While they were hoping to be at the bottom, the Yankees turned their attention to the top of the standings.
In a lineup that included Juan Soto and Aaron Judge and on an afternoon that included Gerrit Cole on the mound, it was new leadoff hitter Ben Rice who didn’t let his team lose a fifth straight game.
It was Rice, who made his debut just 2 1/2 weeks ago, who opened the scoring with a home run, nearly ended the game with another and made Yankees history with a third.
It was Rice, a 25-year-old who came up through the system without much pedigree as a 12th-round pick out of Dartmouth and without a real position, who became the first Yankees rookie to hit three home runs in a single game.
Evidence of his raw side was found in his tortuous route through the dugout after his final shot of the afternoon, trying to find the right spot for his first throw as his teammates jostled him.
By the time Rice finished his work, the Yankees had crushed the Red Sox, 14-4, in front of 45,504 sweaty fans in the Bronx on a sweltering Saturday.
Largely thanks to their young first baseman, the Yankees (55-36) snapped a losing streak and won just their fifth time in their last 19 games.
“It was a legendary day,” manager Aaron Boone said after Rice became the 26th player in Yankees history to hit at least three home runs in a regular-season game.
“It’s a historic day, a magical day,” Cole said after being knocked out in the fifth inning with a one-run deficit before Rice took over. “To be honest, I’m pretty grateful to be able to be on the roster because I know he’ll always remember it.”
“It’s definitely a day I’ll never forget,” Rice said with the same smile he wore after every explosion.
There are concerns throughout the rotation, including with Cole, who has shown dominance but not sharpness.
There are concerns throughout the order, especially at third base, where DJ LeMahieu had shown little before adding a pair of RBI singles.
Fresh concerns have been raised over concentration and restlessness after effort levels were questioned in the previous two defeats.
There are concerns with the bullpen after Clay Holmes and Tommy Kahnle combined to give up the tying and winning runs Friday night.
Those concerns were at least temporarily allayed when Rice’s second home run of the day sailed deep into the right-field seats, a three-run blast that extended the lead to six and helped a struggling offense reach double digits in the fifth inning.
Rice started the day with a game-leading home run deep into the right field seats.
After his fifth-inning hit turned the game into a laugh-out-loud romp, his seventh-inning hit secured his place in franchise history.
Rice’s third home run to right field (and second off Boston’s Chase Anderson) drove in three more runs on an afternoon in which he finished with seven RBIs, tying Lou Gehrig (who did the same on July 25, 1925) for the most RBIs by a Yankees rookie in a game in franchise history (at least since the RBI became a statistic in 1920).
A Boston kid who grew up a Yankees fan in enemy territory, who once wrote “Yankees rule” on the Pesky Pole, whose family and friends couldn’t wait to see him join the rivalry, did what no other rookie in the history of the pinstripe jersey had done.
But Rice knows how to hit home runs.
It took him a while to figure out how to abseil successfully – he had to force his way through the shelter, started up the steps in the middle before being pushed and pulled towards the entrance.
“It honestly happened so fast,” said Rice, who became the fifth player to hit three home runs (in his 17th career game) in MLB history, according to Elias Sports Bureau. “I think I was just recovering from my home run, and I was walking in the dugout and I heard everybody yelling at me to do something. I didn’t even know what they were talking about.”
“Luckily I did it. It was really great.”
The story was cool, but so was helping a team that needed it.
A day that will go down in history, and which was also an opportunity for a team to take a deep breath, something that hadn’t happened for a long time.
“Something he’ll never forget, and people watching here will probably never forget,” Boone said before putting the game into context. “Obviously, it was very necessary.”
News Source : nypost.com
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