Jarren Duran wasn't supposed to be in this game. He got benched for the series finale after Saturday night's dugout incident with a Fenway heckler -- the details of which Duran refused to discuss beyond repeating "nothing happened" into the microphone about a dozen times. Nate Eaton started in left. The game went ten innings. And then Duran came off the bench, took a Fernando Cruz offering the other way into right, and Boston had its first four-game sweep of New York since August 2018. Red Sox 5, Yankees 4.
The way this one ended makes it sting twice as much.
Sonny Gray Made This Difficult
Here's the thing about going to Fenway in late June: you can lose in a lot of ways, but you don't usually expect the game to spend eight innings in near-no-hitter territory. Sonny Gray -- the same Sonny Gray the Yankees traded away after the 2018 season -- went 7.1 innings against his old club and allowed exactly one hit. Nine strikeouts. Zero runs. And tucked into the final stretch, career punchout No. 2,000, with Spencer Jones as the lucky recipient. (Jones has been a recurring character in opposing pitchers' highlight reels this month, for what it's worth.)
Gray retired the first 14 Yankees he faced. He walked Rosario in the fifth -- his only free pass of the night -- then kept mowing until the eighth, when Amed Rosario lined one up the middle on pitch 97 to break up the bid. Tayron Guerrero came in, stranded Rosario, and the no-hit attempt was officially over. The Yankees still hadn't scored, though.
The Rally That Shouldn't Have Needed a Save
Aroldis Chapman -- who, yes, is now pitching for the Red Sox -- couldn't hold the ninth. He didn't have to throw it away, though. Wilyer Abreu did that for him. Caballero scored on an Abreu throwing error, Volpe scored on a fielder's choice, and suddenly it was 2-2 without the Yankees needing a clean hit off Chapman. (There's something poetic about getting back into a Fenway game on Boston's own defense. Poetic until the bottom of the tenth, anyway.)
The Yankees took the lead in extras. Rosario -- the same guy who ended Gray's no-hitter two innings earlier -- lined a go-ahead single to put New York up 3-2 with the automatic runner moving. Austin Wells bounced into a fielder's choice that scored Rosario, and the Yankees were sitting on a 4-2 lead with the home half of the tenth on deck.
0.1 Innings
Fernando Cruz came in with two runs to play with and couldn't hold it. Seigler singled to cut it to 4-3. Cheng's sacrifice fly tied the game at four. Duran -- again, not originally in the lineup -- singled to right to win it. Cruz's line: 0.1 IP, 3H, 3R, 2ER. Blown save No. 2 on the season. Loss, now 4-3.
There's no gentle way to say this: a two-run lead in the tenth inning against a team playing their benched outfielder, and you still lost it in one-third of an inning. That's on the closer, full stop.
What Rodón Earned
Carlos Rodón threw five sharp innings -- 1H, 2 unearned runs, 6 strikeouts, four walks because it's always going to be four walks -- and got nothing out of it. The offense was locked up against Gray for most of the night, and by the time the Yankees clawed back, Rodón had been in the shower for three innings. Paul Blackburn and David Bednar each threw two clean innings to bridge the gap. Then Cruz.
Rodón was the best Yankee pitcher on the mound tonight. He deserved better than this.
The Sweep
Four games, four losses. Boston outscored New York 21-9 across the series -- all of it at Fenway -- sweeping a Yankees club that came in sitting at 48-35. The Yankees head home 48-36, and the schedule doesn't soften up much from here.
The honest read: Rodón looks right, Blackburn and Bednar held their end, and Rosario was the best offensive player on the field for either team on Sunday. But the Yankees can't keep gifting leads back in extra innings and expect to hold position in July. One Cruz meltdown is a bad night. Two blown saves starts to look like a pattern.
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.
