Diamondbacks 8, Yankees 4, and somehow the Yankees homered three times and still lost by four.
That's the box score from Sunday's series finale at Chase Field, but it undersells how strange this one got. The Yankees clubbed three home runs in the third inning to grab a 4-1 lead and chase Corbin Burnes from the game. Then the bullpen handed it right back, and Nolan Arenado buried them with a grand slam in the fifth. Final: Arizona 8, Yankees 4, and the Diamondbacks take the series two games to one.
Three Swings, Three Bombs
The third inning was the kind of half-inning that makes you forget, for a few minutes, that this trip was about to end in a series loss. Heliot Ramos led it off with a line drive to left-center for his 13th homer of the year off Burnes. (Ramos has quietly turned into one of the more dependable bats in this lineup, and nobody outside the Bronx seems to have noticed yet.)
George Lombard Jr. followed with a two-run shot to left field, his fifth homer, scoring Luis García Jr. and pushing the lead to 3-1.
Then Spencer Jones put an exclamation point on it: 448 feet to center, 109.8 mph off the bat, his 11th homer of the season. Three batters, three homers, and one very unhappy Burnes headed to the dugout two-thirds of the way through the third with his day already done.
The Slam That Changed Everything
Will Warren had given the Yankees a fighting chance -- 4.1 innings, four earned runs, four strikeouts against three walks on 83 pitches. Then Brent Headrick came in with the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the fifth, and it went about as badly as it could.
Corbin Carroll worked a walk to force in a run, cutting the lead to 4-2. The next batter, Arenado, turned on one and dropped it into the left field seats for a grand slam, his 27th of the season. Five runs scored in the four batters Headrick faced, and a 4-2 Yankees lead was suddenly a 6-4 Diamondbacks lead. (Headrick takes the loss, and he earned it -- bases loaded with the meat of the order due up is exactly the spot where a reliever needs one out and got zero.)
Arenado Earned This One
Give Arenado his due. That slam was the single biggest swing of the game, turning a Yankees lead into an Arizona lead in one pitch. Geraldo Perdomo had a nice night of his own, going 2-for-4 with a triple and two RBI, one of them driving in the game's first run back in the bottom of the first and another closing it out with a run-scoring triple in the seventh.
For the Yankees, Jones' blast was the highlight, but nobody on this roster walks away from Chase Field feeling good about a 4-8 final where the offense actually did its job for three innings.
Warren Held Up, the Pen Didn't
Warren's final line reads fine in isolation, but it's the two relievers who followed him that decided this game. Headrick's line (0.2 IP, 2 ER, the slam) is the entry nobody wants next to their name. Tim Hill and Luis Gil cleaned up without incident, but John Schreiber gave up a two-run seventh -- a Perdomo triple and a Carroll RBI single -- that turned a manageable deficit into an 8-4 laugher. Justin Martinez picked up the win for Arizona with a clean inning, and the Diamondbacks bullpen didn't allow a run the rest of the way.
The Yankees have lost two in a row and dropped the series in the desert, but at 89-66 they're still sitting comfortably in a Wild Card spot, ten games clear of the cut line and six back of Tampa Bay in the East. This one stings a little more given how well the bats started the day. Get home, reset, and don't let the bullpen have another day like that one.
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.
