Yankees 2, Mets 12. Final. And that scoreline undersells just how thoroughly Francisco Lindor and friends took Gerrit Cole apart on a sunny Saturday in the Bronx.
Lindor led off the game with a homer. He ended the day with a grand slam. The Mets hit six home runs in between and after, Cole didn't make it out of the fifth, and a sellout crowd of 46,864 filed out of the Stadium well before the ninth. The Subway Series is tied at a game apiece heading into Sunday's rubber match.
The Turning Point
This one didn't really have a moment where the Yankees were "in it" so much as a moment where it stopped being close. That came in the top of the 2nd, when Luis Torrens lined a two-run homer to left off Cole, scoring Jared Young ahead of him. The Stadium's win probability dropped from 42.2% to 24.6% on that single swing -- the single biggest shift of the entire game.
Cole had already given up a leadoff homer to Lindor. By the time Carson Benge added a third one in the top of the 3rd, this had stopped being a ballgame and started being a track meet.
Star of the Game
Lindor gets this one, and it isn't close. He went 3-for-5 with two homers and 5 RBI, but the number that matters is 8 -- his eighth career grand slam, which came in the 8th inning off rookie reliever Bradley Hanner (365 feet, right-center, the kind of swing where you know it's gone before the outfielder even turns around).
That slam passed Mike Piazza's mark of six career grand slams (including the playoffs) for the most in Mets history. It also made Lindor the third Met to hit a slam at Yankee Stadium, joining Piazza in 2000 and Carlos Delgado in 2008. Not bad company, and not the history the Bombers wanted to be part of.
(Worth saying: by the time Lindor hit the slam, the Mets were already up 7-2. The damage was done. He just made sure everyone remembered the score.)
Key At-Bats and Pitching Lines
Cole's line: 4.1 innings, 9 hits, 5 earned runs, 3 homers allowed, 4 strikeouts, zero walks. Zero walks means he was around the plate all day -- the problem was what happened when the Mets found it. He's now 0-3 with a 10.92 ERA in his last three Subway Series starts, and he's served up seven homers over his last two outings combined. That's not a blip anymore.
The bullpen didn't stop the bleeding. Ryan Yarbrough gave the Yankees 2.1 clean innings, but Tim Hill served up a Juan Soto solo shot in the 7th, and Hanner's 1.1 innings (four earned runs, the Torrens double and the Lindor slam) turned a bad loss into an embarrassing one.
Zac Thornton, on the other side, was steady all afternoon for the win: 7 innings, 5 hits, 2 runs, 4 strikeouts, the only blemish a Cody Bellinger homer in the 6th.
Bellinger, for what it's worth, had a genuinely good day in a lost cause -- he singled home Paul Goldschmidt in the 4th (Goldschmidt had doubled to lead off the inning) and went deep himself in the 6th to make it 5-2. That was as close as it got.
The Decision That Didn't Help
Down 6-2 in the 7th with runners on, Anthony Volpe grounded into an inning-ending double play, George Lombard Jr. erased at second in the process. It was the costliest non-homer play of the day for the Yankees (-7.6 in win probability, behind only the Torrens and Lindor home runs), and it snuffed out the only real threat the offense put together after the 4th inning. The Captain's had a much better September than that at-bat suggests, but this was not the moment for a ground ball to short.
Yankees fall to 85-63, now 3.5 games back of the Rays in the East and losers of their last one. Get the split back Sunday, or this series goes from "annoying loss" to "bad week."
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.
