Tuesday night in the Bronx may end up feeling a lot bigger than one loss in late August.
The Yankees were in the middle of a wild, back-and-forth game with the Astros when Jeremy Peña stepped in with two outs, nobody on, and the score tied at 6-6. Around that same moment, the Rays had already lost in Detroit and the Red Sox were tied in extras after giving up the equalizer on a dropped third strike that should have ended it.
The door was open. Then came the check swing call on Peña - one of those razor-thin decisions that can change the mood of a ballpark in a heartbeat.
It was a close one, though the replay made it look more like 60-40 than a clean hold. The crowd was ready to explode, and instead the call went against the Yankees.
On the very next pitch, Peña punched a single through the hole against a fading Brent Headrick. Yordan Álvarez followed by smashing the next pitch into the gap at (conservatively) 140 MPH to drive in a run.
Álvarez scored as well on a single, and Headrick was finally pulled after the inning started slipping away.
That sequence may be the kind of tiny, brutal moment Yankees fans look back on all season.
The Yankees did fight back in the eighth and trimmed the deficit to 8-7, but Josh Hader shut the door before they could push it any further. Meanwhile, the Red Sox kept rolling, and Jarren Duran delivered a grand slam in the ninth inning or later for his MLB-leading 14-17th RBI. The Yankees also had an earlier chance to avoid all of this: in Peña’s previous at-bat in the sixth, Fernando Cruz left a center-cut 91 MPH fastball over the plate with two outs, two strikes, a two-run lead and a runner on.
Now the Yankees sit two games back of the Red Sox in the loss column, 1.5 games back in the standings, with two games left before Boston comes to town. The Red Sox have one more game in Miami, and the Yankees have already learned that place can turn into a trap whether they’re the ones playing there or not.
They should have lost both of their first two games and didn’t. The Yankees’ bullpen and rotation blew three leads on Tuesday night, including two after dramatic Luis Garcia Jr. rockets.
There’s still a path for Boston to move ahead by Friday night in a Cam Schlittler start. And if that happens, the idea of going to Fenway Park for a Wild Card series starts to look about as good as it gets for the Red Sox and as bad as it gets for the Yankees. Tuesday offered a handful of moments that could haunt New York, but Peña’s check swing stands out as the one where everything was hanging in the balance - and the Yankees came up empty.
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