NEW YORK — The Yankees stole six bases, put eight runners aboard against one of baseball’s hardest throwers and still walked off their own field looking lost.
Father’s Day at Yankee Stadium turned into an afternoon the Bronx would rather erase. Cincinnati rookie ace Chase Burns held New York to one run over five innings, and the last-place Reds finished a 4-1 win Sunday to take the three-game series.
The loss exposed a Yankees club that ran wild on the bases yet could not deliver a hit when it mattered, then unraveled on defense in a sloppy late inning. New York dropped its third game in four and saw a homestand fizzle to 3-3, though the team stayed atop the American League East by two games.
For a contender eyeing the postseason race, the day raised familiar questions about situational hitting and clean baseball.
Yankees run wild but cannot cash in
New York stole six bases for the first time since Sept. 5, 2013. Jasson Dominguez, Cody Bellinger and Jazz Chisholm Jr. swiped two apiece for a lineup that leads the AL with 80 steals.
The aggression went nowhere. The Yankees went 0 for 9 with runners in scoring position and finished 2 for 32 over the series. Dating to the eighth inning of Friday’s 5-0 win, they are hitless in their last 24 at-bats with a runner in scoring position.
Burns stranded at least one runner at second or third in four of his five innings. Chisholm popped out with runners on second and third to end the first. Austin Wells popped out with a runner at third to close the third.
Wells offered a plain read on a frustrating afternoon at the plate.
“The ball just didn’t really roll the way we needed it to,” the catcher said.
The lone breakthrough came in the third, when Ben Rice drove his 22nd home run for a 1-0 lead. It did not hold. Cincinnati catcher Tyler Stephenson answered with a two-out, three-run homer off rookie Elmer Rodriguez in the fourth.
Boone’s roster choices invite scrutiny
Boone kept Gerrit Cole away. Paul Goldschmidt was not starting to the chagrin of fans.
The defensive breakdowns traced back, in part, to how Boone arranged his roster. In the seventh inning he sent out one of the season’s most precarious alignments, with Dominguez in right field, Caballero in center, Max Schuemann in left, Amed Rosario at third base and Rice at first.
That patchwork unit was tested an inning later. The Reds added insurance in the eighth, and the Yankees handed it to them. Spencer Steer rolled a soft grounder up the middle that skipped under Chisholm’s glove. Caballero, freshly moved to center, charged the ball and threw.
The throw sailed over second base and rolled to the backstop, letting Steer reach third. Boone pinned the breakdown on slow reactions and a botched relay rather than the alignment.
Steer scored on Noelvi Marte’s ground-rule double to the right-field corner. Dominguez, making his seventh career start in right amid Aaron Judge’s injury absence, could not corral it before it bounced over the wall, a play a natural right fielder might have ended.
The defense had cost the Yankees earlier, too. With Blake Dunn aboard, JJ Bleday lined a ball up the middle that Anthony Volpe snared before stepping on second and throwing to first for what looked like an inning-ending double play.
The home plate umpire wiped it out. Wells, just back from the injured list, reached his glove too far forward and Bleday’s bat clipped it. The play went down as catcher’s interference, Wells’s second error of the season. Instead of two outs and a clean frame, the Yankees had a rally to defuse.
Volpe stews over a pickoff call
The Yankees’ frustration boiled over in the third inning. Burns picked Anthony Volpe off first base just before Rice homered, and Volpe argued that Stewart’s foot blocked his lane back to the bag on a headfirst dive.
Volpe said first base umpire Brian O’Nora would not review the play on the video board.
Boone saw merit in the complaint but conceded the call rarely goes the runner’s way. Burns, he noted, owns one of the better pickoff moves in the game even while staying slow to the plate, the same slowness the Yankees exploited on the bases.
Rodriguez and the rotation reset
Rodriguez, 22, allowed three runs and four hits over four-plus innings with a career-high four strikeouts in his fourth big league start. He fell to 0-2 with a 4.76 ERA and has yet to reach five innings in any outing.
The Yankees‘ top pitching prospect started in place of Gerrit Cole, who was bumped back with the rotation for extra rest during a stretch of 16 straight games without an off-day. New York optioned Rodriguez to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre after the game.
Burns, in his second MLB season, improved to 9-1 with a 2.00 ERA and became the first Reds pitcher to win eight straight decisions since Tom Browning in 1989. The Yankees now head to Detroit, where Cole faces Tigers left-hander Framber Valdez in Monday’s series opener.
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