Elle's Baseball Musings: Victor Mesa Jr. Takes Max Fried Deep as Rays Edge Yankees 4-3 to Sweep ALDS
By Elle Elena ·
The game was tied 2-2 in the sixth inning Wednesday night, and Max Fried had just gotten two quick outs. Then Junior Caminero lined a single to center, and Victor Mesa Jr. hit the very next pitch, a sweeper, 401 feet into the right-center seats, and that was the end of Fried's night and, as it turned out, the Yankees' season. The Rays beat New York 4-3 at Yankee Stadium to finish a three-game sweep of the American League Division Series. Tampa Bay is headed to the ALCS for the first time since 2020, according to the Associated Press, and will open at home Monday against the winner of White Sox-Guardians.
I've watched a lot of Rays teams win with pitching and patience. This one won the series by never letting the Yankees take a lead, not even for a half inning. Tampa Bay scored first in all three games and outscored New York 10-5.
Yankee Stadium helped both sides Wednesday. In the fourth, Ryan Vilade, in his first postseason game, pushed a 2-1 fastball from Fried the other way to right. Spencer Jones jumped at the wall and the ball cleared his glove by a little. It went 340 feet, and MLB.com noted it would have been a homer only in the Bronx. Vilade had already hit one 356 feet to left in the second that stayed in the park. Some nights the building gives, and some nights it takes back.
Then came the sixth, and the strangest few minutes of the series. With one out, George Lombard Jr. took a 3-1 sinker from Griffin Jax that was called a strike. Lombard challenged it under the new ABS system, and it was overturned to ball four. Austin Wells then took a full-count changeup that was called a ball, and this time Rays catcher Liam Hicks challenged. The pitch had caught the inside corner, and Wells was out. That brought up Anthony Volpe, who drove a 1-0 sinker to the wall in left. Mesa leaped, missed it, and a fan reached over the wall and caught it in the field of play. It was ruled a game-tying homer on the field. Replay ruled that the ball would not have left the park and Mesa would not have caught it either, so Volpe got an RBI double and Lombard scored from first. That made it 4-3 instead of 4-4. MLB.com's Matthew Leach pointed out it came almost 30 years to the day after Jeffrey Maier reached over the right-field wall for Derek Jeter in the 1996 ALCS. That time the Yankees got the benefit, and this time the replay official didn't let it go. Jax struck out Jones to strand Volpe at second.
Jones deserves a paragraph of his own. In the third, he threw out Taylor Walls at the plate on Jonathan Aranda's RBI single, with Luis García Jr. and Lombard relaying it home to Wells. He walked and scored on Ben Rice's single in the bottom half. In the fourth, after Volpe knocked Nick Martinez out of the game with a 96.6 mph liner off his back for an infield single, Jones lined a two-out double off Ian Seymour to tie it 2-2. He walked again in the ninth. Jones gave them everything he had.
From there it was the Rays' bullpen, which has been the best thing about this team all October. Seymour got four outs and the win. Jax struck out four in two innings. Cam Booser and Kevin Kelly got the Rays through the eighth, with Kelly striking out pinch-hitter Giancarlo Stanton to strand a runner. Bryan Baker took the ninth for his third save in three games.
The ninth was a small, cruel story of its own. Before the game, Aaron Boone benched Jazz Chisholm Jr. for Volpe and told reporters, as Yahoo Sports' Robert Sanchez reported, "Jazz might be the most important guy on the field tonight. Just because you're not in the starting lineup doesn't mean you're not gonna be the central figure." Chisholm came off the bench in the seventh, and with two outs in the ninth he was on first after forcing Jones. He stole second on a changeup in the dirt and stood there as the tying run while Trent Grisham swung through another changeup for strike three. Boone was right that Chisholm would end up in the middle of it. He just never got to come home.
Fried was charged with four runs on seven hits in 5 2/3 innings, with seven strikeouts and no walks. Two of those hits left the yard, and that's the series in a sentence. The Yankees pitched well enough to win a couple of these games and scored five runs in three of them. Without Aaron Judge, who strained his calf in mid-September, they never found the big hit. AP noted that it was the first time they'd been swept in a best-of-five since the 1980 ALCS against Kansas City.
As for the Rays, AP pointed out they've now celebrated on the Yankees' field twice in about two weeks, after clinching the AL East there Sept. 22. They'll have four days off before the ALCS. That rest could freshen a bullpen that has carried them this far, or it could cool off a lineup that hit just enough. Either way, I wouldn't bet against a team that just played the Yankees for three games and never trailed.
-Elle