Yankees 4, Blue Jays 3 in 10 innings, and somebody should buy Ben Rice a steak dinner. The kid booted a routine play in the ninth that nearly cost the Yankees this whole series. Three innings later he was rounding the bases after the biggest swing of the day.
The Bombers dropped the first two games of this set at Rogers Centre, 3-1 and 4-1, and were three outs from a sweep before Rice made sure that didn't happen.
The Turning Point
Ryan Weathers worked into the eighth and handed David Bednar a 2-1 lead. It should've ended there. Instead, Rice -- yeah, him again -- booted a routine grounder off the bat of Josh Smith to open the inning (read: the kind of play a first baseman makes 99 times out of 100). Alejandro Kirk walked. George Springer popped out. Ernie Clement lifted a sacrifice fly deep enough to score Smith, and just like that Bednar had his third blown save of the year and the game was headed to extras, tied at two.
Baseball has a sense of humor sometimes. The guy whose glove nearly cost the Yankees this one got to be the guy who won it.
Star of the Game
With Ali Sánchez -- the automatic extra-innings runner -- parked at third after a José Caballero sacrifice bunt, Rice turned on a Braydon Fisher slider and sent it 438 feet to right-center. 108.5 mph off the bat, his 33rd homer of the season. Two runs in, Yankees up 4-2, and Rice finished the day 1-for-5 with the homer and both RBIs that actually mattered.
That's a full season's worth of production for most guys by mid-August. For Rice, it was just another Sunday.
Key At-Bats and Pitching Lines
Weathers was the best story of the afternoon and almost nobody's going to talk about him because of how the ninth went. Seven and a third innings, one run, four strikeouts, 95 pitches -- the only damage was a Daz Cameron double in the fifth. He left with the lead intact and zero blame for what came after.
Caballero had his hands on both of the other Yankees runs -- he scored on a Luis García Jr. sacrifice fly in the third, then plated the go-ahead run himself with a single in the seventh that needed a replay review to stand up. Toronto challenged the tag at second, lost, and Caballero was promptly thrown out trying to stretch it into a double anyway, because nothing about this game came easy. George Lombard Jr. chipped in a double, a walk, and started two double plays at shortstop -- the kind of rookie afternoon that gets circled back to in October.
Tim Hill closed it out in the bottom of the 10th, allowing an unearned run to score on an Andrés Giménez single but stranding the tying run to lock down his second save.
The Bednar Question
Blowing a lead in the ninth and still walking away with the win is one of those stat-line jokes baseball plays on people. Bednar's third blown save doesn't look great next to a name that says "closer," but the stuff itself was fine -- one strikeout, one walk, and a defense that let him down before he let himself down (his own first baseman, specifically). Boone had seen enough by the 10th and turned to Hill instead, and it worked.
Three games in Toronto, two losses that stung and one that Rice made worth the trip. The Yanks head to Baltimore next, still 5.5 back in the East but sitting comfortably in the Wild Card picture. Ben Rice, presumably, is buying his own steak dinner 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.
