NEW YORK — Trent Grisham rounded third base in the eighth inning Friday night and never broke stride. The Yankees needed a run. He was the one on the move. A double had banged off the right-center-field wall, and the tying run was ninety feet away.
He did not make it. A relay from the Dodgers cut him down at the plate, and a 1-0 game stayed a 2-1 loss.
The play drew the eye and the second-guessing. Third-base coach Luis Rojas had waved him home. The runner was slow. The throw was perfect. On its face, it looked like the moment that beat the Yankees at Yankee Stadium.
Grisham did not see it that way, and neither did his manager. But the tag at the plate hid a larger problem, one that has followed this lineup for a month.
The send was not why the Yankees lost. Over their last 25 games, the Yankees are averaging 3.32 runs per game, the lowest mark in the majors since June 18. A team scoring that little cannot afford to run into outs, but it also cannot afford to sit and wait for a rally that rarely comes. The play at the plate was a symptom, not the disease.
A perfect relay ends the Yankees’ best chance
The sequence began with a one-out walk. Grisham worked it against left-hander Alex Vesia. Then Ben Rice drove a double off the wall in right-center. Grisham did not fully take off from first base until it was clear the ball was landing.
What followed was a defensive gem. Center fielder Andy Pages threw hard but off-line, forcing Mookie Betts to sprint in from short center and relay home on the run. Catcher Dalton Rushing backhanded the throw up the line and swept the tag onto Grisham’s cleat.
Replay confirmed the out. The Yankees had put their best swing on a ball all night and still came away with nothing.
Grisham called it what it was, a photo finish that went the other way.
“It was bang-bang,” Grisham said.
Grisham backs the send and clears his coach
The easy story was to fault Rojas for sending a slow runner. Grisham refused to go there. He said he read the ball off the bat and picked up his coach without confusion.
“I saw it was a double off the wall, so I’m assuming go at all times,” Grisham said.
He did acknowledge one wrinkle. Grisham said he was conscious of his hamstring, which he strained in June and which cost him three weeks into July. Even so, he put the result on the defense, not the decision.
Manager Aaron Boone stood behind Rojas just as firmly. He said the coach read a throw sailing over the second baseman and gambled that Betts could not make a perfect play on the run. Betts did.
“I don’t have an issue with taking the shot there,” Boone said.
The numbers behind a costly gamble
The math tells a harsher story than the men involved will. Entering Friday, Grisham had taken an extra base just 23 percent of the time, 145th of 151 qualified players.
He hit his fifth-fastest sprint speed of the season on the play, 28.6 feet per second, and was still thrown out. Holding him would have left runners on second and third with one out and Paul Goldschmidt due up, though the Dodgers likely would have walked Goldschmidt to load the bases for Cody Bellinger.
Instead, Vesia issued that intentional walk anyway and got Bellinger to fly out to end the inning. The Yankees had traded a runner for nothing.
Yet the deeper issue was never the baserunning. It was the scoreboard. The Yankees managed six hits, went 0-for-4 with runners in scoring position and left six on base against Roki Sasaki and the Dodgers bullpen. Their lone run was unearned, scored in the fourth when Jasson Dominguez doubled, took third on a Pages error and came home on a passed ball.
The loss carried a cost in the standings. With the Red Sox sweeping a doubleheader from the Rays, the Yankees could have gained a game and a half but settled for a half-game, sitting 2 1/2 back at 54-43.
New York turns to Ryan Weathers on Saturday, then Cam Schlittler in Sunday’s finale, against a Dodgers rotation featuring Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The send at the plate will get replayed. The bigger question, the one the numbers keep asking, is when the offense wakes up.
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