Red Sox down Yankees: 3 things you missed from Saturday’s game
By Eric Treuden
3 things you missed from Saturday’s epic Red Sox and Yankees matchup.
The Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees have one of the best rivalries in all of professional sports. The two juggernauts matched up once again in last night’s contest, one the Red Sox emerged victorious from in walkoff fashion.
Both starting pitchers fared well in this one. Yankees lefty Jordan Montgomery went 5.2 innings allowing two earned runs on five hits and striking out four.
Red Sox righty Kutter Crawford, making just his fourth career big league start, went five innings, allowing just one earned run on four hits while striking out six.
The game went to extra innings tied up at three. The Bronx Bombers scored two runs in the top half of the tenth inning but they did not hold the lead for long as the Sox came all the way back and ended up winning the game on an Alex Verdugo walkoff two-run single.
Red Sox down Yankees: 3 things you may have missed from the epic game
No. 1 – Mookie Betts trade return comes up big
One of the biggest trades in 2020 went down in February of that year when the Red Sox flipped former Cy Young Award winner David Price and former MVP Award winner Mookie Betts to the Dodgers in exchange for young-guns Alex Verdugo, Connor Wong and Jeter Downs.
While Wong has yet to make a huge impact at the major league level, it was both Verdugo and Downs that carried the team last night. Downs came on as a pinch-runner for J.D. Martinez in the bottom of the eighth and later got an at-bat and managed to come up big; notching both his first major league hit and RBI.
Two batters later, the 26-year-old Verdugo came up clutch in both the eighth and tenth innings of the game. He drove in the tying run in the eighth inning with a run-scoring single and then drove in both Rob Refsnyder and Downs in the tenth to win the game. While Mookie Betts remains one of the game’s best players, the trade return the Red Sox got from the Dodgers paid off big time last night.
No. 2 – Fenway Park is Aaron Judge’s Kryptonite
Everyone knows that Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge is one of the best baseball players in the league. The big right fielder is having a career-year in 2022 as he already has 30 home runs and 65 RBI in his first 82 games.
The one thing Judge can’t seem to do, however, is swing the bat at Fenway Park. In 32 regular season games he has managed just a .180 batting average, setting a record for visiting players that nobody wants under their belt.
From @EliasSports: Aaron Judge has a .180 batting average in 32 regular-season games at Fenway Park. It’s the lowest career average at Fenway for any visiting player with at least 125 plate appearances here since 1950.
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) July 10, 2022
Last year in 40 games against the Red Sox, Judge was 10-40 with two home runs, good for a .250 batting average. So far this season, he is just 6-23 with zero home runs and the majority of the at-bats coming in Fenway.
The Red Sox should find a way to make Judge’s new home ballpark Fenway in an effort to cool off his red-hot bat and give them a chance to overtake the Yankees in the standings.
No. 3 – Alex Verdugo wants to take back Fenway
Alex Verdugo has been gradually emerging as one of the Red Sox’s leaders in the clubhouse, winning over the hearts of his teammates and the Boston community.
After the game, Verdugo commented that even in a game that Boston managed to win, the Yankees fans overpowered even the hometown squad’s fans.
Verdugo: "You could hear it, even today, Yankees fans chanting. It was really loud for the Yankees. It felt like Boston was getting overpowered vocally by Yankees fans. It was like, 'We've got to get this back. This is our house. This is where we play. This ain't their field."
— Chris Cotillo (@ChrisCotillo) July 10, 2022
As things currently stand, the Red Sox are 15.0 games back of the Yankees in the AL East, a deficit that seems likely to be too tall of a task but as all baseball fans know, anything can happen in this game.
With more epic wins like last night’s, the Red Sox could string some victories together and make a push towards the top of the AL East with about two months left in the regular season.
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