DENVER — As can often happen in the high altitude, Sunday’s game between the Yankees and Rockies got inebriated in a hurry during the late innings.
By the end of the chaos, the Yankees had submitted another candidate for their worst loss of the season.
After blowing a two-run lead in the eighth inning, scoring a pair in the top of the ninth to force extra innings, then pushing across two more runs to regain the lead in the top of the 11th, the Yankees still found a way to lose in gut-punch fashion.
Light-hitting infielder Alan Trejo smacked a walk-off home run against Ron Marinaccio with two outs in the 11th inning to give the Rockies an 8-7 win Sunday afternoon at Coors Field.
Marinaccio was fresh into the game after lefty Nick Ramirez had given up a game-tying, two-run homer to the left-handed hitting Nolan Jones two pitches into the inning.
The Yankees (50-44) blew leads of 3-1 in the eighth inning and 7-5 in the 11th inning to drop the rubber game of the series in excruciating fashion.
“Today was an especially tough one,” said Gerrit Cole, whose 11-strikeout gem went to waste. “It’s one of those games where you feel like everybody comes in here and asks themselves, ‘What could I have done better just to push it an extra inch over the line?’ We’re asking ourselves that question quite a bit. I think sooner than later, we’re going to figure out what it’s going to take to get through and break through.”
The Yankees arrived in Denver to start the second half of the season with a new hitting coach and hopes of starting fresh against the Rockies (36-58), who owned the third-worst record in baseball.
Instead they flew to Anaheim on Sunday night having lost the series because a bullpen that has been one of the best in the majors all season faltered on another day when the offense could not provide enough breathing room.
The Yankees have now lost six of their last eight games to drop back into a last-place tie with the Red Sox at the bottom of the AL East and 1 ¹/₂ games out of the final wild-card spot (pending the Astros’ game Sunday night).
“We got two and a half months to put ourselves in a position to be championship-caliber,” manager Aaron Boone said. “It’s on us, we gotta go prove that. As far as who we’re playing, it’s Major League Baseball, you’re going to beat some good teams, you’re going to lose some series to teams that are struggling. It’s a grind every time you go out there and put on a major league uniform.
“They outlasted us today. We’re obviously pissed off in the moment that we lost the series, but it’s a series that we lost and we gotta move on from it.”
Considering the starting pitching matchup entering the game — Cole versus Chase Anderson, who had given up 27 runs over his previous four starts — it looked like a prime opportunity for the Yankees to win the series.
Instead Anderson blanked the Yankees across five innings before they got some help from the Rockies’ shoddy defense to take a 3-1 lead in the sixth.
But in the eighth, Tommy Kahnle loaded the bases with two outs before handing it over to Clay Holmes, who picked a bad time to give up his first home run of the season. After falling behind C.J. Cron 2-0, Holmes left a sinker down the middle that Cron crushed for a grand slam that put the Rockies up 5-3.
The Yankees tied it with two runs in the ninth, taking advantage of another Rockies error. But on Harrison Bader’s sacrifice fly that tied the game, pinch-runner Oswald Peraza was thrown out trying to tag up to third base for the final out of the inning, costing the Yankees a chance to win it before extras.
“Can’t really kill the aggression there, especially when he saw [no one covering third base],” Boone said. “They made a play against him. Typically you don’t want to make that third out there at third.”
