NEW YORK — Camilo Doval was one strike from escaping the 11th inning. He never got it. The Yankees reliever unraveled at the worst possible moment Wednesday, walking in the go-ahead run with the bases loaded before the roof caved in entirely.
Doval’s meltdown handed the Detroit Tigers four runs in the top of the 11th and buried the Yankees in a 6-2 loss.
It completed a three-game sweep at Yankee Stadium and stretched the Yankees’ losing streak to a season-worst seven games.
The boos poured down from the fans who stayed, a fitting sound for a team in freefall.
Doval entered a tie game and left it a blowout, and the way he lost it, one cutter drifting over the plate and a cascade of walks, captured everything that has gone wrong for the Yankees over the past week. A first-place team a week ago, New York has now dropped nine of 11 and fallen behind the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League East.
The inning that fell apart
Doval actually started the 11th cleanly. He recorded two quick outs on groundballs, with the automatic runner, Kevin McGonigle, moving to third. One out from escaping, the Yankees intentionally walked Riley Greene to set up a force with first base open.
Then the command vanished. Doval walked rookie Hao-Yu Lee after getting ahead 0-2, missing badly with a 103 mph cutter and two more fastballs. He then walked Spencer Torkelson on a full count, forcing in McGonigle with the go-ahead run without allowing a hit.
The dam broke on the next swing. Zach McKinstry lined a single to right that scored three, the damage compounded when catcher Ali Sanchez airmailed the relay throw over Anthony Volpe‘s head at second base. It was the Yankees’ second error of the day and another example of the sloppy baseball that has defined the skid. Four runs scored in the inning, all with two outs.
New York went down in order in the bottom half, and the sweep was complete.
A rally wasted
The cruelest part was how hard the Yankees had worked to get to extra innings. Trailing 2-0 and held to two hits by Tigers starter Troy Melton through six-plus innings, they finally stirred in the ninth. Amed Rosario homered to left off Drew Anderson, his ninth of the season.
Jazz Chisholm Jr. then tied it almost single-handedly. He beat out an infield single, stole second and third on consecutive pitches, and scored the tying run on a wild pitch, manufacturing a run without another hit.
Fernando Cruz worked around his own wild pitch to survive the 10th. But the Yankees stranded the winning run at third in the bottom half, as Oswaldo Cabrera and Sanchez both struck out. Chisholm said the team knows the problem runs deeper than one inning.
“I feel like we’ve got to lock in, do all the small stuff,” Chisholm said. “We make a lot of mistakes, and I feel like we beat ourselves.”
A cutter that betrayed him
Doval’s out pitch is a hard cutter, the kind of weapon that once made Mariano Rivera untouchable in the same ballpark. On Wednesday, it did him no favors. On the YES Network broadcast, analyst Paul O’Neill watched the pitch flatten out and saw the whole slump in one delivery.
“That cutter just sits right up there for a left-handed hitter,” O’Neill said. “It finds a hole, and then the next thing you know, it’s a merry-go-round. Kind of a microcosm of what has happened to the Yankees over the past week.”
The velocity was there. The location was not. Doval touched 103 mph in the inning but could not land the pitch when it mattered, and a Tigers lineup that had done little all day suddenly did not have to swing.
A team out of answers
The numbers around Doval’s collapse are damning. During the seven-game skid, the Yankees have scored 17 runs and allowed 17 unearned runs, per Katie Sharp. The only other team in the past 100 years with such a stretch of seven losses, 17 or more unearned runs allowed and 17 or fewer scored is the 1989 Tigers.
The Yankees have now allowed 23 unearned runs over their last 12 games, their most in any 12-game span since 1989. Starter Will Warren deserved better, holding Detroit to two runs over 5 1/3 innings with seven strikeouts. Manager Aaron Boone did not soften the assessment afterward.
“It’s been a terrible week for us,” Boone said. “There’s no way of sugarcoating it. We’re capable of way more, obviously.”
The Yankees get an off day Thursday before hosting the Minnesota Twins, with reinforcements Ryan McMahon and Trent Grisham due back Friday. Then comes a four-game trip to face the first-place Rays. For now, Doval’s unraveling stands as the latest gut punch in a week the Yankees cannot wait to forget.
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