him going a 3rd time through the lineup but if he can give you 5 pretty clean innings, you're in nice shape.
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I saw something a few years back where Gossage was talking about this home run. If you watch the video you can see Gossage flinch when Brett hits the pitch. Gossage said the contact was so loud that he thought someone had fired a gunshot.
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