PHILADELPHIA - The Yankees got the win they needed, but one fourth-inning sequence at Citizens Bank Park left Jose Caballero staring at an umpire’s ruling he could hardly believe.
New York beat the Phillies 3-1 to take the series and extend its winning streak to three, yet the game briefly tilted on a call that erased what looked like a clean double play. With the score tied at 1 in the bottom of the fourth, the Phillies had runners on first and second with one out. Bryson Stott lined a ball toward Caballero, and the play seemed to unfold exactly the way the Yankees wanted: a catch, an out, and an inning-ending tag at second.
Instead, second base umpire Brennan Miller ruled that Caballero had intentionally dropped the ball to complete a double play. That triggered the intentional-drop rule, the ball was declared dead, and only Stott was out. The runners went back to first and second, De La Cruz was safe, and the inning stayed alive.
Caballero made no effort to hide how absurd he thought the call was.
“I was very surprised,” Caballero said of the call. “They really think highly of me: I can catch the ball, drop the ball and catch the bounce in one motion.”
Aaron Boone didn’t buy the idea that Caballero’s recent run-ins with umpires had anything to do with the ruling.
“I don’t think so,” Boone said. “I think he just missed the call.”
Caballero agreed that it wasn’t about anything beyond the play itself. He had spent the week dealing with umpires after a crackdown on his batter’s box routine, but both he and Boone treated this one as a missed judgment, not payback.
The rule is designed to keep defenders from deliberately letting a catchable ball fall in order to turn an easy double play on runners who are frozen in place. Miller decided that was what Caballero had done, so the second out never counted.
The Yankees still escaped the inning. Left-hander Ryan Weathers came back with two on and got Derek Hill looking, preserving the tie and keeping the game from slipping away in that moment.
The odd ruling fit a season-long pattern for Caballero, who has drawn plenty of attention from umpires already. It also left the Yankees with a strange footnote in a game they ultimately controlled enough to finish off.
The win moved New York to 59-45, second in the American League East and about two games behind the Tampa Bay Rays. The club now turns to a Sunday night finale with the trade deadline approaching.
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