Next year, the Red Sox will, inconceivably, celebrate the 20th anniversary of the historic 2004 season, including their historic toppling of the then-formidable New York Yankees.
The game’s greatest rivalry hasn’t been the same since that unparalleled ALCS, when Boston became the first team in Major League Baseball history to come back from a 0-3 deficit to win a best-of-seven postseason series. Upsetting the Yankees in such historic fashion seems to have permanently shifted the power balance between the warring clubs. Over the last two decades, the Red Sox have demolished their foes in every October meeting.
To paraphrase Steve Martin’s iconic Michael Scott, how the turntables have turned.
Friday night was the final nail in the coffin, and the Red Sox hammered it in hard in their 8-3 victory.
Entering the series opener, August was plodding along too quietly for the Boston bats; they’d topped out at four runs in nine of 15 games this month.
Before the Yankees could record a single out in the top of the first, the first four Boston batters matched that run total. Alex Verdugo led off with a double, and Rafael Devers joined him on base with a single. Justin Turner drove in the first run of the contest with a his team’s third consecutive hit, and then romped home with Devers when Masataka Yoshida walloped a 3-run homer.
By the end of the second, RBI singles by Devers, Turner, and Yoshida stretched that lead to 7-0. It only took Yoshida two at-bats to become the first Red Sox starter to drive in at least four RBI at Yankee Stadium since Mookie Betts on September 20, 2018.
“We’ve been struggling offensively, the last two weeks,” Alex Cora admitted to AppleTV’s Heidi Watney in a fourth-inning sideline chat. “It’s always good when you hit the ball out of the ballpark, but I think that the approach by Raffy (Devers) right away, hitting the ball the other way, set the tempo for the whole inning.”
The Yankees have been easy prey all season, and Brayan Bello has feasted on them since his 2022 debut. Taking the ball for the series opener, he made it clear that while his mentor, Pedro Martinez, is firmly retired, the Yankees still have a Red Sox pitcher to call their “Daddy.”
Over six innings, the 24-year-old right-hander held the Bronx busts to one earned run on six hits, a walk, and struck out four. According to the team’s media relations department, Bello now owns a 1.45 ERA over five career starts (31 total innings) against them.
Garrett Whitlock, Brennan Bernardino, and Chris Martin handled the remaining third of the night.
Whitlock, stolen from the Yankees in the Rule 5 Draft, faltered in his two-inning outing, though there’s a notable caveat to his two earned runs. According to Statcast, the 2-run homer Aaron Judge hit off the 27-year-old righty, was a classic Yankee Stadium cheap knock. In other words, the 342-footer wouldn’t have been a home run at any of the other 29 ballparks.
Yoshida’s didn’t travel much farther, but at 376 feet, would’ve also been gone in Cincinnati and Anaheim.
Bernardino allowed two hits and only recorded one out (a strikeout), but he’s been as reliable they come this season. Likewise for Martin, who’s been one of the best bullpen arms in the game this year. His ERA is down to 1.32 after slamming the door in the Bronx, his ninth consecutive scoreless outing. He’s allowed one run over his last 26 outings.
Entering the weekend, the Red Sox were 5-1 in their meetings with the Yankees. They’ve now won as many rivalry contests as they did all last year, when they finished the final pre-balanced schedule season 6-13.
On the Sunday before Opening Day, this reporter wrote, “It feels like the Yankees are always picked to be the best team in the division, the league, the entire show, and win it all, even though they haven’t won the pennant since 2009.”
USA Today said the American League East was “still the Yankees’ to lose.” ESPN projected they’d finish the year 96-66, the fourth-best record in the Majors, and win their division for just the third time since 2012. The Athletic’s Keith Law declared that the Toronto Blue Jays would top the AL East, one game ahead of a still-respectable 92-win New York club, “the class of the division,” while the Orioles and Red Sox would finish fourth and fifth, respectively. PECOTA and ZiPS both declared this the Yankees’ year.
More than halfway through August, the Yankees instead run a legitimate risk of bringing their streak of 30 consecutive winning seasons to a screeching halt. FanGraphs now projects they’ll finish the year 81-81. According to Stathead’s Katie Sharp, they haven’t been under .500 this late in a season since the end of 1992.
The Red Sox, meanwhile, improved to just 2 1/2 games out of a Wild Card spot.