ANAHEIM, Calif. — The bus rides and cross-country flights are supposed to be the hard part. For the Yankees on Monday night, the flight was the easy part.
Two days earlier, the New York Yankees had buried the Boston Red Sox under a 16-1 avalanche, a statement loud enough to make a wild-card race feel briefly settled. They arrived on the West Coast riding 25 runs across two games and the smug comfort of a series won against their closest peer in the American League postseason race.
None of that boarded the plane with them. What landed instead was a version of this Yankees roster that has surfaced too often in 2026, one that hands opponents extra outs and free bases and then wonders where the night went. The offense that had looked reborn against Boston went quiet. The pitching staff could not find the strike zone. And the defense turned routine plays into gifts.
The scoreboard eventually read like a mismatch, but it was nothing of the sort. This was not the Angels overpowering anyone. This was the Yankees getting in their own way, inning after inning, until a game they should have controlled slipped fully out of reach in front of a home crowd that had almost nothing to cheer about all month.
A 10-1 loss that Yankees authored themselves
The Yankees lost 10-1 to the Los Angeles Angels at Angel Stadium, opening a six-game West Coast trip with one of their sloppiest performances of the season. New York committed three errors, walked and hit batters at a rate that kept rallies alive, and helped a last-place club end a long home skid.
The Angels entered the night at 53-85, tied for the worst record in baseball and losers of seven straight. They had not won at home since Aug. 15. The Yankees, sitting at 78-60, walked into Anaheim as heavy favorites and left having done the reeling home team a considerable favor.
The defeat cost New York a clean chance to gain ground in the AL East. The Yankees remained 4 1/2 games behind the first-place Tampa Bay Rays. It also let Boston creep closer in the wild-card picture, trimming the Yankees’ cushion for the top AL wild-card spot to three games. The 16-1 rout of the Red Sox suddenly looked less like separation and more like one loud weekend.
Elmer Rodriguez’s audition takes an alarming turn
Much of the wreckage traced back to the mound, where rookie right-hander Elmer Rodriguez was making his second start since a recent recall, filling the rotation spot vacated when Ryan Weathers landed on the injured list. Rated the Yankees’ No. 3 prospect by MLB Pipeline, the 23-year-old had delivered six innings of three-run ball against the Astros last week, a start that hinted he had solved something during his time at Triple-A.
Monday undid much of that goodwill. Rodriguez cruised through three innings, touching 98 mph with his sinker and piling up five strikeouts. Then his command vanished. He issued a two-out walk in each of the first three innings, and the third one, following a leadoff double, led to Vaughn Grissom’s run-scoring single and a 1-0 Angels lead.
The fourth inning was worse. With two outs and nobody on, Rodriguez hit Oswald Peraza and Tyler Heineman in back-to-back at-bats, both on curveballs, a pitch that had behaved for him earlier. Zach Neto followed with an RBI single, and Mike Trout laced a two-run single to left to make it 4-0. Rodriguez was pulled after 3 2/3 innings, charged with four earned runs on four hits, three walks and two hit batsmen over 91 pitches. He remains winless through six major league starts, and this was his shortest outing yet.
Rodriguez and Boone refuse to hide behind schedule
Rodriguez did not dodge the issue afterward. Asked what unraveled a start that began so cleanly, the rookie pointed squarely at his inability to work ahead in counts.
“Just falling behind a lot of hitters, just not getting ahead in counts,” Rodriguez said. “When I was getting ahead, I was getting good results, but I was getting behind. They made an adjustment and got the hits when they had the chance.”
He was blunter about the sequence that broke the game open, the pair of hit batters that turned two outs and nobody on into a four-run inning.
“It’s really frustrating,” Rodriguez said. “Ahead of guys, attacking, and then it’s two hit batters, and then you got two straight hits, a couple runs. That’s the thing you don’t want.”
