That was one of the stranger games of baseball you’ll see. If you came in blind and I told you that the Yankees would give up eight runs while only scoring in a single inning, and Sacremento pitching faced the minimum in every other inning, you’d probably bet that they lost their Sunday finale with the Athletics. Except, it was a really, really big inning, a historically big inning. 13 men crossed the plate in the top of the third, and New York finished this road trip 5-1 after a 13-8 victory over
the A’s.
We were all frustrated by the start of the game. The Yankees went down quietly in the top of the first, and Trent Grisham couldn’t find second gear on a dying quail in centerfield:
Bad defense leading to a crooked number, in a West Coast game on a getaway day in an MiLB stadium. There were a lot of reasons for the more superstitious to believe this was going to turn into one of THOSE games. Instead, we got to see something no Yankee fan had seen in more than a hundred years.
How do we even start? Anthony Volpe singled and stole second, before Max Schuemann and Austin Wells both worked walks to load the bases. Down three, with the bases drunk and nobody out, my thought was “you’ve gotta tie the game here”.
Paul Goldschmidt did his job, an infield single and the Yankees were able to capitalize on Jacob Lopez’s failure to cover first. 3-1. Then came Ben Rice, to knot us up:
I’m thinking, great, fantastic, exactly what the team needed to do. I’ve watched a lot of baseball, you figure they’ll maybe tack on another run or two, little bit of a cushion for Will Warren. The club pushed another run across in an eerie echo of the Grisham blunder two innings prior:
It’s a line drive in the box score, Cap.
But then something started to happen. The Yankees kept getting hits, and when they weren’t getting hits it was because José Caballero walked with the bases loaded, ahead of Trent Grisham made up for that first-inning error:
Volpe completed the bat-around with another single, scoring another run. Schuemann pitched in a two-run double. Austin Wells walked again!
Side note — if there’s anyone in the Yankee org that passed along my “Austin Wells stop swinging” advice earlier this weekend, I appreciate you.
Leadoff hitter Paul Goldschmidt was the first Yankee retired in the frame, after a dozen men safely reached base. I can only imagine the ribbing the veteran must have received on returning to the dugout, the crack in the chain of baserunners. Ben Rice picked up the old man with a triple that scored two more runs:
Cody Bellinger would add another run on a single, and Cabby notched the last hit in a historic frame before Grisham was finally retired. The Yankees sent 18 men to the plate, scoring 13 runs. The franchise record in a single frame is 14, set in the 1920 campaign. I suppose it is mathematically possible that someone in the stadium today or watching the YES broadcast was around for that, but the old adage that when you go to the ballpark, you have a chance to see something you’ve never seen before certainly rang true in Sacremento today.
Suzyn Waldman noted on WFAN that 45 minutes is the decision point during a rain delay, where teams remove whatever pitcher was in at the time the skies opened up and go with a bullpen arm. The top of the third lasted 42 minutes, with Will Warren jogging down to the outfield bullpens in an attempt to stay warm. As impressive as the offense was, perhaps equally as impressive was Warren needing just 11 pitches to work the bottom of the inning, and five the bottom of the fourth — the platonic ideal of the quick, shutdown inning after an explosion like that.
Warren ended up going six innings, with zero earned runs allowed. He pretty clearly pivoted to “pitching to the scoreboard” after the third inning, so I wouldn’t worry too much about the 5:3 K:BB ratio. Tim Hill was the first bullpen arm used, likely since with such a significant lead Aaron Boone needed someone who could keep the ball in the strike zone. While Hill did that, he didn’t exactly keep the ball in the yard, giving up two home runs and taking it from a ten-run game to a six-run affair.
Fernando Cruz also allowed a run in the eighth, an RBI double off Nick Kurtz’s bat. David Bednar, in need of work after five days off, was called upon in the ninth and put a pair of men on, before finally closing it out and sealing a series win. The Yankees didn’t even get a hit outside of that mammoth third, but it was mammoth enough that we’ll remember it for a long time.
The club gets a much-appreciated day off tomorrow as they fly home from the West Coast, and then we get Cam Bump Day on Tuesday. Cleveland comes to town for a three-game set, and Cam Schlittler gets the ball for the first round against lefty Joey Cantillo. Tuesday’s action starts at 7:05pm Eastern.
