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BOSTON – Xander Bogaerts and Kyle Schwarber beat Yankees ace Gerrit Cole, and Nathan Eovaldi had a sixth inning shutout to help the Boston Red Sox beat New York 6-2 on Tuesday night in the AL Wild Card Game.
Bogaerts also made a perfect throw to throw Aaron Judge home while the game was still close, sending the Red Sox into the AL Division series against the Tampa Bay Rays. The first game of the best-of-five duel takes place Thursday night in St. Petersburg, Florida.
With Bucky Dent in the crowd and Aaron Boone in the Yankees dugout, Boston chased Cole in the third inning and beat New York in the playoffs for the third straight time. The Yankees, who lead the majors with 27 World Series championships, haven’t won everything since 2009.
A year after baseball took its playoffs in neutral-venue bubbles to protect itself against the pandemic, a sold-out crowd of 38,324 – the biggest of the year – filled Fenway Park to rekindle one of the most passionate rivalries in sport. Enough Yankee fans were among them to fuel a raucous back and forth of insulting chants.
It was the fifth playoff clash between longtime enemies, with Boston taking a 3-2 advantage. That doesn’t count the 1978 AL East tiebreaker – the No. 163 regular season game technically – which the Yankees won thanks to Dent’s homerun in the net over the Green Monster.
Boone, the former infielder who is now the manager of the Yankees, added to the chagrin with his 11th inning homer in Game 7 of the 2003 AL Championship Series.
The Red Sox haven’t lost to them since.
They got their revenge the following year when they rallied after losing the ALCS’s first three games to eliminate the Yankees, then winning their first World Series title in 86 years. They won three more series, in ’07, ’13 and ’18 when they knocked out the Yankees in the divisional round.
Any lingering pain disappeared in the central field stands in the first round on Tuesday night.
Unlike Dent, who barely broke the wall in left field which is just 310 feet from home plate, Bogaerts punched a 427-foot practice line down center right away. And unlike Carlton Fisk, who contorted his body to get the ball right in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, Bogaerts interrupted his home run trot only to flex for the Red Sox dugout.
Cole was taken out after allowing Schwarber’s solo shot in the third inning and putting two more men with no one on the outside. In all, he was charged with three runs on four hits and two walks, striking out three strikes in more than two innings.
Eovaldi allowed just two hits in five innings before yielding a solo home run to Anthony Rizzo – Schwarber’s teammate on the 2016 Cubs Championship squad – which sparked the first enthusiastic cheers from Yankees fans in the crowd.
After a single in the field of Judge, Ryan Brasier relieved Eovaldi and gave up a single at the wall to Giancarlo Stanton. Mistakenly sent home by third baseman Phil Nevin, Judge was easily tossed home – 8-6-2 – by the team that led the majors with 43 assists to the outfield during the season. (The Yankees have made 22 home strikeouts this season, tied for most in baseball.)
Overall, Eovaldi allowed one run on four hits in 5 1/3 innings, striking out eight on strikes. Alex Verdugo doubled by a run in the sixth to make it 4-1, then scored two more in the seventh to give Boston a 6-1 lead.
Stanton, who hit the wall early, hit a solo homerun in the ninth.
The teams have traded places twice in the final 10 days of the season, starting with the Yankees’ three-game sweep in Boston from Sept. 24-26 that propelled them to number one in the wilds. At one point, Major League Baseball went through tie-breaking scenarios and the Yankees had to choose whether they wanted to play Boston or Toronto to break a four-way tie.
They chose Boston.
Although the tiebreakers were not necessary when the two teams finished ahead of Toronto and Seattle – with identical records of 92-70, Boston won the field thanks to a 10-9 head-to-head record – word from the Yankees the decision inevitably returned it to the Red Sox clubhouse.
“We knew it. We don’t really talk about it because we had some business to do, ”Red Sox center fielder Kiké Hernandez said ahead of the game. “They wanted us and they have us now, so win or go home. That’s it.”
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