Yankees having fun as they try to chase down the Rays
Yankees designated hitter Aaron Judge is greeted by Anthony Rizzo after his two-run home run during the sixth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays in an MLB baseball game at Yankee Stadium on Saturday, May 13, 2023. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The Rays blustered into the 2023 season looking like the main character in their own superhero origin story. Here was a team that came in with low-to-moderate expectations that instead won the first 13 games of the year. They felt indomitable, and even now, a quarter of the way through 162, they maintain an air of mystery that’s pretty rare in the age of quantification and optimization.
How is it that a bullpen full of “who’s that?” guys has managed to (mostly) contain its opponents? How is so much of their lineup on pace for career years? Also: Yandy Diaz is a big-time home run hitter now?
Call it the results of the Rays’ easy early schedule, or some level of sabermetric sorcery, but for a while there, the Yankees were in the difficult position of squaring off against an opponent with no on-paper vulnerabilities. The Rays are first in ERA and home runs and OPS and pretty much any other column you want to click on in Baseball Reference.
It should be frustrating. It should be infuriating. But after the Yankees’ 9-8 comeback win over the Rays on Saturday, there was one description the team used repeatedly: “Fun.”
“We’ve got a lot of grinders,” said Aaron Judge, who hit a pair of two-run homers. “These are some of the funnest games we’ve played all year . . . We’re facing the best and they’re bringing it every single night and we’re bringing it every single night.”
That’s different than the tune the Yankees were singing last week, when they lost two of three in St. Petersburg, but the Yankees also are different from what they were last week.
Judge is back from the injured list, Anthony Volpe is starting to heat up, and they’re embracing a type of scrapper mentality that helps key big innings — especially with new rules that make it so much easier to steal a base. (Volpe bunted, stole two bases and scored on a wild pitch! Anthony Rizzo bunted!)
The result: They’ve won two of the first three games of this four-game set, and on Saturday, they crawled back from a 6-0 deficit against ace Shane McClanahan.
Just as pivotally, the Rays still look good, but they don’t look untouchable. They’re also a little less mysterious than they were when they were hacking down the Tigers and A’s with gleeful efficiency.
It was the Yankees’ best win of the season, coming a day after their previous best win of the season (Rizzo hit two homers Friday, including a two-run shot in the eighth that erased the Rays’ lead).
“It’s awesome,” Rizzo said. “It’s great. It’s fun. It makes the season fun, and it makes tomorrow’s game more important.”
And while the Yankees still may be looking for the Rays’ obvious weaknesses, they do have the benefit of knowing their own game very, very well. They showed patience against McClanahan and finally pounced the third time around the order, scoring four runs in the fifth behind home runs from Kyle Higashioka and Judge.
Volpe led off the sixth with a bunt single and used the basepaths as his own personal launching pad, getting the Yankees to within 6-5 when Ryan Thompson’s breaking ball skittered away from Francisco Mejia for a wild pitch. Judge homered again that inning to give them the lead for good, and the bullpen held it — keyed by Jimmy Cordero, who ate up 1 2⁄3 innings, and closed out by Wandy Peralta, who wouldn’t buckle as the middle of the Rays’ order wasted pitch after pitch before he finally closed the door.
It was a confident style of baseball — the kind that comes from playing to your strengths rather than waiting for your opponent to show its weaknesses. It’s the style of baseball, too, that the Yankees will have to continue to hone if they’re going to crawl out from the AL East basement. They’re five games over .500 and still seven games back — a cruel quirk of playing in the world’s hardest division.
Before the game, Aaron Boone was reminded that they were a half-game out of a wild-card spot. It’s mid-May.
“Incomplete,” Boone said when asked about his assessment of this season at nearly the 25% mark. “A long way to go.”
Then, wryly: “I’m certainly looking forward to the next 74 ½% to go.”
He’s not wrong there. The Rays’ scorching-hot start made it easy to forget that this season still is in its earliest stages and that the Yankees, who’ve had 14 players hit the injured list, need a minute to find their footing. They’ve won five of their last six and are 8-3 in their last 11, with Giancarlo Stanton, Luis Severino and Carlos Rodon still on ice as they work to come back from injury.
Will it be enough to beat out the Rays?
Who knows? But this series has shown they’ve got the pieces to make it possible.
In the meantime, it’s sure going to be fun watching it play out.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
