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Jorge Castillo, ESPN Staff Writer
NEW YORK — Frustration did not permeate the home clubhouse at Yankee Stadium on Monday night. A bunch of wasted opportunities combined to squander the New York Yankees‘ chance to push the Kansas City Royals one loss from playoff elimination, but frustration did not surface in the quiet room. There wasn’t any anger. Emotions were held in check.
The heavily favored Yankees instead exuded a cool confidence after their 4-2 defeat in Game 2, a result that shifted home-field advantage to the Royals in a best-of-five American League Division Series tied at one game apiece heading to Missouri for Game 3 on Wednesday.
“It still feels the same, that we’re going to win [the series],” Yankees third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. said. “I don’t feel like anybody feels any different. We’re going to go out there and do our thing still. We still don’t feel like any team is better than us. We had a lot of missed opportunities tonight so they just got lucky.”
For three innings Monday, the Yankees played like the superior club.
Carlos Rodon, feeding off the rowdy home crowd, struck out the side in the first inning with 12 pitches and an electric fastball that touched 98 mph. Two innings later, Giancarlo Stanton muscled a one-hopper in the hole that Royals star shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. couldn’t cleanly field with his backhand to score Gleyber Torres from third base for the game’s first run and incite a deafening roar.
While Rodón cruised — he threw just 39 pitches through three innings — Royals starter Cole Ragans, who was dominant over six scoreless innings against the Baltimore Orioles in the AL Wild Card Series five days earlier, needed 70 pitches to get nine outs. Yankee Stadium was buzzing. A backbreaking hit seemed imminent. It never came.
The Yankees didn’t muster another run until Chisholm led off the ninth inning with a home run to briefly reinvigorate the building. They took Game 1 despite not cashing in with runners in scoring position, but they couldn’t overcome the shortcomings in Game 2, leaving eight runners on base and going 1-for-6 with runners in scoring position. New York is 3-for-19 with runners in scoring position in the series.
“They were making their pitches when they needed to,” Yankees center fielder Aaron Judge said. “We got a couple of guys in scoring position and they buckled down and made some tough pitches on us. But we got to come through in those situations and break it open.”
Like in Game 1, Judge’s first at-bat in Game 2 came after Torres and Juan Soto reached base. And like in Game 1, he struck out for the first of three consecutive outs to end the threat.
Judge, the presumptive AL MVP who entered 10-for-74 with 28 strikeouts in 18 postseason games since 2020, just missed a home run to right field in his second at-bat, walked in his third plate appearance and reached base on an infield single in the eighth. He finished Tuesday 1-for-3 after going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts and a walk in Game 1.
“You can never count him out,” Soto said. “He’s the greatest hitter of all time right now. He’s just doing his thing. Struggled a little bit with the fastball today, but I know he’s going to bounce back.”
The Royals did not have trouble in that department during a four-run fourth inning. Veteran catcher Salvador Perez ignited the outburst with a leadoff home run off Rodón for his first postseason homer in nine years.
“It still feels the same, that we’re going to win [the series]. I don’t feel like anybody feels any different. We’re going to go out there and do our thing still. We still don’t feel like any team is better than us. We had a lot of missed opportunities tonight so they just got lucky.”
Yankees third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr.
“Any time Sal’s up, you’re always on the edge of your seat,” Witt said. “You never know what’s going to happen, so he just came up big, and that’s what players like that do.”
From there, the Royals used four singles and heady baserunning to tack on three more. Yuli Gurriel cracked a single and took second base on a Rodón wild pitch. Two batters later, Tommy Pham laced a line drive to center field to score the Gurriel from second base. Pham then swiped second and scored on Garrett Hampson‘s single, which suddenly chased Rodón from the game.
Each of the four run-scoring hits came on sliders. They left Yankee Stadium silent while a “Let’s go, Royals” chant broke out during the Kansas City Chiefs‘ win at Arrowhead Stadium.
The Yankees and Royals will meet across the parking lot from Arrowhead on Wednesday for the first postseason game at Kauffman Stadium since Game 2 of the 2015 World Series.
The Royals will play host confident knowing that Witt — the presumptive AL MVP runner-up — is 0-for-10 in the series, their vaunted starting rotation has logged just eight innings in two games and they needed just one extra-base hit Tuesday to snatch home-field advantage. The Yankees will take the field convinced they are the better team that just ran into some misfortune in Game 2, expecting a bounce-back performance.
“I think that’s been a hallmark of our success,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “Especially after some difficult ones where we’ve had a win or lost something late or just a tough gut punch. These guys are really confident and understandably so, and we’ll be ready to go in Game 3.”