The Red Sox just swept the Yankees in four games at Fenway Park, and the guy who delivered the kill shot was hitting .156 in June and got chirped by a Yankees fan the night before.
There’s a version of this series where the Yankees walk away with a story worth telling. Sonny Gray, 36 years old and a former Yankee, was crafting one of the most complete individual performances you’ll see all season. He held New York hitless into the 8th inning on Sunday night. Seven and a third innings, one walk, nine strikeouts, 97 pitches at a season-high effort level. Clutch Points noted it was the first time in the modern era since 1900 that any pitcher reached both 2,000 career strikeouts and 2,000 innings pitched in the same game. Gray got Spencer Jones swinging on an 86-mph sweeper for career strikeout number 2,000, and the Fenway crowd — the Fenway crowd — stood up for him.
Amed Rosario singled to center with one out in the 8th. Four outs short of history. The no-hit bid was over.
The Yankees still found a way to make it worse.
Aroldis Chapman blew the save in the 9th, because that’s what the Yankees’ bullpen problems look like when they’re wearing their Sunday clothes. New York clawed back, tied it, then somehow went up 4-2 in the top of the 10th. My dad texted “we might actually win this.” I did not respond.
Gray’s milestone got its due online:
https://twitter.com/TalkinBaseball_/status/2071404403899117614
Then the bottom of the 10th happened.
The Yankees deployed a five-man infield. Five. Men. In the infield. Against Jarren Duran, who is hitting .156 in June, who went 0-for-4 the previous night, who had to be separated from a heckling Yankees fan in the Fenway stands on Saturday. That fan was escorted out. Duran told the media “Nothing happened” and went home with another zero in the box score.
So the Yankees looked at this guy, a man publicly humiliated by his own numbers, feuding with the customer base, playing like his swing is being reviewed by a congressional subcommittee, and they said: we will put an extra defender in the dirt to stop him. They moved so many guys to the infield that they left a gap in right field you could drive a truck through.
Jarren Duran hit an 84.5-mph single into that exact gap. 257 feet. Walk-off. Red Sox sweep Yankees 2026.
Masataka Yoshida scored. The Fenway Faithful lost their minds. The Yankees trudged off the field having been swept by a team that entered the series 36-46 and that nobody outside of New England was treating like a serious threat.
“It meant a lot,” Duran said afterward. “I feel like I’ve let this team down a lot this year, and that moment felt like I let a little bit off my shoulders.”
That’s a guy who earned it. The arc of the whole thing is almost too clean: struggling hitter, public spat with a fan, teammates stepping in, one more 0-for-4, then Sunday night at Fenway with the series on the line and the Yankees handing him an empty patch of grass.
The full AP game account has the inning-by-inning breakdown if you want to read about each individual decision the Yankees made that turned a guy hitting .156 into a folk hero.
The Red Sox swept the Yankees. They’re still under .500 and they don’t care. Somewhere in Hoboken my dad is stress-eating. Revis is looking at me with pity. And a 36-year-old former Yankee nearly no-hit his old team on the same night some kid who can barely hit his weight made the Yankees pay for being too clever by half.
That’s baseball. I hate it here.
