ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The Yankees collected only three hits Monday night. All three left the ballpark, and that was enough to end a stretch of misery.
Jose Caballero hit two of them, punishing the team that traded him a year ago and dragging a slumping New York lineup to a 5-1 win over the first-place Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field.
For four innings, this looked like another quiet night for the Yankees. Rays starter Griffin Jax retired the first 13 batters he faced and piled up strikeouts.
The break came in the top of the fifth. Jax struck out Cody Bellinger to start the inning, then walked Jasson Dominguez and Jazz Chisholm Jr. to put two on with one out.
Caballero fell behind in the count and fouled off two pitches before Jax left a changeup over the middle. He drove it 395 feet to left field for a three-run homer, the Yankees’ first hit of the game. He added a solo shot off reliever Chris Roycroft in the eighth for his career-high 10th home run of the season.
Ben Rice provided the cushion. He took Roycroft deep in the ninth for his 25th homer, giving the Yankees a four-run lead before David Bednar closed it out with a perfect ninth.
Jax took the loss despite striking out 10 over five innings. The two walks in front of Caballero proved decisive.
A revenge night against his old team
Caballero came to the Yankees from Tampa Bay last July, and both two-homer games of his career have come against the Rays. The bat tosses and a bow-and-arrow celebration Monday were aimed at his teammates as much as his former club.
“I’m trying to spark the team somehow, someway,” Caballero said. “We’re struggling right now with going through a bad stretch. Something that can get the team going a little bit and get them excited, it’s always good.”
Schlittler answers with a rebound gem
The homers backed a starter who badly needed a good night. Cam Schlittler had allowed a career-worst six runs and four home runs in his previous outing against the Detroit Tigers, a start Boone called arguably the toughest of his young career.
Schlittler answered with eight innings of one-run ball, allowing four hits and striking out eight without a walk. He said the criticism after Detroit gave him an edge.
“They want to say that there’s regression because I have one bad outing,” Schlittler said. “So it was personal to go out there and have a dominant start and put this team in the right position.”
The performance lowered his ERA to an AL-leading 2.01, second across the majors only to Milwaukee’s Jacob Misiorowski, and strengthened his case to start the All-Star Game for the American League.
Tampa Bay’s only run came in the fifth on a two-out RBI single from Richie Palacios, who had two of the Rays’ four hits.
Echoes of a wild night in 2004
The victory was just the Yankees’ second in 11 games and trimmed the Rays’ lead in the AL East to three games.
It was also a slice of history. New York became the fifth team in the Modern Era to win a game in which every one of its hits was a home run, and the first to do it while striking out 17 times.
The all-homer formula pointed straight back to one afternoon in Detroit. On July 15, 2004, the Yankees beat the Tigers 5-1 with all five of their hits leaving the yard.
Alex Rodriguez homered twice that day. Derek Jeter, Hideki Matsui and Kenny Lofton added the others, all solo shots, in a franchise-record five-homer, five-hit win.
The pitching line rhymed with Monday, too. Jose Contreras threw eight innings of one-run ball before Mariano Rivera recorded the final three outs, the same division of labor the Yankees got from Schlittler and Bednar against the Rays.
Monday marked only the second time in Yankees history the team won a game with at least three hits and every one a home run. The 2004 game in Detroit was the first.
The Yankees improved to 50-40 and remain second in the AL East, three games behind Tampa Bay. They have three more games in this series at the Trop before closing the first half at the Washington Nationals, still chasing the consistency this strange, powerful night did not quite prove they have found.
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