LOS ANGELES — The two best teams in baseball met at a packed Dodger Stadium on Friday evening for the first of three interleague games that some believe is a tantalizing preview of what the World Series could look like.
If that’s true, the Yankees sent a message by flexing their significant muscles against stud lefty Hyun-Jin Ryu on the way to a 10-2 beating that was witnessed by a sold out crowd of 53,775.
For Players’ Weekend the Yankees wore black uniforms and the Dodgers countered with white instead of sporting the two most iconic uniforms in sports. The garb made a big league game look like it was played by two in-shape softball teams wearing custom cleats.
“We came here to play the same baseball,’’ said Didi Gregorius when asked about the buzz surrounding the Yankees-Dodgers on a perfect Southern California evening inside a baseball cathedral.
Gregorius contributed a seventh inning grand slam that broke the game open against Ryu in the five-run fourth and added a solo blast in the ninth for the Yankees’ final run. Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez homered in the third off Ryu and Gleyber Torres hit his team-leading 32nd homer in the sixth after crushing two Thursday night in Oakland.
Ryu walked Sanchez intentionally to load the bases and set up a lefty-lefty matchup with Gregorius.
“Do not hit a ground ball into a double play,’’ Gregorius said of his thinking when he hit Ryu’s first pitch over the right-field wall.
Working without his first-inning problems (11.05 ERA and 28 hits; 11 homers in 22 games) and using the curveball more, James Paxton delivered a performance that likely put him in the lead to start Game 1 of the Yankees’ first playoff series.
“Using that pitch was huge for me,’’ said Paxton who won his fifth straight game and is 10-6. In 6²/₃ innings the lefty allowed two runs, five hits and fanned 11. “The curveball being good made my fastball better.’’
As for Sanchez, he became the fastest catcher and position player in history to reach 100 career homers and did it in 355 games.
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“I feel happy, [but] I am sure another catcher comes up and breaks that record,’’ said Sanchez, who took a fierce foul ball off the mask in the eighth inning.
Judge added an RBI single in the eighth and went 3-for-5.
Everybody in the Yankees’ starting lineup except Paxton had at least one of the 16 hits.
The victory kept the Yankees’ lead over the second-place Rays in the AL East at eight lengths and pulled them to within a game of the Dodgers in the race for home-field advantage throughout the postseason.
Paxton delivered a much-needed solid outing considering how poorly the Yankees starters performed in the previous seven games.
With Chad Green getting blistered (five runs in one-third of an inning) as an opener by the Indians on Aug. 15 the arms that started the previous seven games were a combined 2-5 with an 8.44 ERA. In 32 innings they gave up 38 hits, nine of which were homers.
During the four-game losing streak which tied a season high that started last Sunday against the Indians in The Bronx and continued in Oakland where the Yankees were swept in three games by the A’s, CC Sabathia, Domingo German, J.A. Happ and Masahiro Tanaka were 0-4 with an obese 9.33 ERA and allowed 24 hits in 18¹/₃ innings.
All of those numbers were extinguished by Paxton and the Yankees’ bats who combined to end a four-game losing streak and delete the suffering of a three-game sweep by the A’s.
“These guys have been hearing about this series and know the excitement around this series and to come play a big interleague series at Dodger Stadium, I think our guys relish that,’’ Boone said. “To have those kind of at-bats, impact at-bats against a guy like Ryu up and down the lineup it was really nice to see.’’