Yankees 10, Rockies 3, and by the time Anthony Volpe's grand slam landed in the right field seats, this one had gone from a tight ballgame to a laugher. The win completes a three-game sweep of Colorado at the Stadium and pushes New York's streak to three straight.
It didn't start as a laugher, though. It started as a pitcher's duel that lasted about four batters.
The Turning Point
Luis García Jr. led off the bottom of the first by turning around a Ryan Feltner fastball and depositing it 413 feet into center field, a two-run shot (Ben Rice was aboard) that erased a scoreless tie before most fans had found their seats. It was the single biggest swing in win probability all night -- bigger, even, than the slam that came later. Feltner never really recovered. He'd allow four earned runs over five innings and take the loss.
Kyle Karros answered for Colorado in the top of the second, a 431-foot blast off Max Fried that was the longest ball hit all game (yes, longer than the slam). Small consolation for the Rockies -- the Yankees were already building.
Star of the Game
Volpe gets top billing, and he earned it: 3-for-4, five RBI, and a grand slam off Jimmy Herget that turned a 6-2 game into a laugher. He'd already knocked in a run with a second-inning single before the big one arrived in the seventh, when the bases were loaded and two were out.
Credit where it's due, though (and this is the part the box score buries): García's WPA number for the night actually edged out Volpe's. The first-inning bomb mattered that much. Volpe got the marquee stat line. García got the Yankees on the board when it mattered most. Baseball doesn't always hand out its trophies to the right guy on paper -- both of these guys earned theirs.
Key At-Bats and Pitching Lines
Fried was cruising through three innings before the Karros homer, and he still walked off the mound with seven strikeouts on just 80 pitches over 3.1 innings (1 hit, 1 earned run, 2 walks). Whatever limited him to a short outing, it wasn't stuff -- he was missing bats all night.
The bullpen did the rest. Fulmer, Schreiber, Yarbrough, Headrick and Gil combined for 5.2 innings and allowed exactly one earned run (Yarbrough, in relief). John Schreiber got the win with a clean 1.1 innings, and honestly, a reliever picking up a W in a game this lopsided is one of those quirks of baseball scoring that never stops being a little funny.
Jake McCarthy tripled home a run for Colorado in the seventh (Ezequiel Tovar scoring), the kind of hit that briefly made it look like the Rockies had life. Two batters later, Spencer Jones lined a single up the middle that scored both Cody Bellinger and Jasson Domínguez, and three batters after that, Volpe made it academic. Six runs, one inning, over almost as fast as it started.
Colorado picked up a garbage-time run in the eighth on an Adael Amador single that deflected off Domínguez's glove in right field for an error -- not the kind of highlight anyone in the Bronx dugout was worried about with an eight-run lead.
The Series
Sweeping a last-place team at home isn't the stuff of parades, but three straight wins are three straight wins, and the Yankees took all three from the Rockies by a combined score of 21-7. New York sits at 84-62, still chasing Tampa Bay (3 games back in the AL East), with the schedule about to get a lot more interesting.
The Mets come to the Bronx next. That one's going to feel different.
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.
