Yankees have a plan to control the Angels’ running game

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The Boston Red Sox’s plan for controlling the Angels running game was to keep the Angels off the bases. That didn’t work so well – in their three-game sweep of Boston, the Angels had an on-base percentage of .348 and stole three bases in four tries.

Yankees Manager Joe Girardi is taking a different tack. He concedes that the Angels are going to get on base and then run once they get there. Girardi says he’s going to tell his pitchers not to worry about that.

“The focus when you play the Angels is not to get wrapped up in their running game, because they’re going to run,” Girardi told reporters in a conference call Tuesday. “The bottom line is that you have to keep making pitches, and when your focus is so much on the running game, you don’t make the pitches that you need to make.

“Moving forward, we’ll talk to our pitchers about that like we did the last series , and we’ll do things to try to curb their running game.”

Among those things, Girardi said, would be pitch-outs and quickening pitchers’ deliveries to the plate with a slide-step.

In the Yankees’ sweep of the Minnesota Twins in their division series match-up, the Twins stole three bases in as many tries.

-- Kevin Baxter

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