In football, when a team is getting blown out and acknowledges in the closing minutes that it has no possible route to victory, sometimes they pull their quarterback and star receivers and put in the backups and scrubs. Th opposing team usually responds by resting its starting QB too as there's no point in risking an injury, and instead of rapidly firing off passes to the sidelines to control the clock and score another TD, they run out the clock and take the win. Some teams (cough, Ohio State, cough) might try to run up the score in that situation to impress the polls, but that's generally considered a classless move.
Same thing in the NBA. A losing team might sit its starters in the fourth quarter and put in the bench players who don't otherwise see many minutes. The other team will slow down and run out the clock, and not have their leading scorers go for a burst of easy baskets against the weaker defense in the closing minutes.
Then there's the New York Yankees. This afternoon, when the Red Sox were down by a score of 10-1 in the eighth inning and their bullpen was depleted, they put infielder Andruw Monasterio on the mound as a relief pitcher as a sort of "white flag" acknowledging their defeat. In baseball, a team can't run out the clock like in football or basketball, but they can still try to end the game as quickly as possible, take the easy win, and give their players some rest. They wouldn't be expected to deliberately strike out, but they could bunt, trot to the bases, and certainly put in their substitute bench players.
But that's not what the Yankees did. They kept their starters in, took full advantage of Monasterio's lack of pitching skills, and hit homer after homer and scored six more runs in that eighth inning, running up the score like TCU against Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow A&M.
Classless, vulgarian motherfuckers. May their whole team and fan base rot in hell.
This Red Sox suffered two low points this season (so far). The first occurred on June 24 when we lost a series to the hapless Colorado Rockies and fell to 32-46, 14 games below .500. The other was today, when we lost the third of four to the Yankees in the Bronx, the last two by a cumulative score of 25-3. The Elder Gods of baseball could have allowed that total score to be 28-3 to echo the Patriots' low point in Super Bowl LI before coming back to victory and signal that better things were ahead for the Red Sox, too, but they wouldn't even give us that.
A low point in today's low-point game occurred in the fifth inning, when obnoxious show-boater Jizz Chism hit a fly ball into deep center field and Ceddanne Rafaela made a spectacular diving catch. But the umpires ruled the ball had hit the ground and after a long-ass review by MLB headquarters located in, wait for it, New York, they ruled that it wasn't a catch. Shown from a different angle, it appeared that the ball may have indeed touched the ground, but only for a fraction of a second and after it was already in Ceddanne's glove and he had control of the ball. Yes, the picture above is an AI recreation, and the player shown is higher off the ground than Ceddanne was when he made the catch, but it's also a clearer and less blurry image than the stop-action frame of the actual play (and I don't have copyright to images of MLB games).
But New York HQ gave the New York team the base hit, and two plays later, a two-RBI single brough Chism home (even though he never should have been on base to begin with). Fortunately, considering the final score, that one run didn't matter anyway, but all the momentum and confidence seemed to swing the Yankees way after that play.
Cheaters never prosper. New York may have won the game, but in the long run, they're still the classless, vulgarian motherfuckers in the Bronx.
What's more, today's game marked the return after long absences to the IL of Roman Anthony and Trevor Story. Both played well, Roman going 2-for-4 with a single and a double, and Trevor going 2-for-3 with a single, a double, and a run. However, a game that should have marked the start of a new offensive spark to the team will instead be remembered as an embarrassment and a new point of contention in the long history of Red Sox-Yankee animosity.
So the damage is done. Boston (74-63) is 8½ games back from Tampa Bay in the AL East, and four back from the second-rate second-place Yankees in the Wild Card standings with 25 games left to the season. Three of those remaining games are later next month in Tampa Bay, but 16 are against sub-.500 teams, although the Sox do seem to generally play better against quality opponents, this weekend not withstanding.
So anyway, that was humiliating, but all we can do is get back up, dust ourselves off, and get back to it. Tomorrow, the Sox return home to Fenway to host Seattle (64-73). Payton Tolle (8-6, 3.09) will start the first game against the Mariners' George Kirby (9-10, 4.02).
Let's flush this one down like a toilet bowl after a meal of diarrhea lettuce and get back to our earlier, winning ways.
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