The Yankees, American professional sports’ most accomplished franchise, suddenly seem to possess a knack for making the wrong kind of history.
As they try to avoid a third straight season of missing the playoffs, Joe Girardi’s bunch played the Yankees’ longest home game ever Friday night into Saturday morning. That they lost the contest, 6-5 in 19 innings to the Red Sox in the inaugural rivalry game of the year, served as yet another negative indicator on a squad filled with them.
“It was one game that felt like it was about six,” Girardi said, displaying some gallows humor. The double-plus shift, which lasted six hours and 49 minutes (not counting a 16-minute delay when some lights went out), featured its share of encouraging signs for the Yankees, who wiped out one-run deficits in the ninth, 16th and 18th innings and enjoyed excellent bullpen work until losing pitcher Esmil Rogers clearly ran out of gas.
“We showed a lot of heart tonight,” Brett Gardner said. “We didn’t win, but we played hard, and we played long.
But the Yankees continued a young trend by going 2-for-12 with runners in scoring position, and that ultimately cost them, as did the recurring trend of base running ineptitude. Gardner got caught stealing second base in the eighth, and he got picked off first base in the 17th.
The Yankees own a 1-3 record now, whereas the Red Sox’s massive makeover has produced an opposite, 3-1 mark. We will see whether Hanley Ramirez stays healthy, Pablo Sandoval enjoys Northeast baseball and the ace-less starting rotation comes through. Yet if there’s going to be a team that upends the Las Vegas favorites, there’s scant reason to think it will be the Yankees, who thrilled their crowd of 41,292 repeatedly before falling short
After Nathan Eovaldi left his Yankees debut in the sixth, trailing 3-0, seven Yankees relievers teamed up to throw zeroes into the 16th. Lefty Chasen Shreve, acquired from Atlanta over the offseason, stood out among the crowd, tossing 3¹/₃ innings while giving up three hits and striking four while walking none.
Nevertheless, Rogers, who threw 2¹/₃ innings Thursday night in the Yankees’ 6-3 loss to the Blue Jays, went another 4²/₃ innings, and he looked gassed about halfway into the journey; Girardi, having used up his bullpen, stuck with Rogers rather than going with a starting pitcher or position player, though the manager said afterward that designated hitter Garrett Jones would have taken the mound for the 20th. The straw that broke the Yankees’ back proved to be Mookie Betts’ sacrifice fly to centerfield in the 19th, which scored Xander Bogaerts from third.
It’s to the Yankees’ credit that they dragged this contest toward the seven-hour mark. Chase Headley swatted a game-tying homer off Boston’s Edward Mujica with two outs in the ninth inning. Mark Teixeira ripped a game-tying blast off the Red Sox’s Steven Wright to knot the game at 4-4. And after Boston jumped ahead, 5-4, in the 18th, the Yankees responded with doubles by Brian McCann and Carlos Beltran, the latter of which should have been caught by inexperienced left fielder Hanley Ramirez. Ultimately, Wright had a little more left in the tank than did Rogers.
The Yankees displayed plenty of fight on this night into morning, and maybe this game can register positively down the line. More likely, though, it will go down as the sort of game that characterizes their season: Just not good enough, on the road to the wrong kind of history.