Tigers shut out Yankees, take 2-0 series lead

I’m not sure when the shutdown inning became a thing. There was probably one announcer who kept checking on it, and he started a somewhat silly trend. Most innings are shutdown innings because, all things being equal, the odds will always favor a team not scoring. It doesn’t make sense to pay special attention to the total of shutdown innings over a full season.

But it’s still something to note in an individual game, I suppose. And in the bottom of the seventh, Anibal Sanchez had a shutdown inning after the first Tigers run. It wasn’t that easy, either. Alex Rodriguez started the inning with a line drive! Right to Andy Dirks in left. Because, well, that’s the deal he’s made with whatever celestial being he got his talent from in the first place.

The bottom of the sixth inning was the Anibal Sanchez show. But not in the way you’d think. It was a strange show, more like Twin Peaks. When the credits rolled, it was still a scoreless game.

The inning began with a Sanchez error, putting Ichiro Suzuki on first, where he was likely to start some mayhem. Robinson Cano grounded back to Sanchez for the second out, but it wasn’t quite so simple; Sanchez made a 45-foot horseshoe toss that just clipped Cano, who wasn’t running especially hard. If Cano was running hard, does he make it?

The good news: sweet, sweet contact. The Tigers actually put the ball in play during the top of the fourth inning, including a ball that looked like it was ticketed for center field off the bat.

The bad news: Nary a runner. That ball that looked like it had a chance to go to the outfield? Shortstop Jayson Nix was hanging out just over second base before the pitch, positioned perfectly.

Four days ago, Hiroki Kuroda threw 105 pitches.

Today he’s pitching Game 2 on “short” rest, which of course is something that pitchers almost never do during the regular season, and managers generally send their guys to the mound on short rest only in October, when they’re under duress. Because the numbers aren’t encouraging.

For what feels like the fifth straight playoff game in Yankee Stadium, both starting pitchers have opened the game on fire. Not literally. That’s just stupid. But Hiroki Kuroda has been especially impressive, striking out five of the first six batters he faced, and he hasn’t allowed a runner.

Anibal Sanchez has allowed three runners -- a double, a walk, and an infield hit, but the Yankees have stranded all three. In the bottom of the second, Jayson Nix hit a la(y)ser to the left-field warning track, but it was hauled in by Andy Dirks.

It sure was nifty, though:

After Derek Jeter’s season-ending injury in Game 1, Yankees manager Joe Girardi immediately proclaimed that Jayson Nix was going to take over at shortstop. Nix is something of an unknown, though -- what kind of shortstop is he?

Well, he’s not really a shortstop. At least, he wasn’t for much of his professional career. Here are the number of games Nix has started at short over his career in the minors and majors combined over the years:

Girardi has obviously elected to keep Alex Rodriguez in the lineup, even though he’s 4 for 47 in his last 10 postseason games, and hasn’t hit a home run since last April.*

* hyperbole

Kuroda picked up a win in his lone start in the Division Series against Baltimore, giving up two runs in 8⅓ innings and striking out three. Kuroda is pitching on just three days rest.