Yankees 2, Rays 0, and Carlos Rodón made sure it never got interesting.
He needed one swing of Cody Bellinger's bat to have enough, then spent eight innings making sure it was plenty. The Bombers took the opener of a doubleheader against Tampa Bay at the Stadium, in front of 41,421 people who showed up on a cloudy, windy Tuesday afternoon expecting a dogfight against the team sitting atop the AL East. By the fourth inning, the only real question was whether the Rays would manage a run at all. They didn't.
Turning Point
The whole game turned on one sequence, bottom of the 4th.
Ben Rice led off with a double off Nick Martinez, ripped into the corner. Two batters later, Bellinger turned on a fastball and sent it out to right field for his 17th homer of the season -- a two-run shot that put the Yankees up 2-0. That was it. That was the whole scoreboard for the day, and it held up for the rest of the afternoon.
Bellinger finished 1-for-4. Rice went 1-for-3 with a walk to go with the double that started the whole thing. Neither of them needed to do much else. In a game decided by one swing, the guy who got on base ahead of it deserves a mention too.
Star of the Game
Rodón was the story before Bellinger ever stepped to the plate, and he stayed the story for four more innings after. Eight innings, three hits, zero walks, eight strikeouts, zero runs. The line drops his ERA to 2.67 across 16 starts (a number that reads like a typo for a pitcher who's had his homer-prone stretches this year, and yet here we are).
He was locked in from the jump -- a 1-2-3 first inning, and Jonny DeLuca's double play erased his lone baserunner in the second before he'd even broken a sweat. Junior Caminero and Yandy Díaz couldn't find him all day. Jonathan Aranda got the only clean piece of him, a seventh-inning single that went nowhere. Eight strikeouts on a night the Rays came in hitting, and not a single walk allowed.
David Bednar closed it out in the ninth, 1-2-3, his 35th save. Nobody in the building thought that inning was in doubt. (That's the kind of game Rodón hands you -- boring by the fourth inning, in the best possible way.)
Key At-Bats and Pitching Lines
Martinez wasn't bad, for what it's worth. Six innings, five hits, seven strikeouts, and the only mistake he made was the one that mattered -- a fastball Bellinger didn't miss. Take away the homer and it's a scoreless duel into the sixth.
Tampa Bay's best look came in the top of the 6th, when Victor Mesa Jr. singled to put a runner on with one out. Richie Palacios followed by lining into a double play, Bellinger to García Jr., and that erased the last real threat the Rays put together. Three hits total, and nobody reached third base after the second inning.
Yandy Díaz went hitless with two strikeouts at the top of that Tampa Bay lineup, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the day went for the Rays' offense. Jorge Mateo struck out, Jonny DeLuca grounded into a double play of his own back in the second, and it just never got rolling.
The Workload Call
Handing Rodón the ball for a full eight, with a doubleheader nightcap on the schedule a few hours later, could've been a harder call on a different night. It wasn't much of one here. Zero walks and a pitch count that stayed manageable from the first inning to the last made letting him finish the easier decision, not the riskier one.
Bednar got the ninth. Everybody else got the night off before Game 2, which starts back up at 7:05 tonight (a quick turnaround, but nobody's complaining about a bullpen that only had to throw one inning).
The Yankees improve to 90-66, still five games back of Tampa Bay in the AL East, but they've snapped a two-game slide from the trip to Arizona and get to do it all over again tonight, with two more games against the Rays still to come this week at the Stadium. Go win the nightcap.
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.
