Fateful 3-batter stretch spoils otherwise dominant night for Jax

ST. PETERSBURG -- Take away a three-batter stretch in the fifth inning, and Rays starter Griffin Jax was perfect on Monday night.

Unfortunately for Jax and the Rays, that three-batter stretch was enough to swing the game in the Yankees’ favor.

With All-Star ace Cam Schlittler dealing for the Yankees, the 17 pitches that Jax threw to Jasson Domínguez, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and former Ray José Caballero in the fifth proved to be the turning point in the Rays’ 5-1 loss at Tropicana Field, their third straight defeat and their first of the season at home against an American League East opponent.

With one out in the fifth, Jax issued back-to-back walks to Domínguez and Chisholm before surrendering a three-run homer to Caballero. It was the only hiccup in an otherwise brilliant performance, as Jax retired each of the other 15 batters he faced and tied a career-high mark with 10 strikeouts over five innings.

While Jax acknowledged how good his stuff felt and agreed there were positive elements of his outing to carry forward, he was still hung up afterward on the sequence that changed the whole night.

“It's still going to keep me up tonight, that one swing,” Jax said. “Sucks that that one swing defines the game.”

It wasn’t even really the swing by Caballero that frustrated Jax, although he admitted the 2-2 changeup down in the strike zone was a mistake and “probably not the pitch to him, at the end of the day.” It was the consecutive walks to Domínguez and Chisholm that irked the right-hander.

Jax had been incredible to that point, retiring each of the first 13 batters he faced and striking out eight of them while the Yankees hit just one ball out of the infield. But he fell behind Domínguez, walked him, then did the same to Chisholm.

“I think I just sped myself up, tried to be a little bit too perfect there instead of forcing them to hit the ball,” Jax said. “Maybe found myself going for the strikeout instead of challenging them to put the ball in play. Ultimately, those two walks are what changed that inning.”

Manager Kevin Cash was able to accentuate the positive regarding Jax, saying he pitched “incredibly well” in an “outstanding” start. And there was, indeed, a lot to like. Jax recorded 16 swinging strikes, with whiffs on four different pitch types.

It was just that one sequence that didn’t go his way.

“The two walks came back and bit us a little bit. We're probably not talking about if it's not followed with the home run that opens the game up and separates it for them,” Cash said. “But got to be really pleased with the way his arsenal attacked that Yankee lineup. Just a bunch of strikeouts, a bunch of swing and miss and a lot of strikes.”

That was the case for the Rays’ staff as a whole on a strange night. Jax, Cole Sulser, Casey Legumina and Chris Roycroft combined to strike out a club season-high 17 batters and issued only two walks.

But both batters they walked wound up scoring, and the only three hits they allowed were home runs. Two came off the bat of Caballero, who now has a pair of multi-homer games in his career -- both against the Rays since they traded him to the Yankees before last year’s Trade Deadline.

It was only the second time in franchise history (also June 9, 2023, against Texas) the Rays allowed three hits in a game with all three being homers.

“Look, they hit a lot of homers,” Cash said. “That's part of the DNA of their club. But pleased with the way we pitched. We've just got to find a way to keep them in the ballpark.”

But their pitching was almost a secondary concern in the series opener, because the Rays had no answers for Schlittler. The frontrunner for the AL Cy Young Award overpowered Tampa Bay with his four-seam fastball for eight innings, allowing only four hits and striking out eight without a walk.

The Rays’ lone run came in the fifth, when Richie Palacios drove in Chandler Simpson with a single to left field. That was one of only five balls they hit out of the infield against Schlittler all night. Schlittler finished each of his eight strikeouts and induced all 16 of his whiffs with his fastball.

“When you pair that [carry] with 100 mph, and then he’s doing it consistently one through eight [innings], it’s tough to time up, it’s tough to square up,” first baseman Jonathan Aranda said through interpreter Kevin Vera. “The biggest thing that he was able to do was do that specifically, but also do it for the entirety of the game.”