Yankees beat Royals to complete their first series sweep in more than two months
Yankees' Anthony Rizzo reacts to the dugout as he run on his solo home run against the Kansas City Royals during the third inning of an MLB baseball game at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, July 23, 2023. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
On Sunday morning, Aaron Judge took live batting practice in hopes of returning to contribute to the Yankees in the future.
On Sunday afternoon, Anthony Rizzo finally found a way to contribute to the Yankees’ present.
The struggling first baseman broke out in a big way, going 4-for-4 with a home run, a double and two RBIs in an 8-5 win over the Royals at Yankee Stadium.
After a 1-5 road trip following the All-Star break, the Yankees (53-47) won three games against the Royals (28-73) over the weekend, their first series sweep since May 19-21 at Cincinnati.
Rizzo broke an 0-for-20 slump with a single on Saturday, but that was a mere warmup for Sunday’s heroics.
The highlight was his third-inning home run, his first since May 20. After hitting 11 homers in his first 46 games, he had gone 45 games, 187 plate appearances and 166 at-bats without one.
His teammates responded by good-naturedly giving him the silent treatment in the dugout (which he said he expected). His excited attempts to slap hands were met with a decided lack of interest. Then they mobbed him.
“It’s easy to look at it and say, ‘I’m drowning’ and ‘I’m in the water,’ ” he said later. “But I just kept saying, ‘I’m on the boat just waiting for the winds to pick up and the sails to set.’ ”
Rizzo, 33, said he would not have had such perspective earlier in his career, but after 13 major league seasons, he knows this is part of the deal.
“You learn through the ebbs and flows of this game and really just going through it, going through ups and downs,” he said, “knowing that it comes and goes no matter what. No matter how good you think it’s going or how bad you think it is, usually it evens out if you stay the course.”
Rizzo has made some adjustments, including changing his walk-up music on Sunday to Taylor Swift’s “ . . . Ready for It?”
“It’s her summer, really,” he said. “She’s helping the economy in every city she goes.”
Rizzo sprayed the ball around, doubling to left-center, homering to right, lining a single to center and finishing with a hard single up the middle that manager Aaron Boone called his best at-bat of the day.
“When you’re through it, it’s not easy; it’s not fun,” Boone said. “But he’s got a lot of support in that [locker] room. Everything points to we should be able to get that out [of him] with the physical attributes he still possesses.
“So it was a good day for him. Excited for him.”
The Yankees scored four runs in the first inning against Jordan Lyles (1-12). They began the game with four hits in a row, including a two-run homer into the Yankees’ bullpen by Gleyber Torres and Rizzo’s RBI double.
Luis Severino (2-4) seemed poised for his second consecutive strong start, but he gave up an opposite-field homer into the second deck in rightfield by Salvador Perez in the fourth and a two-out, two-run homer by Michael Massey on his final pitch, which tarnished his final line and got Kansas City within 5-3 in the sixth.
Severino threw 100 pitches in 5 2⁄3 innings, allowing three runs, eight hits and no walks with five strikeouts.
The Yankees got some breathing room with a three-run eighth. They scored twice when first baseman Nick Pratto threw away an attempted flip to his pitcher on a squibber by Oswald Peraza with the bases loaded and one out.
Freddy Fermin and Kyle Isbel homered off Ron Marinaccio in the ninth.
It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective, and it righted the Yankees’ ship after Boone said on Wednesday, “We stink right now.”
As the wait for Judge continues, getting Rizzo right would be a huge boost to the offense.
“Just being in the right position to hit is always my biggest thing,” he said. “Sometimes you get so out of whack that getting in the right position feels wrong.
“It’s fighting through the weird feelings, and today definitely was a big step in the right direction as far as feel.”
He added, “You get a couple of hits and you start getting more belief that you feel right again and you just want to keep that feeling bottled up and never lose it.”
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
