NEW YORK — The Yankees were hitless in seven straight at-bats with runners in scoring position when Trent Grisham stepped up in the sixth inning Thursday afternoon. MacKenzie Gore had kept them quiet all day. The Rangers led 2-1. The homestand was on the line.
Grisham crushed a ball to the gap in left-center and watched it carom off the wall. Three runs scored. The stadium woke up. And the Yankees did not stop there.
Six runs in the inning. Two more in the seventh. A 9-2 final. New York closed out its homestand with a series win over Texas, extended its run to six consecutive series victories and improved to 26-12 on the season.
Grisham breaks it open with bases-clearing double
The sixth inning started with walks to Bellinger and McMahon and a bloop single from Rosario to load the bases. Gore had been sharp all afternoon. The Yankees loaded the bases with one out and brought up Grisham.
Grisham had other ideas. He drove the first pitch he could handle into the left-center gap. All three runners scored. Gore was pulled. The Yankees led 4-2 and never looked back.
J.C. Escarra followed with an RBI single to score Grisham. Aaron Judge laced an RBI single of his own. Bellinger added another. The Yankees sent eight batters to the plate and scored six runs off a starter who had held them to one through five.
Manager Aaron Boone had watched Grisham battle through a miserable stretch of bad luck all season. His batting average had dipped to .151 in late April despite hard contact in nearly every game. Boone singled out the moment when asked about the key play of the game.
“I think that Grish at-bat’s the at-bat of the game,” Boone said. “He has been incredibly unlucky, because I feel like he’s hitting the ball off the barrel a couple of times a game and not being rewarded. The hit of the game was the bases-clearing double, so it’s good to see him get some results.”
The statistical case was real. Per MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, only five players this season have a larger gap between batting average and expected batting average than Grisham’s 73 points. Thursday the Yankees outfielder finally got his reward.
Grisham finished 3-for-4 with three RBIs and two runs scored. He also stole a base in the seventh and scored on Max Schuemann’s first Yankees hit. Bellinger matched him with three hits and a walk. Every Yankees starter recorded at least one hit and six drove in a run.
Beck makes MLB debut, bullpen shuts the door
The Yankees were without their scheduled starter Ryan Weathers, who was scratched due to illness. Paul Blackburn opened the game but lasted only one inning before giving way to Brendan Beck, who was making his major league debut after being promoted from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre earlier Thursday morning.
Beck was 27 and had never thrown a Yankees pitch in the majors. His wife traveled from Scranton, his parents caught a red-eye from California and his brother Tristan, a pitcher in the Giants system, was granted the day off to watch from the stands.
Brendan Beck pitched three-plus innings, allowed two runs on a Duran homer and walked three but made enough key pitches. Boone was asked about the difficulty of a same-day call-up for a matinee start.
“He held his own out there and gave us a chance to win,” Boone said. “He made enough big pitches when he had to. We felt like, if he could get us to the middle of the game, we were set up pretty good from there. And he did that.”
Beck was optioned back after the game. Tim Hill stranded two Yankees-threatening runners in the fifth to preserve a 2-1 deficit. Camilo Doval finished with a clean ninth.
Beck put it plainly when asked about the experience of his first big-league outing.
“It was really special,” Beck said. “It’s a dream come true. You always want it to happen and think it’s going to happen, but it actually does. I can take that back and now really get to work.”
Bellinger, depth deliver again
Bellinger had set the tone in the first inning. With Joc Pederson struggling in right, a Goldschmidt flyball caromed away from him for a triple. Cody Bellinger then lined a ball past a diving Pederson for a second triple and a 1-0 Yankees lead.
Texas tied it in the third on Duran’s homer and added a fifth-inning run. Duran had five hits in eight at-bats in the series. Jazz Chisholm Jr. made a diving play to limit the damage. The Yankees trailed 2-1 entering the sixth.
What followed was a clinic in Yankees depth. Fourteen hits. Eight runs after the fifth. Bellinger summed up what it meant.
“The depth is what makes us a really good team,” Bellinger said. “We’ve got a lot of players that can do a lot of different things on a baseball field. Today was just a great example of that.”
Ryan McMahon, who entered after Dominguez was carted off, went 2-for-3 with an RBI. Max Schuemann added the first hit and RBI of his Yankees career. Escarra contributed a key run-scoring single in the sixth.
The Yankees head to Milwaukee with their roster tested, their depth proven and their confidence fully intact.
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