It's bangers and mash as Yankees win 30-run London slugfest  

LONDON — It was a bloody mess.

The pitching, that is.

After 30 runs and 37 hits — 16 for extra bases — that’s hard to argue.

The ball seemed to carry quite well at London Stadium during batting practice Friday when the Yankees and Red Sox worked out, but no one could say for sure what that would mean when the real games began in this converted Olympic and soccer venue.

The answer arrived emphatically Saturday afternoon. The nearly 3,500-mile overnight flight, which included only sporadic sleep for much of the teams’ traveling parties Wednesday night into Thursday morning, did little to slow two of baseball’s top offenses. And it was the Yankees’ pitching staff that came away a bit less beaten up in a 17-13 victory that lasted 4 hours, 42 minutes.

It was the first MLB game ever contested in Europe, in front of a sellout crowd of 59,659 that was very much vocally involved much of the night, although only about half remained by game’s end.

“Tonight was beyond a Coors Field game,” said DJ LeMahieu, who spent the previous seven seasons playing in that hitters’ paradise. “It was like something I’ve never been a part of.”

Few have.

Neither Rick Porcello nor Masahiro Tanaka made it through the first inning as each team scored six runs and sent 10 to the plate. The Yankees wound up with 19 hits to Boston’s 18. Each team used eight pitchers, with the Yankees throwing 214 pitches and the Red Sox throwing 208.

“Obviously, it was a struggle for both sides in the pitching department,” Aaron Boone said in the understatement of the evening.

No member of either team’s pitching staff made any excuses, though outfielders from each club commented on the sun setting directly behind home plate — the game started just after 6 p.m. local time — as contributing to a handful of misreads and odd routes taken to balls. A super-fast turf contributed to baseballs shooting through the infield for hits or balls aggressively finding the outfield gaps.

Was it just one of those “freak” things in which both clubs’ hitters couldn’t be stopped, or was it the result of a hitter-friendly stadium? “No, it’s a hitter’s ballpark,” Aaron Hicks said with a laugh. “We’re a powerful lineup, they have a powerful lineup, and any ball hit in the gaps here has an opportunity to go out.”

The Yankees had 18 hits in the first five innings in taking a 17-6 lead, but the Red Sox brought the tying run to the plate in the eighth before Zack Britton escaped the jam by getting Marco Hernandez to ground out to third with the bases loaded.

The game ended with a spectacular double play, as Didi Gregorius dived to his left to snare a hard shot by Sam Travis and made a backhand flip to Gleyber Torres, who barehanded the relay and fired to first to end it.

Through 4 1⁄2 innings, LeMahieu was 4-for-5 with five RBIs, Luke Voit was 4-for-4 with three doubles, and Gregorius (three runs) and Brett Gardner each had three RBIs.

Hicks (who hit the first homer on European soil in MLB history when he went deep off Porcello), Gardner (who broke a 6-6 tie with a two-out, two-run homer in the third) and Aaron Judge went deep for the Yankees, who also had seven doubles. LeMahieu improved to an astounding 34-for-70 this season with runners in scoring position.

The negatives for the Yankees: Voit left the game in the fifth with a lower abdominal injury on his left side, the severity of which was unclear. After his RBI double in the first, Edwin Encarnacion struck out in his last five at-bats.

Michael Chavis had a pair of two-out, three-run homers off Tanaka and Nestor Cortes Jr. in driving in six runs for the Red Sox, who had three homers and three doubles. Jackie Bradley Jr. had four hits and J.D. Martinez added three.

The AL East-leading Yankees (53-28) moved 10 games ahead of the Red Sox, 11 in the loss column, and remained seven games ahead of the Rays. With their 12th victory in 13 games, they hit the halfway mark a season-high 25 games over .500 in a season that has had four distinct parts: 6-9, 32-10, 3-8 and 12-1. They have the best record in the American League, are a game behind the MLB-leading Dodgers (56-29) and have the fewest losses in the majors.

Each team had a pair of six-run innings. The first inning lasted 58 minutes and featured a total of 92 pitches. Three hours into the game, the teams had completed 4 ½ innings.

The game no doubt was the first for many of the fans in the crowd. What would Boone’s impressions of the sport have been if it had been his first?

“I actually gave that some thought at various points during the game looking into the crowd,” he said. “They were probably like, ‘Wow, this is pretty long.’ Then I thought, cricket takes like all weekend to play, so I’m sure a lot of people are used to it. They saw great hitters do some great things . . . but we should remind them that there’s not 30 runs every game.”

It technically was a Red Sox home game, and the crowd was about 60-40 Boston to New York fans. The latter made plenty of noise in the top of the first when the Yankees drove Porcello from the game after one-third of an inning, and the former quickly had their chance to voice their support in the bottom half when the Red Sox knocked out Tanaka after two-thirds of an inning. The two starters combined to provide about as much length as the typical opener.

“Just an amazing experience,” LeMahieu said. “Obviously, the game was wild, so I won’t forget that, but the stadium, the atmosphere, looking up in the outfield and seeing all those people out there, it’s pretty special. Pretty special to play out there.”

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.