In finally starting to show some signs of ending their recent slump, the Yankees avoided a sweep at the hands of the Blue Jays on Sunday, and then followed that up with a two-game sweep of the Mets. Beyond just the fact that they were wins, there was something similar about all three games: the Yankees won them by the score 4-2.
While two of the games played out semi-similarly (Yankees go up 2-0, other team ties the game, Yankees pick up two late runs and hang on for win), all three had fairly notable moments that could’ve caused this random occurrence to not happen.
In the Blue Jays win, Andrew Benintendi’s seventh inning, go-ahead home run was two runs instead of just one because Jose Trevino managed to reach on an infield single. The next day, Oswaldo Cabrera’s miscommunication with Marwin González led to an error, which in turn led to a runner being on for Daniel Vogelbach’s home run, which was the Mets’ only run-scoring play in that game. In Tuesday’s game, the Mets loaded the bases in the top of the ninth, and just one at-bat going slightly different could’ve lead to a vastly different score.
Even beyond stuff like that, there’s hundreds of small things every game that could slightly alter how things play out after one happens. Yet in the three games from Sunday to Tuesday, when the chips fell, they all came out with an exact 4-2 final score.
While three games seems to be the limit for this sort of streak, at least in Yankees’ history, it has happened a couple times before. Let’s look back at some of the other occasions.
Maybe the most notable occasion of a streak of same scores came via the 1960 Yankees. In three games in an early August series against the Tigers, they managed to win all of them exactly 3-2.
On August 1st, the Yankees opened the series winning by that score after a two-run, sixth inning rally after trailing 2-1. The next day was a doubleheader, and both games ended 3-2, both thanks to extra innings walk-offs. In the day’s opener, a Johnny Blanchard RBI single won the game in the 14th, after the Tigers had tied the score in the top of the ninth. In the second game of the day, Bob Cerv led off the 10th with a home run to complete a doubleheader sweep of 3-2 final scores.
Obviously, when a game goes 14 innings, both teams had their chances to score prior to that, which might’ve altered the final score. However, it was the second game where things played out in a crazily perfect way to get to that exact score. The game was scoreless for seven innings, with the Tigers breaking a tie with a run in the eighth and then another in the ninth. The Yankees were then down to their final two outs when Roger Maris homered to keep them alive. In the top of the 10th, a third and go-ahead Tigers’ run was just 90 feet away when the Yankees managed to strand two runners on base to set up the win in the bottom half of the inning. In those last couple innings, things needed to play out pretty perfectly to end up with the same score again, and yet they did.
From July 18-20, 2009, the Yankees’ won three consecutive games exactly 2-1, beating the Tigers in the first two, while beating the Orioles in the third. In the Orioles game, Baltimore took a lead when Nick Markakis homered in the second at-bat of the game. After that, Yankee pitching managed to keep them to an 0-for-8 day with runners in scoring position, helping preserve the random 2-1 streak.
On the flip side of this year’s streak, in the first three days of September 1937, the Yankees took three-straight 4-2 losses to Cleveland and Washington.
The Yankees have scored the same number of runs in four-straight games on a couple occasions, but the final scores haven’t lined up on the other side in those instances. The one occasion where a Yankees’ team has scored the same runs in five-straight games came in 1968. In that time, they probably weren’t terribly far away from a five game streak, as the other teams scored somewhere between zero and five runs in those five games. Just a couple things go different in each of those games, and the weirdest streak ever would’ve happened.
Hey, after the struggles the Yankees have gone through of late, if they want to win every single game 4-2, that would be fine with me
Source
Baseball Reference
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