Erik Boland: Yankees reeling after a lost weekend
Jazz Chisholm Jr. of the Yankees reacts after getting ejected in the sixth inning against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday in Boston. Credit: Getty Images/Jaiden Tripi
BOSTON — From embarrassment to euphoria to gut-punched. All in about an hour’s time.
“Obviously, a terrible weekend for us,” manager Aaron Boone said after the last-place Red Sox completed a four-game sweep of his Yankees on Sunday night at Fenway Park.
After being held hitless by Sonny Gray through 7 1⁄3 innings, the Yankees staged a ninth-inning comeback against another of their former pitchers, Aroldis Chapman, helped by the first of two throwing errors by rightfielder Wilyer Abreu, a Gold Glove winner the previous two years.
Aided by Chapman’s lack of command — as well as the Red Sox reverting to the slipshod outfit that got manager Alex Cora fired — the Yankees scored twice, helped by a terrific slide home by Anthony Volpe, to send the game to extra innings.
The Red Sox (36-46) continued their banana-peel act in the top of the 10th; combined with an RBI single by Amed Rosario and a chopper in front of the plate by Austin Wells that drove in a run, the Yankees handed over a 4-2 lead to splitter specialist Fernando Cruz in the bottom half.
But Cruz’s split was anything but special. Former Yankees farmhand Anthony Seigler’s RBI single made it 4-3. Masataka Yoshida rocked a double into the rightfield corner to put runners at second and third with none out. Tsung-Che Cheng’s sacrifice fly tied it and sent Yoshida to third, and with the Yankees utilizing a five-man infield, Jarren Duran lined an RBI single to right to win it.
“I felt like I was leaving my pitches up in the zone,” said Cruz, who entered with a 2.08 ERA and 46 strikeouts in 34 2⁄3 innings. “It has been a tough weekend [for us], especially this game.”
Boone didn’t sugarcoat the lost weekend, one the Yankees entered with a three-game lead over second-place Tampa Bay and exited one game behind the Rays.
“It’s one of those crap moments of the season, crap times of the season where you have a really rough weekend against a division rival,” Boone said. “But you gotta get over it quickly . . . The bottom line is we’ve got to get it going a little bit offensively and we just didn’t play clean enough here this weekend.”
The Yankees were 6-for-81 in a three-game span before Rosario’s one-out single in the eighth for their first hit, and they had scored two runs in their previous 25 innings. They had allowed six unearned runs on Thursday to sabotage Cam Schlittler’s outing and two more on Sunday, thanks to an error by third baseman Oswaldo Cabrera that set the stage for Caleb Durbin’s two-out, two-run single off Carlos Rodon in the fourth. The Red Sox had only one hit through 6 1⁄3 innings but led 2-0.
The Yankees were no-hit through at least four innings in three straight games.
Rosario’s single did save them the indignity of getting no-hit by Gray, who flopped during his brief time in the Bronx (2017-18) but has been a standout in each of the other locales in which he’s played. But Gray (2.69 ERA) certainly got the Yankees’ offense at the right time.
The Yankees slipped to 12-12 without captain Aaron Judge (stress fracture in rib), who isn’t close to resuming baseball activities and whose return still is very much up in the air. The general feeling is a best-case scenario for that would be mid-August or so, but no one really knows.
After an initial surge without Judge, the offense has sputtered of late. Not coincidentally, that slide coincided with slumps by two of the club’s most productive hitters during the first two-plus months of the season.
Ben Rice, after going 0-for-4 Sunday, is in a 2-for-27 skid in his last seven games and has one homer in his last nine games. Cody Bellinger, 0-for-4 Sunday, is 5-for-37 with no homers in his last 11 games. Wells continues to be a black hole in the lineup with a .157/.258/.241 slash line.
Supremely talented Jazz Chisholm Jr. continues to cost himself money on the free-agent market as he keeps backing up the industry-wide perception that he lacks maturity. Last week in Detroit, it was bringing a blow pop onto the field, a victimless crime big-picture. That wasn’t the case Sunday when he got himself ejected in the sixth after disputing a check swing.
First-base coach Dan Fiorito sprinted from his position on the field to pull Chisholm away from plate umpire Adam Hamari and Boone bolted from the dugout to do the same. Hamari gave Chisholm plenty of leash — Boone, rarely one to side with umpires, acknowledged that — but when Chisholm spiked his helmet, first-base umpire Todd Tichenor tossed him.
“You gotta try and rein it in there,” Boone said.
It still cannot be said that the Yankees (48-35) are in a full-out nosedive. Even without Judge, even with their best hitters slumping, even with a questionable back end of the bullpen (though David Bednar has been a stud over the last five weeks), they remain the class of a weak American League.
But that gap suddenly isn’t as significant as it once appeared.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
