The first game of Sunday’s doubleheader had the makings of a special pitching matchup.
But only the Yankees’ feeble lineup obliged.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto dominated them in a complete game while the Dodgers made Cam Schlittler labor, knocking him out of the game by the fifth inning before the wheels fully came off for the Yankees in an 8-2 loss to the Dodgers on a sunny afternoon in The Bronx.
The Yankees could barely touch Yamamoto, their only real damage against him coming on Trent Grisham’s home run to lead off the fourth inning that represented their first of only four hits against the Dodgers ace.
After winning four straight games to close out the first half, the Yankees (54-44) have opened the second half looking more like the team that went through a 4-14 rut in late June and early July. Most notably, that includes the offense reverting to a rough watch, lacking much in the way of punch or depth that not even a healthy Aaron Judge would fully fix.
The Dodgers (63-36), meanwhile, consistently put up tough at-bats against Schlittler. Typically fairly efficient, Schlittler threw 98 pitches across 4 1/3 innings while giving up three runs. He struck out eight and did not walk a batter, but the Dodgers worked plenty of long at-bats to drive his pitch count up and get to the Yankees bullpen early in the doubleheader.
It was still just a 3-1 game entering the eighth inning, when the Dodgers broke it open against Jake Bird and Camilo Doval, thanks in part to the Yankees losing their second ball in the sun of the day.
Both came off the bat of Max Muncy, this one a foul pop up that fell near Ryan McMahon, who did not know where the ball was. Instead of being the second out of the inning, Muncy eventually drew a walk, the first of seven straight Dodgers to reach before the actual second out was recorded on a sacrifice fly that made it 8-1.
Bird was responsible for all five runs in the inning – on four hits and two walks in two-thirds of an inning – while Doval walked three and hit a batter in 1 2/3 innings.
Schlittler came out firing, striking out the side in the top of the first inning on 17 pitches. But the Dodgers began hiking up his pitch count in a 27-pitch second inning, which included Muncy reaching on a double after skying a pop fly to right field that Max Schuemann and Jazz Chisholm Jr. both appeared to lose in the sun.
Shohei Ohtani then put the Dodgers ahead for good in the third inning when he scalded a 111.1 mph RBI double to the gap to go up 1-0. Freddie Freeman added an RBI single to make it 2-0 before another 27-pitch inning was over.
Then, after Grisham’s 11th homer of the year made it 2-1 in the fourth, the Dodgers immediately got the run back in the fifth. Schlittler hit Tommy Edman with a 97 mph fastball that grazed his elbow on an 0-2 pitch, and he came all the way around to score on Andy Pages’ bloop double down the right-field line.
The Yankees were later on the receiving end of a sun ball to score their second run of the game off Yamamoto, as Chisholm hit a “double” that Pages lost and came in to score on Anthony Volpe’s bloop single.
