NEW YORK - The Yankees were one swing, one clean contact, away from ending the misery.
In the 10th inning against the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday, José Caballero dropped down a sacrifice bunt that moved Spencer Jones to third with one out. Jones, one of the fastest players on the roster, was 90 feet from home and the game was there for the taking.
A fly ball would have done it. Maybe even a soft grounder.
Instead, the night kept slipping.
Oswaldo Cabrera struck out. Ben Rice was intentionally walked.
Ali Sánchez struck out. The game rolled into the 11th, and once it got there, Camilo Doval couldn’t find the zone.
He gave up four runs, two of them earned, and the Yankees were finished off 6-2 after three empty at-bats in the bottom of the inning.
That loss was their seventh in a row, the club’s longest skid since the ugly 2023 season.
The Yankees also went into Wednesday night dealing with another problem: sickness. Food poisoning hit the clubhouse Tuesday night, and manager Aaron Boone said “seven or eight players” were dealing with overnight and early-morning illness.
That mattered when the game got tight. Paul Goldschmidt, who did not start, was fine.
Max Schuemann, also on the bench, was not and was unavailable.
That backdrop made Boone’s handling of the 10th inning stand out even more. With Cabrera up in a spot where a pinch hitter made sense, Boone stayed with him.
Goldschmidt, one of the team’s best hitters this season and a potential Hall of Famer, stayed on the bench. Boone said he did not want to put Goldschmidt at second or third base in the 11th.
“Because I have confidence that Cabrera can touch the ball, too,” Boone explained.
Cabrera’s spot in the lineup may not last much longer anyway. He is likely to be optioned before Friday’s game against the Minnesota Twins, with Ryan McMahon and Trent Grisham expected to come off the injured list. Boone also had another possible path if he wanted Goldschmidt’s bat without using him in the field: move Amed Rosario to third base and burn the designated hitter, something the Yankees recently did in extra innings at Fenway Park.
The decision not to go to Goldschmidt looked cautious on a night when the Yankees badly needed conviction.
They had chances before the 10th, too. In the eighth, they put the first two runners on and came away with nothing.
The bigger picture is even uglier. The Yankees have only 23 hits over their last six games, the fewest hits in any six-game single-season span in franchise history.
“It’s been a terrible week for us,” Boone said. “There’s no way of sugarcoating it.
We’re capable of way more, obviously. You’re gonna have stretches where it’s tough, where you’re missing some guys.
This was a really difficult week for us offensively, coupled with not playing clean enough and taking care of the ball well enough. That’s what you get.
You get an awful week.”
The sloppiness showed up again Wednesday. Caballero, filling in in center field at a position he normally doesn’t play, threw to the wrong base on a single in the sixth inning.
Then in the 11th, he overthrew Rice, the cutoff man, on a throw home from right field. Sánchez followed by airmailing the ball into center field, and a routine single turned into a bases-clearing mess.
It was the kind of poor fundamental baseball that has haunted the Yankees throughout the streak.
“I feel like we’ve got to lock in, do all the small stuff,” Jazz Chisholm Jr. said. “We make a lot of mistakes, and I feel like we beat ourselves.”
Before the game, captain Aaron Judge, sidelined with a stress fracture in his ribs, had already called out the club for a lack of focus. Nothing about Wednesday changed that feeling.
The numbers around the collapse are starting to bite. On June 24, the last day the Yankees won, FanGraphs had their chances of winning the American League East at 84.1 percent.
After seven straight losses, that figure is down to 49.8 percent. Next up is a four-game road series against the AL East-leading Tampa Bay Rays beginning Monday.
Inside the clubhouse, the mood is as dark as the results.
“It f-ing sucks,” Cody Bellinger said. “It’s a s--y feeling.”
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