CHICAGO — A four-run lead in the ninth should be the easy part. For the Yankees, it turned into the most nervous inning of the night.
The Yankees beat the White Sox 9-5 on Monday at Rate Field to open the series and move a season-high nine games over .500. The final margin looked comfortable. Almost nothing about getting there was.
Max Fried lasted just three innings. Seven relievers followed. The defense kicked the ball around, and a game that should have closed cleanly instead lurched toward a mess.
The Yankees had spotted the White Sox three runs in the first, clawed back, blew a lead, then reclaimed it. By the ninth, they led by four and simply needed three outs.
Those three outs nearly became an ordeal.
A dropped pop-up forces the closer into the fire
Camilo Doval started the ninth and could not finish it. He walked Munetaka Murakami, got a lineout, then coaxed a towering pop-up from Colson Montgomery that should have been the final out. Anthony Volpe called everyone off in shallow center and dropped it.
The error let a run score and left runners at the corners. What should have ended the game instead forced manager Aaron Boone to summon closer David Bednar for a single out, the last thing New York wanted after leaning on him all week.
Bednar answered. He struck out Chase Meidroth to end it and record his 21st save, stranding the tying run on deck. It was a one-batter rescue in a game that had threatened to unravel.
The appearance was Bednar’s fourth in six games, a workload the Yankees had hoped to avoid on a night they carried a four-run cushion into the ninth. The bullpen depth that has carried this team was stretched thin again.
An unlikely hero ends six years of waiting
The player who made the ninth survivable was the same one who broke the game open an inning earlier. Ali Sanchez, a 29-year-old journeyman catcher, crushed a three-run homer off Sean Newcomb in the eighth for the first home run of his major league career.
Sanchez reached the majors with the Mets in 2020, then bounced through the Cardinals, Marlins, Blue Jays and Red Sox organizations before the Yankees signed him to a minor league deal last winter. His blast landed in a season when New York has gotten almost nothing from the catcher spot, a hole general manager Brian Cashman has openly called an issue.
Sanchez described the moment as one he had imagined since childhood in Venezuela.
“I thought about it in my mind a lot,” Sanchez said. “You always dream to play in the big leagues. Having your first homer with a Yankees uniform and getting the ‘W,’ it’s special.”
Fried, whose short outing put the bullpen in a bind, made a point of celebrating the catcher who caught him.
“He works his tail off behind the plate,” Fried said. “He puts together real quality at-bats. For him to get in that spot and handle a fastball from a really good pitcher, I was really happy for him. It’s a long time coming.”
Chisholm and a gritty comeback set the tone
The Yankees needed the late fireworks because the early innings went sideways. Chicago jumped Fried for three runs in the first, capped by Braden Montgomery’s two-out triple, before New York had batted twice.
Jazz Chisholm Jr. led the response. His two-run double in the fourth tied the game at 4, part of a four-run frame. He later added a bunt single, a stolen base and an RBI single, a 2-for-4 night from the six spot in the order.
Ben Rice delivered the go-ahead hit, an RBI single in the seventh that scored Amed Rosario and put the Yankees ahead for good. Volpe, whose drop nearly cost them later, also cut down a runner at the plate with a sharp seventh-inning relay to protect the lead.
Chisholm framed the night as proof of the team’s refusal to fold, even shorthanded.
“It just shows,” Chisholm said, “that we’re never going to give up.”
A messy win that still counts in the standings
Boone reached back to a famous phrase to describe the night, borrowing the 1983 White Sox slogan of winning ugly. Two Yankees errors and a string of sloppy plays nearly undercut a strong offensive showing.
“We’ve got to play cleaner than that, but it was a really gritty effort by a lot of different people in that room,” Boone said.
The comeback was the Yankees‘ 27th of the season, the most in the American League, according to analyst Katie Sharp. It fit a team that has leaned on resilience while missing Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Cody Bellinger, the latter now out a month or more with a Grade 2 hamstring strain.
The win lifted the Yankees to 60-46, keeping them within striking distance in the American League East. They send Gerrit Cole to the mound Tuesday against the White Sox, still hunting for catching and bullpen help before the Aug. 3 trade deadline, and still finding ways to win the games that get away from them.
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