NEW YORK — For eight innings, two Yankees hitters kept their team breathing. Each homered to drag a struggling lineup back into the fight against the Cleveland Guardians. Then, with the tying run on base and the game hanging in the balance, the same two bats went silent at the worst possible time.
The Yankees fell 5-4 at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, a loss sealed not by their early holes but by a ninth inning that ended with their two biggest contributors making the final outs.
The two bats that kept the Yankees alive
On a night when the offense mostly sputtered, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Jose Caballero supplied nearly all the life. Chisholm answered an early Cleveland home run by driving a ball into the second deck in right off tough Guardians righthander Gavin Williams. The blast briefly pulled the Yankees even and gave the Stadium a jolt.
Caballero followed in the fourth inning. His solo home run cut Cleveland’s lead to 3-2 and kept New York within striking distance. Without those two swings, the Yankees would have had almost nothing to show for their night at the plate. Williams was sharp, holding New York to three runs and four hits over 5 1/3 innings with six strikeouts.
The two homers mattered even more given who was missing. The Yankees played a second straight game without Aaron Judge, and the lineup managed only five hits while looking flat for long stretches. Chisholm and Caballero were the exceptions, the players keeping the comeback hope alive.
A ninth inning full of promise
Here is where the night tightened. Trailing 5-3 entering the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees had every reason to fold. Instead, they mounted a threat that put the tying run in scoring position and brought the crowd back to its feet.
Paul Goldschmidt opened the inning with a double, exactly the kind of spark New York needed. Cody Bellinger followed with a deep sacrifice fly that scored a run and pulled the Yankees within 5-4. Suddenly the comeback was real, and the lineup had turned over to the very hitters who had carried them all night.
That was the moment. The Yankees needed one more hit from the two players who had already delivered. The tying run was aboard, the winning run was looming, and the matchup set up perfectly for a dramatic finish in the Bronx.
The heroes go cold when it counts
It did not come. Chisholm, who had homered earlier to keep the Yankees afloat, stepped in with a chance to tie the game and struck out. The energy in the ballpark dimmed in an instant.
Caballero was the last hope. The other Yankees hitter who had gone deep, he came up with the game on the line and flew out to end it. Just like that, the comeback was over. The two players who had been the offense’s heartbeat for eight innings could not produce the one swing that mattered most.
The cruelty of the sequence was hard to miss. Chisholm and Caballero had been the reason the Yankees were even in position to win. Then they were the reason the rally died. Baseball rarely scripts its endings so neatly, and rarely so painfully for the home crowd.
A loss that fits a troubling pattern
The defeat stung beyond the box score because of what it represented. The Yankees are now 6-12 in games decided by one run, a mark that ranks third-worst in the major leagues. Those 12 one-run losses are tied for the second-most in baseball. Close games keep slipping away from a team built to win them.
The series loss carried its own weight too. New York still owns just one series win all season against a team that entered Wednesday with a .500 or better record, a victory over the Mariners back in late March and early April. For a club with championship ambitions, the inability to beat quality opponents has become a genuine concern.
The Yankees also remain in a holding pattern with Judge, whose bone bruise in his right shoulder and upper rib cage area kept him out again. His bat was clearly missed in the late innings. On this night, though, the story was not who was absent. It was that the two Yankees who showed up biggest came up empty when one more hit would have changed everything.
They share a bigger responsibility for the loss than Cole.
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