Austin Wells pumped his glove toward Max Fried, as if the Yankees catcher expected the arms of home plate umpire Derek Thomas to follow moments later.
Fried’s 2-2 fastball to Astros right fielder Cam Smith had caught the outside edge of the zone, and a strike would’ve allowed the Yankees to escape a bases-loaded jam in the fifth still trailing by just two runs.
But Thomas didn’t call anything.
Wells crouched in disbelief.
Two pitches later, Smith doubled to score two runs and extend Houston’s lead.
And as a listless Yankees (62-56) group lost 7-1 to the Astros on Sunday in The Bronx, this wasn’t the only Thomas call that frustrated them, with manager Aaron Boone getting ejected for an MLB-leading fifth time this season in the third inning.
“It definitely would’ve been nice,” Fried said of the call during the Smith at-bat, “but no one’s gonna look back and really care, right? You just gotta be able to make the pitch and get out of it anyway.”
It didn’t take long for Boone’s frustrations with Thomas to boil over.
Trent Grisham, Ben Rice and Aaron Judge all had pitches outside the zone — per MLB.com’s locations — called strikes against them in the first inning.
Then, when a sinker scraped the edge of the zone two innings later and Thomas called a second strike against Ryan McMahon, Boone said enough to get ejected.
He proceeded to hop out of the Yankees dugout and continue arguing with Thomas — “You f—ing need to fix it,” Boone said, according to YES Network audio of the exchange — even as crew chief Jordan Baker stepped between the pair and kept shuffling to block Boone’s path. Postgame, after he watched his lineup manage just three singles and lose for the seventh time in nine games, Boone called the zone “a little all over the place.”
“I mean, I was on [Thomas] a lot,” Boone said. “That’s over and done with. Is what it is. That isn’t the reason we lost this game.”
That stemmed from the Yankees not generating a hit until Rice singled in the sixth.
That stemmed from Fried’s strong outing spiraling with a 36-pitch fifth inning.
But near the end of that frame, when a would-be strikeout was followed by a foul ball and then a sinker driven 88.8 mph toward the right field corner, Thomas’ missed call forced Fried to throw two more pitches — in addition to the six others that followed in the next at-bat before he finally escaped the inning.
And the second one drastically altered his afternoon.
“Just wanted to be able to come out of that [jam], especially keeping it in a tight game and keeping it within two,” Fried said. “Pushing it to four, it’s on me, and it’s frustrating.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
