Max Fried not at his best?
Some sloppy infield defense?
An injury to one of the best hitters in the game?
None of it stopped the freight train that is the Yankees. They beat the Orioles 11-3 on Sunday, their third straight victory over Baltimore and 13th in their past 15 games overall.
Home runs by Ben Rice — who exited with a hand injury — and Aaron Judge gave the Yankees an early lead before the Yankees scratched together a run in the sixth to go ahead for good thanks to solid work by the bullpen and a seven-run eighth inning.
Facing Trey Gibson in his MLB debut, Rice opened the scoring with his 12th homer of the season with one out in the bottom of the first.
Judge followed with a routine grounder to third that Weston Wilson booted. Judge reached second on the two-base fielding error but was stranded.
The Orioles tied the game in the third.
Wilson led off with a single and swiped second after Fried threw to first base and seemingly had him picked off.
Blaze Alexander followed with a flare to right to score Wilson, but Judge threw behind Alexander and got him at first.
Judge’s defensive excellence continued when he caught up to Taylor Ward’s shot to the wall in right and made a leaping grab for the second out of the inning.
The Yankees went up again in the bottom of the third when Rice reached on a double to shallow left and Judge came through with his 13th home run of the year to make it 3-1.
But Fried, far from his sharpest Sunday, gave it back again in the fourth.
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Pete Alonso opened with a double. After a walk to Tyler O’Neill, an infield hit by Coby Mayo loaded the bases on a play Ryan McMahon might have made.
Leody Taveras hit a grounder up the middle — stopped by Jazz Chisholm Jr. — for an infield single to score a run. Baltimore then tied it on a Jeremiah Jackson double play.
The Yankees had a chance to go up again in the fifth, but Cody Bellinger’s two-out liner to right bounced off the top of the wall for a double that sent Judge to third.
Chisholm grounded out to end the inning.
Jasson Domínguez sparked the Yankees in the sixth with a leadoff double from the right side. He moved to third on an Austin Wells groundout, and with the infield in, McMahon scored Domínguez on an infield single.
With McMahon on second, Trent Grisham hit a shot to right-center, but O’Neill made a diving grab to end it.
Brent Headrick got Adley Rutschman to ground out to end the top of the seventh, leaving Samuel Basallo at third as the potential tying run.
The Yankees put an end to the drama in the eighth, as Domínguez hit a two-run homer — his first of the season — and Paul Goldschmidt, who replaced Rice at first, drove in a pair with a single.
