Judge’s monster homer leads Yanks to 5-1 win over Mariners

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the Yankees have won two straight games and are 5-4 since the All-Star break. Crazy, I know. They might actually win a series this weekend. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. The Yankees took the second game of this four-game set against the Mariners on Friday night by the score of 5-1. Monster home runs and dynamite relief pitching. My kinda ballgame. West Coast night games get bullet points recaps, so let’s get to it:

• Vintage Sabathia: Vintage start for CC Sabathia. He labored a bit early, everyone freaked out about his pitch count, and yet there he was on the mound in the sixth inning, with only one run on the board. And that run scored because Chase Headley is a third baseman playing first. He ranged too far to his right on a ground ball and missed the bag when he rushed to get back. That would have been the final out of the first inning. Instead, the runner was safe and a run scored. Womp womp. Sabathia allowed the one run on four hits and three walks in five innings plus one batter. He struck out five. A workmanlike effort.
• Loud Contact: The first two innings did not go to well against rookie righty Andrew Moore. The Yankees got to him in the third when back-to-back doubles by Headley and Clint Frazier — Frazier flicked his wrists and smashed the ball off the center field wall — tied the game 1-1. Later in the inning Aaron Judge added a long sacrifice fly to give the Yankees a 2-1 lead. They broke it open in the fifth inning. Single by Brett Gardner, single by Gary Sanchez, three-run home run by Judge. He almost hit it out of Safeco Field. The video is above. The guy in the last row of the upper deck caught it. Insane. Feels like an eternity since Judge last that. That mammoth homer gave the Yankees a 5-1 lead.
• Bullpen On Parade: With the four-run lead, Joe Girardi went to his top relievers. Tommy Kahnle (one strikeout) in the sixth, David Robertson (three strikeouts) in the seventh, and Dellin Betances (two strikeouts) in the eighth. Adam Warren threw the ninth with the four-run lead. Aroldis Chapman has pitched five times in the last eight days, so yeah. Betances allowed a double just inside the bag and an opposite field single, but otherwise the bullpen shut things right down. Glad to have Robertson back. Some guys just look right in a Yankees uniform.
• Leftovers: Nice little game for Clint Frazier, who doubled off the wall and made a great diving catch in left field. He also hit two other balls on the screws for outs. If they send Clint back to Triple-A when Aaron Hicks gets healthy, we riot … three hits for Didi Gregorius and two for Headley. The only starter without a hit was Todd Frazier … only three strikeouts for the offense, their second lowest total of the season. They struck out once in a game against the Rays in April (Jordan Montgomery’s debut).

Here are the box score, video highlights, and updated standings. Don’t miss our Bullpen Workload page either. This series continues Saturday night — that’s a 9pm ET start — with Masahiro Tanaka and lefty Ariel Miranda on the mound. The first series win in more than a month is within reach.

Source: FanGraphs