Red Sox 6, Yankees 1. And for five-plus innings, the run total was the least embarrassing part of the night.
Payton Tolle retired the first 16 Yankees batters he faced at Fenway Park. Sixteen up, sixteen down -- no hits, no walks, not even a hard-hit ball worth worrying about. When Spencer Jones finally singled to left in the sixth, it ended Tolle's perfect game bid and his no-hitter in one swing. The New York Yankees collected two more hits after that -- one in the eighth, one in the ninth. Only one of them mattered. By the time it was over, the Bombers had put together three hits, one run, and another loss in a series where they've looked nothing like the club sitting on top of the AL East. (It's almost worse when you can't really argue with it.)
When Warren Lost the Ball Game
Will Warren got touched up early, and the game was effectively over before the Yankees took their fourth turn at-bat.
Willson Contreras singled in the first to score Wilyer Abreu -- Boston up 1-0 before the Yankees had even blinked. The second inning added two more on a pair of force-out grounders, the kind of quiet, un-dramatic run-scoring that makes you feel like you're watching a game slip away in real time. Then Contreras stepped in again in the third and turned on one 418 feet over the Green Monster, his 17th home run of the season. Suddenly it was 4-0 before the game felt like it had really started.
Warren's final line: 5.2 innings, 7 hits, 5 earned runs, 3 walks, 0 strikeouts, 1 homer.
Zero strikeouts. He didn't record a swing-and-miss the entire outing. That's not a tough loss -- that's a bad start, flat and simple.
Ryan Yarbrough came in for the final out of the sixth, then pitched through the seventh. He got tagged for a run in the eighth -- Jarren Duran singled off him, and Duran eventually scored after Yerry De los Santos took over. The run went on Yarbrough's ledger either way. De los Santos finished the night. None of it moved the needle.
Tolle Was Just Better
Payton Tolle: 7 innings, 1 hit, 0 runs, 2 walks, 7 strikeouts. He became the youngest Red Sox pitcher since Eduardo Rodriguez to throw seven or more scoreless innings.
He wasn't surviving on luck. Tolle threw strikes from the first pitch, mixed his pitches well enough to keep the Yankees off-balance in counts, and the Yankees helped him out early by expanding the zone. There wasn't one inning where the Bombers really had him working -- he was just ahead, consistently, the whole way.
Jones' single ended the perfecto in the sixth, but Tolle went right back to work and finished seven clean innings anyway.
(Give him his credit. He earned it.)
The One Yankee Moment
Jones' sixth-inning single was the only real thing the Yankees did offensively for most of the night. Volpe doubled in the eighth and scored on an Austin Wells groundout to make it 5-1. Dominguez doubled in the ninth -- the Yankees' second extra-base hit, and their second hit since Jones broke up the perfecto.
Connor Wong made sure none of it mattered, singling in the bottom of the eighth to score Duran and push it to 6-1. That was the ballgame.
The Fifth Got Loud
In the fifth inning, after Warren had already surrendered four runs, he came inside on Contreras and the two of them started jawing. Both benches and bullpens emptied. No punches landed, umpires issued warnings to both clubs, and everyone went back to their corners.
It was the most animated the Yankees were all night. (Not the kind of energy anyone was hoping to generate, but there it is.)
The Bombers are 47-33 and still on top of the AL East, but they've now dropped two straight to a Red Sox team that was 33-46 coming into this series at Fenway. Two more games to figure it out.
Jimmy writes the Bronx Pinstripes game recap after every Yankees game. Beat-reporter pacing, fan's heartbeat. He calls opposing players by last name and has no patience for dead-air innings.
