Yankees Highlights: Pitching gets crushed again as Red Sox cruise

Whatever good vibes that were engendered by the Yankees’ rousing series victory in Minnesota have long been extinguished. They dropped their third in a row today by a score of 9-5, again thanks to a pitching staff that put up little resistance against the Boston lineup. The good news, of course, is that this rough stretch has come only after the Yankees ran up a huge lead in the AL East. Things are shaky right now, but the Bombers still have plenty of time to figure it out.

Winner of the Game

Gio Urshela had the best afternoon of any Yankee, opening the scoring with a solo homer and ultimately finishing with four hits and two RBI. He refuses to fade, and has bumped his season line up to .306/.352/.507 with a 124 wRC+. He did appear hobbled as he pulled into second with a double in the eighth, but he remained in the game.

Loser of the Game

It’s a day that ends in “Y”, so we saw another subpar starting pitching performance. CC Sabathia wasn’t as bad as James Paxton was yesterday, and certainly didn’t suffer through anything like the nightmare Masahiro Tanaka endured Thursday, but the veteran left-hander looked every bit his age today. Sabathia was just too hittable, with the Red Sox knocking him for nine hits and five runs in 4.1 innings. He did run into some poor fortune, as the Xander Bogaerts double that knocked him out of the game registered just a six-percent hit probability per Statcast, and Andrew Benintendi’s second-inning solo homer had just a one-percent chance of going for a hit. Still, Sabathia gave up too much loud contact when he came into the zone to stand much of a chance.

Honorable mention: The Yankees were still in the game when Sabathia exited, but Chad Green yielded four runs in 2.1 innings to dig a hole the offense couldn’t climb out of.

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