BOSTON — Well, at least it’s over now. The Yankees’ disastrous, nine-game roadtrip featured blown leads, bad base running and the offense being held scoreless three times. Sunday night, Michael Wacha and the Red Sox sent the Bombers limping back home after 3-0 shut out at Fenway Park.
The Yankees (72-43) lost seven out of nine on this trip and they have lost none of their last 11 games. The Red Sox handed the Bombers’ their fourth straight series loss, dating back to the Mariners in the Bronx before they took off on this trip. The Bombers still hold a 10-game lead over the Blue Jays in the American League East, but they’ve fallen 2.5 games behind the Astros in the race for the AL’s best record.
It’s a dramatic turnaround from the first half of the season when they were the best team in baseball and lost just three series total before the All-Star break.
“We’re in first place. If you would ask me at the start of the year we would like to have a 10-game lead in the middle of August. I think anybody would sign up for that,” Aaron Judge said. “But like I said there’s little things we need to improve on. Going back on this whole road trip there’s different things; on the base path, executing when we got guys in scoring position, picking each other up. So our whole outlook is we gotta pick it up and it starts tomorrow.”
Jameson Taillon has picked it up. Sunday was his second straight encouraging start after a month of struggles.
He held the Red Sox to three runs on six hits over seven innings. He did not issue a walk and struck out four. He got hurt by the long ball again, but on a good pitch up-and-in.
With Tommy Pham aboard, Taillon tried to jam Rafael Devers inside with a 96-mile-an-hour fastball on a 3-2 pitch and the Red Sox third baseman turned on it quickly and absolutely crushed it. It landed 433 feet from home plate in the right-field seats and gave the Red Sox a 3-0 lead.
Pham had also scored the Red Sox’s first run. He led off bottom of the first with a single and scored on Xander Bogaerts ground out. Taillon worked around baserunners in the next two innings, stranding one on third thanks to a double play, but cruised through the fourth and fifth.
“He was aggressive again with his fastball but I thought he had a little bit of everything going. I thought he was really good,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “It was good to see Jamo go out there and give us seven strong innings again. Unfortunately we just couldn’t mount much offensively to support him.”
And Wacha was just as aggressive.
He scattered two hits, walked one and struck out nine over seven innings.
The right-hander retired the first 14 hitters he faced before Miguel Andujar lined a single into center field with two outs in the fifth.
“You gotta tip your cap on a lot of those at bats. He really worked that edges well with all his pitches.,” Judge said. “He kind of left a lot of pitches out of the heart of the plate and when they were over the heart of the plate, I think back to the Gleyber (Torres) at-bat, he drills a ball to centerfield but right at a guy.
“So he was working on his pitches on the edges and we couldn’t really get anything going against him.”
In part the offensive malaise has to do with the fact that they were without Giancarlo Stanton (left Achilles tendinitis) and then lost Matt Carpenter (left foot fracture) in Seattle and DJ LeMahieu (sore right big toe) Sunday night.
But it has to stop if the Yankees are going to meet their own expectations.
“It’s baseball, you’re gonna go through stretches like this. Every team does,” Judge said. “So it’s just about us staying consistent, don’t sit on our woes here, don’t hang our heads. We’re not happy about it, but there’s a lot of work to be done. Also a lot of things you need to improve on and keep working on.”
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Source: Berkshire mont
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