Max Fried not at his best?
Some sloppy infield defense?
An injury to one of the best hitters in the game?
None of it stopped the freight train that is the Yankees on Sunday, as they beat the Orioles a third straight time, 11-3, and have won 13 of their last 15 overall.
Home runs by Ben Rice — who exited with a hand injury — and Aaron Judge gave the Yankees an early lead before they scratched together a run in the sixth to go ahead for good thanks to solid work by the bullpen and a seven-run eighth.
Facing Trey Gibson in his MLB debut, Rice opened the scoring with his 12th homer of the season with one out in the bottom of the first.
Judge followed with a routine grounder to third that was booted by Weston Wilson, as Judge reached second on the two-base fielding error, but was stranded.
The Orioles tied the game in the third.
Wilson led off with a single and swiped second after Fried threw to first base and seemingly had him picked off.
Blaze Alexander followed a with a flare to right to score Wilson, but Judge threw behind Alexander and got him at first.
Judge’s defensive excellence continued when he caught up to Taylor Ward’s shot to the wall in right and made a leaping grab for the second out of the inning.
The Yankees went up again in the bottom of the third, with Rice reaching on a double to shallow left and Judge coming through with his 13th home run of the year to make it 3-1.
But Fried, far from his sharpest on Sunday, gave it back again in the fourth.
Pete Alonso opened with a double and after a walk to Tyler O’Neill, an infield hit by Coby Mayo loaded the bases on a play Ryan McMahon may have been able to make.
With the bases loaded, a grounder up the middle by Leodys Taveras — stopped by Jazz Chisholm Jr. — went for another infield single to score a run and Baltimore tied it on a Jeremiah Jackson double play.
The Yankees had a chance to go up again in the fifth, but Cody Bellinger’s two-out liner to right bounced off the top of the wall for a double that sent Judge to third.
Chisholm grounder out to end the inning.
A leadoff double by Jasson Dominguez — from the right side — in the sixth sparked the Yankees, as he moved to third on a groundout by Austin Wells and, with the infield in, McMahon scored Domínguez on an infield single.
With McMahon on second, Trent Grisham hit a shot to right-center, but O’Neill made a diving grab to end it.
Brent Headrick got Adley Rutchsman to ground out to end the top of the seventh, leaving Samuel Basallo at third as the potential tying run.
The Yankees put an end to the drama in the eighth, as Domínguez hit a two-run homer — his first of the season — and Paul Goldschmidt, who replaced Rice at first, drove in a pair with a single.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
