Giancarlo Stanton cracked a grand slam, Anthony Volpe went 3-for-4, and the Yankees (8-2) won their first home series of the season with an 8-3 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays (4-6) on Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium.
Both teams traded loaded-bases opportunities and walked in a run in the third inning with two outs. The difference, however, was that Yankees starting pitcher Luis Gil struck out Cavan Biggio to limit the damage.
Faced with an identical situation in the bottom half of the same inning, Blue says starter Bowden Francis faced Stanton with the bags full and two outs only for the Bronx Bomber to crush the ball 417 feet the other way for a grand slam and the exclamation point on a five-run inning.
The caveat for both sides, however, was that both starting pitchers ran their pitch counts high.
Francis was done after three innings, having thrown 77 pitches. Gil’s day was over after 4.1
innings and 95 pitches thrown, with legitimate concern that this matinee matchup would put
undue stress on both bullpens.
In his first start in the Bronx, Gil picked up eight strikeouts, with his heater nearly touching 97mph.
Jake Cousins, who picked up the win, finished out the fifth plus the first out of the sixth, though it featured an RBI double by Bo Bichette, scoring Vladimir Guerrero Jr. whose double earlier in the frame ran Gil out of the game with one out in that fifth inning.
With one out in the sixth inning, the Blue Jays loaded the bases again but could only score once through a Guerrero RBI groundout to make it a 5-3 game.
The Yankees responded with some small ball: Volpe singled and Austin Wells walked, but Oswaldo Cabrera’s sac fly moved Volpe over to third. A wild pitch by Toronto reliever Trevor Richards gave Volpe enough time to make it home, 6-3.
In the eighth, the Yankees poured in two more insurance runs for safe measure. It started with Volpe’s single to right field, followed by a double steal. Cabrera’s timely single brought Volpe home lightly jogging.
A balk by Toronto reliever Génesis Cabrera sent the Yankees’ Cabrera from first to second base, and a single by Gleyber Torres moved him over another base. For the second out of the eighth, Juan Soto hit a sac fly to score Cabrera to make it 8-3.
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