ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - The Yankees didn’t just lose Game 2 of the American League Division Series. They gave away the kind of night that forces a franchise to stare at itself.
Four errors, three of them in the first inning, helped sink New York in a 5-2 loss to the Rays and left the Yankees down 0-2 in the series. If they don’t recover, the conversation around this team will get ugly fast - and it will center on a familiar October question: how can a club so good in the regular season keep running into the same wall in the postseason?
That wall showed up again Monday night, and it looked a lot like a smarter, sharper, more relentless Rays team. The Yankees were sloppy, and the sloppiness wasn’t random. It was the sort of collapse that felt baked in once the pressure rose.
Austin Wells put it plainly when asked whether the Yankees beat themselves.
“They put pressure on you,” Wells said. “They’re fast, they bust their butt out of the box, so they make you feel like you have to do more.”
That pressure exposed New York immediately. Behind Cam Schlittler, the Yankees committed three errors in a span of four batters in the first inning. A veteran scout’s verdict on the scene was brutal: “Clown show.”
Schlittler managed to limit the damage to one run in that opening frame, but the rest of his night never really settled in. He said, “I didn’t have my best stuff” after working 4 1/3 innings, striking out two and allowing four runs, two earned. He generated just seven swings and misses, a steep drop from the 24 whiffs he produced against Boston in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series.
The Yankees did get some offense from Ben Rice, whose two solo home runs gave them something to hang onto in Aaron Judge’s absence. But that wasn’t nearly enough to change the tone of the night.
Not when the Rays kept making the Yankees play faster than they wanted to. Not when Ian Seymour came in and, aside from Rice’s homer, shut them down from the sixth through the eighth. And not when the game had already tilted so hard that the final 45 minutes felt like a formality at Tropicana Field, where close to 40,000 fans turned Games 1 and 2 into something far louder than the usual empty-ballpark setting.
Aaron Boone’s choices only added to the noise. He stacked the lineup with eight lefties against Rays starter Freddy Peralta, and that left New York exposed once left-handed reliever Ian Seymour entered the game.
Boone, though, sounded like a manager trying to move past the wreckage as quickly as possible.
“We’ve got to get over it, it’s as simple as that,” he said. “We can’t dwell on what just happened to us.
We have to come ready (on Wednesday) and play for our lives. I expect the team to do that.”
Cody Bellinger kept it short, too.
“We took it on the chin,” said Cody Bellinger. “We have to go out and win a game on Wednesday.”
The bigger issue is what happens if they don’t. Boone is under contract through 2027, but if the Yankees lose this series, his future would become a serious topic. He has had nine years to win a championship and still doesn’t have one.
Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner would be left to answer for a team that keeps piling up regular-season success and then unspools in October. The Yankees lead the American League in attendance and generate strong ratings on YES.
They spend enough to field a lineup with star power. They win 90-something games and keep the fan base believing.
And then October arrives.
The clubhouse response Monday night was quiet, almost rehearsed. Outside of Schlittler and Wells, the quotes were all short, guarded, and empty of much detail.
“We didn’t show up,” Schlittler said.
That was the problem, and maybe the most damning part of all: no one had a convincing explanation for how that could happen.
The numbers now make the mountain steeper. Teams that lose the first two games of a Division Series have gone on to lose 89% of the time.
The Yankees have climbed out of 0-2 holes before, doing it against the A’s in 2001 and against Cleveland in 2017. But this group looks different, and not in a good way.
The scout who called the game a “Clown show” had one last line after the final out that summed up the night and the larger fear around this franchise.
“There’s no mystique,” he wrote. “The Yankees look like just another team.”
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