Yankees’ season ends in bitter disappointment again as Rays sweep ALDS
New York Post · RC · trust 45/100
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From the bulk of their offseason all the way down to a repeat October exit in the ALDS against the division foe who was simply better than them all season.
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For the 17th straight year, the Yankees will not be World Series champions, this time falling woefully short of a 28th title as they were swept out of the ALDS in three games by the Rays in a 4-3 loss Wednesday night at a sold-out Yankee Stadium.
After the Yankees lineup let them down in Game 1 and their defense joined in to fail them in Game 2, their bats were held in check once again in Game 3 and Max Fried could not limit the damage, resulting in an all-too-familiar feeling in The Bronx.
The playoff run ended with Aaron Judge watching from the dugout , the Yankees unable to get deep enough to give their captain a chance to return from a right calf strain that he suffered in mid-September.
After they survived the three-time MVP missing over half of the regular season with a right rib stress fracture, the Yankees could not do the same in October.
And so, a year after they bailed out of the ALDS in four games against the AL East champion Blue Jays, the Yankees played their way into another early exit, entering another offseason in which they will face more questions about how they might finally end their drought — if and when baseball is played next year with a lockout looming.
After clobbering the Red Sox in the wild-card series in which they never trailed, the Yankees never led against the Rays. They mustered all of five runs across the three games, their offense outside of Ben Rice coming up small.
Rice was on deck in the ninth inning when Trent Grisham, with the tying run on second, chased a pitch well out of the zone to end it.
Trailing 4-2 in the sixth, after Victor Mesa Jr. crushed a two-run shot in the top of the inning to knock Fried out of the game, the Yankees briefly thought they had tied it on a two-run homer from Anthony Volpe that had the building shaking.
But replays showed a fan reached over the left field wall to interfere with the ball that was not going to clear the fence, and after a crew chief review, the play was ruled an RBI double to make it a 4-3 game.
Spencer Jones then struck out to strand Volpe at second.
Fried, following a regular season in which he spent two stints on the injured list for a left elbow bone bruise, was not his sharpest. Twice after the Yankees had tied the game, he gave up home runs to give the Rays the lead back.
The first came on Ryan Vilade’s solo shot in the fourth inning, inches past the outstretched glove of a leaping Spencer Jones at the short porch, to put the Rays up 2-1.
Then in the sixth, Fried hung a sweeper and by the time Mesa put a swing on it, the left-hander had dropped to his knee because he knew what was coming. Mesa’s two-run shot sailed high and far into the right field seats, giving the Rays a 4-2 lead.
For the third time in three games, the Rays struck first. They set the table in the third inning with a pair of infield singles before Jonathan Aranda came up with two outs and roped a single through the right side for the 1-0 lead.
The Yankees got a break, though, as Luis García Jr. cut off Spencer Jones’ throw home and caught Aranda between first and second, which eventually resulted in the Yankees tagging out Taylor Walls between third and home to end the frame.
Then in the bottom of the inning, the Yankees found an immediate answer against Rays right-hander Nick Martinez. Jones, who was dropped to eighth in the lineup after entering the night 2-for-15 in the postseason, led off with a walk and moved to second on José Caballero’s productive groundout.
With two outs, Rice delivered a single through the right side to tie it 1-1, meaning Rice had driven in each of the Yankees’ first three runs of the series.
After Vilade’s homer, the Yankees answered again in the bottom of the fourth as Volpe hit a comebacker off Martinez, at which point Rays manager Kevin Cash went to his bullpen for lefty Ian Seymour. Jones greeted him with a double as Volpe raced all the way around from first to score, tying the game at two.
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