Yankees skilled at getting off the mat after taking a punch
The Yankees' Aaron Judge takes a drink prior to a game against the Dodgers on Sunday in Los Angeles. Credit: AP/Mark J. Terrill
On Friday night, a fan base still shell-shocked from the 2024 World Series loss watched Max Fried not pitch well for the first time this season and the Yankees flush a three-run lead entering the sixth inning, the home team scoring four runs en route to an 8-5 victory.
Though not completely analogous to the calamitous five-run fifth inning from Game 5 of October’s World Series — Friday night’s sixth, for instance, didn’t contain the defensive slapstick from Game 5’s fifth as the Yankees' 5-2 lead swirled the drain — it was, nonetheless, a distinction without a difference for plenty of fans.
Then came Saturday, an 18-2 debacle in which Will Warren managed to record just four outs, the Yankees trailed 10-0 after two innings and were outhit 21-7.
At that point, the aggregate score of the series was 26-7 and a “the Yankees still can’t beat the Dodgers” narrative hit a full-throat howl, a three-game sweep all but assured with Dodgers ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto set to go Sunday night.
But the Yankees, who in Aaron Judge’s words a few weeks back had shown a proclivity for “flushing the tough losses” and bouncing back, did so again.
Grinding out at-bat after at-bat, the Yankees bounced Yamamoto, who brought a 1.97 ERA into the night, after a season-low 3 2/3 innings. The righthander allowed four runs and seven hits in a 7-3 loss that allowed the Yankees to salvage a game in the series and finish a nine-game trip a more than respectable 6-3.
What the victory didn’t do was portend anything one way or the other for down the road should the teams have a World Series rematch in October. An end-of-May series, regardless of how it would have played out, including had the Yankees been swept, would hardly have been predictive. The most obvious reason is both clubs, should they get that far — and the Dodgers would seem to have the more difficult route there as they have to win the far tougher National League October bracket — will have different-looking teams in four-plus months. Just looking at the Yankees, there are the eventual returns of 2024 AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil to an already good rotation, and last year’s postseason MVP Giancarlo Stanton. Not to mention the move or two (or more) sure to be made by general manager Brian Cashman before the July 31 trade deadline (the Dodgers, of course, are expected to add before the deadline as well).
Which doesn’t mean Sunday night’s result was irrelevant. Besides calming their fan base, for one night anyway, when it comes to a pronounced Dodgers Inferiority Complex, the 2025 Yankees again demonstrated what Judge referenced and is an at times underrated but important trait for any big-league team: the ability to take a punch and respond. Every team talks about moving on “to the next day” after a rough loss. Not all of them, including some of Aaron Boone’s teams in his eight years as manager, prove capable of doing it.
And doing so against the defending champions isn’t nothing.
“I think any time you lose like that, [18-2 on Saturday], and then you’re able to come back and win, it’s a big deal,” Austin Wells said late Sunday night in Los Angeles. “I don’t read too much into what’s happened right now [in predicting the future], but I know we feel good about it and feel good about today.”
Boone, throughout his tenure, has talked about the importance of “blocking out the noise,” which goes part and parcel with getting past the most brutal of defeats. And not all of them, with Saturday’s embarrassment a prime example, have to be of, to use an oft-used Boone phrase over the years, the “gut-punch” walk-off variety.
“This team’s bounced back from whatever, quote, ‘tough losses’ we’ve had,” Boone said. “We’ve had a handful of them the first couple months of the year. [Saturday], it was tough, it was noisy. I know a lot of people made a lot of it. But that’s who they are, and they went out against Yamamoto . . . and played a really great game to give us a really good trip going back home into an off day.”
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
