Yankees 4, Phillies 11, and by the time Alec Bohm cleared the bases in the third inning, this one was already circling the drain.
Will Warren didn't have it Sunday night. Bryson Stott had entirely too much of it. New York limped out of Citizens Bank Park with its only loss of the weekend, in front of 42,799 people who came to see a series finale and got a laugher instead. (The Yankees still walked away with the series, 2-1, so let's not pretend the sky is falling.)
The Turning Point
Warren opened with a leadoff triple from Trea Turner and a sacrifice fly in the first, then a Stott solo shot in the second, before the third turned into a full-blown track meet. Kyle Schwarber, Bryce Harper, and Brandon Marsh all crossed the plate on one swing from Bohm, a bases-clearing double to center that Trent Grisham had no chance of running down. Stott followed him the very next at-bat with an RBI single, and it was 0-6 before most of the crowd had finished a first beer.
That's a 14.9-point win-probability swing on one at-bat -- the kind of number that tells you the game got decided in real time, not in hindsight.
Warren's final line: three innings, six hits, six runs, two walks. He falls to 7-5 on the year, and the Yankees never had a real chance to make him forget it.
The pen didn't do much to stop the bleeding, either. Ryan Yarbrough followed and allowed five earned runs of his own across three innings -- the Turner single, the Bohm hit-by-pitch, and Stott's second big swing of the night all came on his watch. Tim Hill was the lone exception, working a scoreless inning sandwiched in between. By the sixth, the only question left was how ugly the final line would get.
Stott Ruins the Weekend
Credit where it's earned: Bryson Stott had the kind of night that buries a team on his own. He went 3-for-4 with a solo homer in the second (360 feet, his eighth of the season) and a bases-loaded double in the sixth that turned an uncomfortable 3-8 game into a laugher at 3-11. Five RBI, one Yankees pitching staff completely out of answers.
Cristopher Sánchez made sure none of it mattered on the other side, cruising to his 13th win of the year with six innings of three-run ball. He never once looked stressed doing it.
New York's Only Answer
The Yankees' best inning of the night came with the game already gone. Jasson Domínguez's groundout to third baseman Alec Bohm plated Ben Rice from third in the fifth, and the very next batter, Anthony Volpe -- The Captain doing Captain things even in a laugher -- doubled to left to score Amed Rosario. That cut it to 3-6 and, briefly, made this look like a baseball game again.
It didn't last. Philadelphia answered right back with five more in the sixth (Turner, a Bohm hit-by-pitch, and that Stott double did the damage), and Ben Rice's solo shot in the seventh -- 417 feet, his 31st of the year -- was strictly a box-score exercise by the time it landed.
The one real bright spot: Camilo Doval came on in the bottom fifth relieving Hill with two runners on and nobody out, and struck out the side to escape the jam clean. The Yankees' best sequence of pitching all night (even if the game was already trending the wrong way by then).
In the Clubhouse
Aaron Judge met with reporters afterward, same as he does whether the Yankees win by ten or lose by seven. Nobody in that room was pretending an 11-4 laugher in a game the Yankees didn't need meant anything more than three runs on the wrong side of a final score.
Take the series win -- the Yankees are 59-46, three back of Tampa Bay in the East -- and forget game three ever happened. The White Sox are up next in Chicago, and they won't hit like the Phillies did tonight.
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.