The Yankees had every convenient excuse available. Four games in three days against Boston, a red-eye flight, a cross-country time change. Manager Aaron Boone waved all of it off before anyone could reach for it.
“Obviously an ugly one for us tonight,” Boone said. “It’s just a great reminder that in this league, you’ve got to play well or you get it handed to you. So we’ve got to bounce back tomorrow.”
Boone also credited his rookie’s raw stuff even as he acknowledged the location betrayed him, noting the two-out walks that inflated the pitch count and shortened the outing.
“I thought stuff-wise, Elmer was pretty good, came out right away,” Boone said. “I thought he had some life to the sinker, but then just struggled to get consistently in the zone where he needed to.”
A circus in the field turns a deficit into a rout
If Rodriguez opened the door, the defense kicked it off the hinges. The Angels padded their lead in the fifth on a Christian Moore bloop that glanced off a sliding Spencer Jones’ glove in shallow right for a double. Reliever Michael Fulmer then tried to pick Moore off, and the throw skipped away Jose Caballero. Trent Grisham’s return throw from center had nothing on it, and a relay attempt sailed wide of the plate, letting Moore circle the bases for a 6-1 lead.
It got sloppier in the sixth behind Luis Gil, who was making his first major league appearance since April 26 and his first out of the bullpen. Gil appeared to induce an inning-ending double-play grounder to shortstop Caballero, who was starting in place of the injured George Lombard Jr. Caballero booted the ball, then bounced the rushed throw to first. Two errors on one play, no outs recorded, another run in. The Angels led 7-1.
Caballero did not sidestep his share of the collapse.
“Couple mistakes we made, including me,” Caballero said. “Just need to clean that up and play better baseball.”
The number that frames the Yankees’ season-long soft spot
With Caballero’s two miscues, the Yankees now lead all of Major League Baseball in errors from the shortstop position, 39 for the season. That is a remarkable figure for a contending club, and it lands at the exact moment the position has become a question mark.
Lombard Jr. remains out with knee inflammation, leaving Caballero to man shortstop in the interim. The instability runs deeper than one game, with Anthony Volpe being moved around the infield at Triple-A while Lombard recovers. A defense-first position has quietly become a liability just as the postseason race tightens, and Monday put that vulnerability under stadium lights.
There is a broader pattern, too. Of the Yankees’ games this season in which they surrendered 10 or more runs, three have come against these same Angels, more than against any other opponent in baseball. For a team with October ambitions, a recurring case of the Anaheim yips is not a footnote.
Spencer Jones’ lone answer and a familiar name on deck
New York’s only run belonged to Jones, whose towering solo homer to right-center in the fifth was measured as his eighth of the season and briefly cut the deficit to 4-1. Five of those eight have come over his last 30 games, and Boone has repeatedly praised the rookie outfielder’s adaptability at the plate. On a night when the lineup managed just five hits and no walks against Angels rookie Walbert Urena, Jones was the only Yankee to solve him.
Urena, the 22-year-old right-hander, was the story on the other side. He worked seven innings of one-run ball, scattering five hits, walking none and striking out eight while dropping his ERA to 2.85. The Angels named him their game MVP, and he made the Yankees‘ bats look nothing like the group that had torched Boston.
The margin only widened late. Closer David Bednar, pitching for just the second time in 10 days, was summoned for a low-leverage eighth and surrendered three runs, two on a Grissom double that capped the Anaheim infielder’s four-RBI night. Bednar had allowed just two runs all August entering the outing, making the blowup an unwelcome note for an unsettled bullpen even in garbage time.
The Yankees now hand the ball to Gerrit Cole on Tuesday, and the timing is fitting. Cole, an Orange County native and UCLA Hall of Famer, returns to a mound where he has thrived before, tasked with stopping the bleeding before it spreads to a full series. He is set to face Grayson Rodriguez, with first pitch scheduled for 9:38 p.m. ET on YES. A team that looked untouchable 48 hours earlier suddenly needs its ace to steady a trip that began in a heap.
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