Yankees 16, Red Sox 1, and honestly that gap undersells how lopsided this one felt by the middle innings. This wasn't a comeback or a nail-biter. It was a beatdown, capped by a nine-run eighth that turned Yankee Stadium into a home run derby and sent the Red Sox home having taken just one game out of four all weekend.
The Turning Point
Boston starter Ranger Suárez actually kept it scoreless into the fifth. Then it fell apart fast. Paul Goldschmidt slapped a two-run single up the middle -- the single biggest swing of the game, good for a 13.2% jump in win probability -- and two batters later, Heliot Ramos turned around a 1-2 curveball and sent it 416 feet into the left field seats for three more. Three batters, five runs, and a scoreless game became a laugher in about four minutes. Yankees win probability jumped from 68% to 95.7% before the Red Sox even got back to their dugout.
Star of the Game
Give this one to Ramos. Austin Wells is going to get (and deserve) the headlines for his two-homer eighth, but Ramos's blow came with the outcome still very much in doubt, and it carried the highest win-probability added of anyone on the field. Final line: 2-for-2, a homer, two walks, three RBI, a run scored. It was also his first homer since the Yankees got him from the Giants at the trade deadline (his first since July 20, per wire reports), and it's the kind of swing that buys a guy a lot of patience if the bat's been slow to wake up.
Key At-Bats and Pitching Lines
Will Warren was the other half of this win, and honestly the better story on a normal night. Seven innings, one run, six hits, seven strikeouts, one walk, 98 pitches -- the kind of start that wins a lot of games that don't turn into 16-1 laughers. He picked up his ninth win of the season and only left because the Red Sox bullpen made it pointless to keep him out there any longer. Tim Hill closed it out with two clean innings, because why not let the final line look as ugly as possible.
Then came the eighth. Chisholm walked to lead it off, and Wells cashed him in immediately with a two-run shot off Jovani Morán. By the time the inning was over, Wells had hit a second homer -- 358 feet the other way -- sandwiched around a Goldschmidt solo shot and a José Caballero three-run bomb. Nine runs, four homers, and per MLB.com, Wells became the first Yankee to go deep twice in one inning since Gleyber Torres did it back in September 2022. (Multiple other outlets threw out bigger, messier superlatives about it being some kind of all-time record -- take those with a grain of salt, because they don't agree with each other or with the box score on the details.)
Jazz Chisholm Jr. deserves a mention too: 2-for-3 with two walks, two stolen bases, and three runs scored out of the leadoff spot. He was on base basically all day, which tends to happen when the other team's bullpen can't find the strike zone.
The Yankees are 78-59 now, sitting second in the AL East but holding the top AL Wild Card spot with a four-game cushion over the Red Sox specifically. They took the four-game set 3-1 and, per the wire reports, locked up the season series with Boston at 7-6, which matters if these two are still jockeying for position come October. Two wins in a row, and a whole lot of positive vibes heading into the next series.
Go do that again, except maybe spread the damage out over more than one inning next time.
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.
