Red Sox come back to beat Yankees in 10 innings
Yankees designated hitter Josh Donaldson returns to the dugout against the Red Sox during the sixth inning of an MLB game at Yankee Stadium on Sunday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
If the Yankees are going to win without Aaron Judge, they are going to have to play crisp baseball. They did not do that on Sunday night in a 3-2, 10-inning loss to the Red Sox before a sellout crowd of 46,138 at Yankee Stadium.
The Yankees led 2-1 in the eighth, but a defensive lapse by Gleyber Torres helped the Red Sox tie it. Two innings earlier, as the Yankees tried to stretch a one-run lead, Anthony Rizzo was picked off second base.
Those two mistakes by themselves are not why the Yankees lost. But they are the kinds of mistakes the Yankees cannot afford to make with Judge sidelined indefinitely with a sprained big toe.
The Yankees fell to 3-4 since the loss of Judge. Asked by Newsday after the game when his injured toe might let him play again, he said: “When it feels better. It’s a process.”
Enrique Hernandez gave the Red Sox the lead against Ron Marinaccio (2-3) in the top of the 10th with a one-out RBI single past a drawn-in and diving Anthony Volpe. Ghost runner/pinch runner Adam Duvall scored from third.
The Yankees, who dropped the rubber game against their historic rivals, could not get their ghost runner home in the bottom of the 10th against righthander Chris Martin.
Billy McKinney — who made a leaping catch near the leftfield wall to end the top of the 10th — hit a fly ball to right that sent ghost runner DJ LeMahieu to third. But Jose Trevino and Volpe, in his first at-bat of the night, both struck out to end it.
“It’s obviously frustrating,” said Clarke Schmidt, who allowed one run in 5 1⁄3 innings. “You don’t want to drop the series, especially at home and then obviously to these guys.”
The Yankees, who did not homer for the first time in nine games, scored seven runs in the series. So did Boston.
The Yankees are off on Monday. They will visit Citi Field starting Tuesday for a two-game Subway Series against the reeling Mets. The pitching matchups: Luis Severino vs. Max Scherzer on Tuesday and Gerrit Cole vs. Justin Verlander on Wednesday.
The Yankees were nursing a 2-1 lead in the eighth when Hernandez led off with a single to left. McKinney fielded it and fired to second on a bounce, and the Yankees watched in horror as Torres allowed the throw to sail past him without making any perceptible effort to move his glove or shift his body to catch it.
Hernandez took second as Rizzo retrieved the ball up the first-base line in foul territory. Torres was charged with an error.
Michael King then walked Reese McGuire. Pablo Reyes sacrificed the runners along and the tying run scored on a grounder to second by Jarren Durran.
If not for the Torres error, the run that made it 2-2 might not have scored. But because King walked McGuire, the run counted as earned.
“It’s on me,” Torres said. “He made a throw straight to the bag and I think I was looking too fast [at] the runner and then missed the ball. That’s on me.”
Asked what he would have done differently, Torres said: “Catch the ball.”
Said manager Aaron Boone: “We’ve got to be more careful with the ball. I just looked at [the error] . . . We’ll work through it . . . One of the things Gleyber does really well defensively, he plays the game with ease, so you’ve got to strike that balance. But we’ve got to be careful there. That can’t get on you like that. Whether it’s off-line or not a little bit, you’ve got to be in position to handle a little bit off-line there.”
After Justin Turner led off the second with a home run off Schmidt to give the Red Sox a 1-0 lead, the Yankees got lucky in the bottom half to take the lead.
With runners on second and third and two outs, Trevino hit a grounder up the middle. Hernandez, the second baseman, was waiting for the ball in the hopes of turning it into an inning-ending out, but the ball had other ideas. It banged off second base and into centerfield for a two-run single.
Red Sox righthander Brayan Bello held the Yankees to three hits and those two gift runs in seven innings. The Red Sox wound up outhitting the Yankees 7-3.
Anthony Rieber covers baseball, as well as the NFL, NBA and NHL. He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since July 5, 2004.
