NEW YORK -- As he looked out at the raucous Bronx crowd during his team’s electric eighth-inning rally Wednesday night, New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone had one thought: “It’s May, and it’s bedlam.”
October has arrived at Yankee Stadium. Five months early.
And, after a pair of high-energy games between the Bombers and Boston Red Sox in the Big Apple this week, Thursday's Game 3 figures to keep that playoff intensity alive.
For Yankees first baseman Neil Walker, playing in this storied rivalry for the first time, it feels like Halloween is around the corner -- not Mother’s Day.
“You would’ve thought it was September or October with how excited it was,” Walker said. “It’s fun to play in this environment.”
It has been doubly fun for the Yankees, who have won the first two games, completing a three-week surge that culminated Wednesday night in them taking sole possession of first place in the American League East. Boston had been leading the division from the start of the season.
Back in mid April, the Yankees were 7½ games behind the Red Sox. Now, after winning an astounding 17 of their past 18, they're a game up.
“It’s not even so much that you’re chasing results every day,” Boone said. “It’s just that you’re coming to work and you’re coming to grind the other team down. And they’ve done a great job of that, even when we were a little slow out of the gates, nothing really changed. The attitude, the focus.”
New York’s rise to the top of the AL East began April 21, when it embarked upon what became one of the best stretches of winning in recent Yankees memory. At 17-1 since then entering play Thursday, the Yankees have won their past six series and are going for their second straight series sweep in the finale with the Red Sox.
“That’d be nice,” veteran outfielder Brett Gardner said, when asked about pulling off the sweep. “But you don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself. There’s not many opportunities for that.”
If the Yankees win Thursday, it'll mark their fourth sweep in their past five series.
“A lot of these young guys, no moment is too big for them,” said Gardner, crediting rookie Gleyber Torres and 23-year-old third baseman Miguel Andujar with sparking the team in recent weeks. “Big stage, facing guys they’ve never seen before. ... It’s not too much for them, putting together good at-bats up and down the lineup. They’re pretty relentless.
“Even when guys aren’t getting hits, [they're] putting good at-bats on people and making them work. It’s just been working lately.”
Gardner was the one working Wednesday, going 3-for-5 with two doubles, a triple and two clutch RBIs in a 9-6 win over the Red Sox. He also scored three runs, snapping out of a season-long slump that had seen him enter the game with a .198 batting average.
The last time the Yankees swept the Red Sox was in a two-game set in April 2017. Before that, they took all three games in a late September 2016 series.
Something that should work in the Yankees’ favor in the finale? The pitching matchup. Although Boston’s starter, Eduardo Rodriguez, enters with a 3-0 record, he also sports a 5.29 ERA.
He’s also left-handed -- and the Yankees feature a veritable lefty destroyer in the form of Giancarlo Stanton. The slugger’s numbers against lefties are dramatically better than against right-handers.
This season against left-handed pitchers, Stanton is batting .400 with a major league-leading 1.575 OPS, six homers and a 5.0 at-bat/homer ratio. Against righties, he’s hitting .193 with a .626 OPS, three homers and a 36.3 at-bats per homer.
Stanton has been especially effective against the Red Sox this season, batting .526 with a 1.644 OPS and two home runs.
Numbers aside, Boone believes much of the Yankees' recent winning stems from his players embracing the heightened expectations that have followed them since the offseason.
“They expect to be really good. They expect to be a really good team. And they come to work,” Boone said. “It was just that we were going to approach every single day, every single pitch, every single inning in a very workmanlike way, and they’ve continued to do that, all the while having fun playing the game of baseball, which always comes out, which I love.”