BRONX, NY — For as much as Devin Williams tried to soak in the occasion, Opening Day felt off to him. brav
The new Yankees closer, who was acquired via trade from the Milwaukee Brewers over the winter, looked across the infield and up the third-base line during pregame introductory ceremonies only to see his old team looking back at him.
“It was different,” Williams, who spent the first six years of his career with the Brewers, admitted. “Like, when we do the opening ceremonies and looking across and seeing all the faces that I’m familiar with being on the other side, it was kind of weird for me.”
The oddities didn’t stop there. Holding a 4-1 lead going into the top of the ninth, the Yankees called on the 30-year-old right-hander to close out his old mates, only for his entrance from the bullpen to be interrupted by an umpire’s review of a caught-stealing that ended the bottom of the eighth.
“It was a little weird. I made it all the way to the mound and then [the umpire] was like ‘Hold on, they’re doing a review’ and I was like ‘Damn, they let me get all the way out here.'”
When asked if he had to jog back to the bullpen if the call was overturned (it was not), Williams speculated “I guess I would have had to.”
His actual appearance was just as uncertain. He gave up a single to Joey Ortiz, a double to Isaac Collins, and a walk to Jake Bauers to load the bases with no outs in the ninth. Out came pitching coach Matt Blake and catcher Austin Wells to give the struggling closer a breather.
“[I told him to] just keep being you and filling it up,” Wells said. “He’s done it for a while now. He’s calm, cool, and collected.”
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He got Brice Turang to hit a sacrifice fly for the first out, though it cut the Yankees’ lead to 4-2 and brought the go-ahead run to the plate.
“I didn’t think my command was the best today, but they also had a really good plan against me,” Williams said. “There’s no one that knows me better than that team over there, so they really made me work for this one.”
Even with the extra work — he threw 36 pitches in the frame — he kept his laid-back demeanor — “I don’t know, I think it’s just kind of my personality,” he said — and bore down.
He got Jackson Chourio swinging, the young Brewers outfielder’s fifth of the afternoon, with his patented “Airbender” changeup for the second out. He closed things out by getting Christian Yelich to whiff on a four-seamer up in the zone.
“I love that he didn’t break,” manager Aaron Boone said. “He ends up getting backed into a corner there, and having Chourio and Yelich barreling down at you with the game in the balance and not a lot of margin for error there, and he just kept making pitches.”
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