Yankees 3, Angels 7: Swept out of Anaheim

When it rains, it pours. The Yankees didn’t visit Seattle on this West Coast trip, but they’re definitely getting poured on at the moment as they dropped their fourth straight game (and 9 out of their last 12) in a series sweep to the Angels, dropping the finale, 3-7.

New York’s pitching has been finding opportune times to implode later in the game, but today they opted to get that over with right out of the gate. Carlos Rodón took the ball for the third time this season looking to build off of a shaky start, but he only found more problems. He had next to no control of his slider throughout the day, and it got him into trouble immediately in the first inning — he got Zach Neto to lead off with a groundout, but after a walk to Shohei Ohtani Taylor Ward took him deep for a two-run shot.

His command never improved, and the second inning wound up being a near-exact repeat — Hunter Renfroe led off with a walk, and then Luis Rengifo drove one out of the park. Then in the third inning Rodón walked Ohtani and Ward to put runners on with no outs, and proceeded to give up a single to Mickey Moniak and a groundball fielder’s choice from Eduardo Escobar to make it 6-0 in the blink of an eye. Rodón worked around a Neto single in the fourth and got the leadoff batter in the fifth inning before Aaron Boone came to get his $162 million man, ending an ugly day for the left-hander: 4.1 innings of six-run ball, and it was the first time in his career that he walked five batters and gave up a pair of bombs in a start.

Meanwhile, the offense was once again struggling to find their footing against a pitcher with an atrocious ERA entering the afternoon. Chase Silseth hadn’t been up in the majors since June 3rd and had a 5.30 ERA, but he cut through the Yankee lineup for 5.2 innings of one-run, 10 K ball. The only blemish came when Giancarlo Stanton fought off a pitch hard enough to deposit it over the wall in right, the type of homer that typically has fans marveling over his strength. In the middle of this stretch though, it was just the hit that prevented them from being shut out up until that point.

Stanton’s blast did seem to rally the troops, at least temporarily. Franchy Cordero started a two-out rally with a single, moved into scoring position on a Harrison Bader walk, and Kyle Higashioka scored him on a single. Later, in the eighth Cordero continued to cut into the deficit with a solo home run to make it 3-6, but the offense stalled out from there. It was a net positive day for Cordero getting a rare start after mostly sitting on the bench, though he did blunder an earlier rally by running into an out at third in the second inning when a ground ball was hit right in front of him.

The Angels added an insurance run in the bottom of the eighth off of Tommy Kahnle, who has had a rough week after an excellent start to the year, and then Aaron Loup closed out the non-save situation for Los Angeles in a 1-2-3 ninth inning. The Yankees are off tomorrow and will face the Royals behind Clarke Schmidt on Friday at 7:05pm ET. They head back home to New York on an extremely somber note, and have to find a spark somewhere between now and in two weeks — or else you could put this season on ice.

Box Score