Conventional wisdom suggests the Yankees should be happy splitting a weekend series with the Rays, who remain baseball’s gold standard in mid-May. The relentless mindset the Yankees displayed in a pair of comeback wins over the AL East leader was encouraging, and they nearly pulled off a third in Sunday’s thrilling 8-7 loss before a crowd of 42,116.
While that’s all true, we can’t help but feel that this Mother’s Day was a missed opportunity for Aaron Boone & Co., a still-healing group that has plenty of hill to climb (eight games out) to get back in this division race.
Sure, the difference between the two teams on the field has been incredibly small — six of the seven games were decided by one run — but Sunday was a matter of a few inches and a couple of feet.
We’ll start with the final swing, a 399-foot blast by Aaron Judge that Jose Siri reeled in at the warning track in left-centerfield with the entire Stadium — including Rays reliever Jason Adam — holding its collective breath. This was the hardest-hit ball by anyone all game — 111.9 mph, according to Statcast — and would have cleared the fence in 19 of 30 ballparks. Just not the widest expanse of lawn in the Bronx.
“I hit it good, but off the bat, just too high — especially with how deep it is out there,” Judge said. “I was kind of praying for a miracle once it got up there.”
And speaking of praying for miracles, that’s probably what Boone was thinking when he brought in embattled reliever Albert Abreu to put out a raging fire in the fifth inning.
The Yankees already had roared back from a 3-0 deficit to go up 4-3 (sound familiar?) before the shaky Clarke Schmidt got busy trying to flush it all away.
Schmidt had survived the fifth only three times in eight starts this season (put an asterisk next to the six innings vs. the mail-it-in A’s), so Boone surely knew he was on thin ice, especially with the top of the Rays’ lineup waiting. Schmidt…
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