NEW YORK — The Yankees’ stalled offense finally exhaled with Cody Bellinger boost.
In the 25 games without him, the Yankees scraped together just 3.5 runs a game. His return, slotted into a lineup already missing Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, carried the weight of a rescue.
Instead, the rescue came from the parts of the roster nobody circles on a scouting report.
The bottom of the Yankees order, the rookies and the reclamation projects, carried an 8-3 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays in front of 41,802 at Yankee Stadium. It clinched the series, pushed the Yankees to six wins in their last seven. The win kept them three games behind the first-place Tampa Bay Rays in the American League East with a month to play.
Bellinger did his part quietly, going 1-for-4 and scoring a run. But the story of the afternoon was buried lower, in the names that had gone cold for the better part of three months.
The one number that had haunted the Yankees
For nine games, the Yankees could not deliver with a runner in scoring position. They went 10-for-62, a .161 clip, and the failures piled up into a losing feeling even when the pitching held.
Sunday broke it. The Yankees finished 3-for-9 with runners in scoring position, and the tide turned in one decisive frame.
The Yankees loaded the bases with nobody out in the sixth against Toronto starter Jose Soriano, then nearly wasted it. Austin Wells struck out. Jose Caballero lifted a shallow fly that scored no one. With two outs and the game tied 2-2, the rally hung by a thread.
Trent Grisham worked a full count against reliever Braydon Fisher and drew a bases-loaded walk to nudge the Yankees ahead 3-2. Ben Rice followed against left-hander Mason Fluharty and dropped a two-run single into right field. In three swings and a walk, the offensive weakness that had defined the Yankees’ summer was gone.
Rice began the day hitting .121 in August with a .539 OPS. He went 2-for-5 and delivered when the pressure was highest.
Boone points to a swing that surprised him
Manager Aaron Boone had watched Ben Rice grind through a month of ugly at-bats. He said the young hitter’s cuts looked off even Sunday, right up until the swing that mattered.
“Benny, who I felt took some weird swings today, saved his best one for the toughest situation,” Boone said.
The three-run sixth flipped a tie into a lead the bullpen would protect. Toronto had clawed back from a 2-0 hole with single runs in the third and fourth, the second set up by a fielding error, before New York pulled away.
Two rookies keep pushing Yankees to new level
The engine of the Yankees win sat in the fifth and sixth spots. George Lombard Jr. and Spencer Jones combined for four hits, four runs and an RBI, and twice they built rallies by themselves.
In the second, Lombard slashed a leadoff single to the right side and Jones followed with a scorching RBI double into the right-center gap to put the Yankees ahead 2-0. Wells then doubled home the second run after Jazz Chisholm Jr. pulled a grounder to move a runner up.
The sixth started the same way. Lombard beat out a slow roller to third for an infield single, and Jones smoked a single over the shortstop to set the table for the breakthrough. Jones has hit safely in eight of his last 11 games and is slashing .307/.357/.564 in that stretch, with seven home runs on the season.
Their chemistry has become a running joke between them, the fast man on base and the big man driving him in.
“He told me after he scored, he’s like, ‘Man, I feel like we’ve been doing a lot of that,’ where he gets on base, I hit the ball in the gap and let him run around the bases,” Jones said.
Lombard, 21, recorded his fifth multi-hit game in his first 17 in the majors and is batting .288 with a .755 OPS. His glove has wobbled, with an error in three straight games, including a botched double-play grounder in the fourth that cost Carlos Rodon an extra dozen pitches. Boone is willing to live with the growing pains.
“They’re good players, so hopefully they can continue to kind of entrench themselves as key pieces going forward,” Boone said of the duo.
Buried metric that explains why New York can win like this
One number rarely makes the recap. Before Sunday, the Yankees had scored more than five runs just seven times across their previous 58 games, the entire span played without both Judge and Stanton. Sunday was the eighth, and their most productive day at the plate since Aug. 12.
The reason the drought has not sunk the Yankees is on the mound. Their relievers own the best ERA in the majors, 2.44, over their past 70 games dating to June 3. That margin means the lineup does not have to be great. It only has to be competent, and Sunday it was better than that.
Carlos Rodon, activated early to cover for the injured Max Fried, gave four innings and allowed two runs, one earned, on 76 pitches in his second start off the injured list. Paul Blackburn, Ryan Yarbrough and Brent Headrick followed with five innings of one-run relief. Blackburn earned the win. Soriano took the loss.
“It was good enough,” Rodon said. “Obviously I’d like to get past four there and get into the fifth, just take on a couple more outs, but I need to be a little more efficient with the pitch count.”
A contract-year bat finally warms as the schedule tightens
Chisholm added the exclamation points. From the No. 7 spot, he dropped the perfect sixth-inning bunt single that loaded the bases, then launched a two-run homer into the second deck in the seventh, his 18th of the year and his first long ball since Aug. 4. Grisham reached Monument Park with his own 18th homer in the eighth.
Chisholm has quietly gone 6-for-17 over five games with a double, a triple and a homer, a stretch that matters for a player facing an uncertain free-agent winter. Asked what he is chasing now, he did not blink.
“To win the World Series,” Chisholm said. “That’s the only goal I’ve got.”
The Yankees, 74-56, take Monday off before opening a three-game homestand set against the Houston Astros on Tuesday night, with Will Warren scheduled to start. Judge and Stanton remain out. For now, the lineup New York has left keeps finding ways to score, and Sunday it finally did the one thing it could not do all month.
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