NEW YORK -- It was the third inning on Saturday afternoon, and Cam Schlittler found himself adjusting his cap near the back of the mound, unable to find the right combination. He’d thrown nine pitches to Andy Pages already, and when the 10th resulted in a playable foul pop, it almost registered as relief.
The Dodgers have earned a reputation for producing what manager Aaron Boone calls “heavy at-bats,” the type that have been in short supply for his own team of late. The Yankees were shut down by Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s complete-game effort, falling 8-2 at Yankee Stadium.
“They’ve got a great lineup, right?” Schlittler said. “I feel like I threw a lot of strikes. They were able to foul a lot of them off. I had some tough, long at-bats there that taxed the pitch count.”
Trent Grisham’s fourth-inning solo home run represented the biggest blow off Yamamoto, who dazzled with his strike-throwing and efficiency, retiring 18 of his first 19 batters faced.
Perhaps Yamamoto’s splendid outing could be viewed as, like Boone said, “a little bit of an outlier” – but the Yankees’ offense has been scuffling for weeks. They’ve lost nine of their last 10 home games; something that had never before happened at this Yankee Stadium (previous instance was in 2003).
“We’ve got to be able to do more,” Boone said. “We’ve been saying that a lot here the last few weeks.”
The promising results immediately following Aaron Judge’s assignment to the injured list in early June have faded; since then, the Yanks are 18-21, including losses to the Dodgers in the first two games of this series. Their stagnant offense has been a main culprit.
“The game’s tough, but this is our job,” third baseman Ryan McMahon said. “This is what we’re supposed to be really good at doing, so we’ve got to find something. We’ve got to get something going. I think one good kick in the right direction would get us firing.”
With what Boone described as “death by a thousand cuts,” the Dodgers drove up Schlittler’s pitch count early. He’d thrown 71 pitches through three innings, with Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman knocking in early runs.
“I think I had a lot of 3-2 counts, so some uncompetitive pitches there didn’t help,” Schlittler said. “And at that point, you’re just kind of trying to make a good enough pitch where you hope they can put it in play and get themselves out.”
That’s the kind of grind-it-out mentality the Yankees have been searching for, and without much success, which is why McMahon said their hitters have grown “pissed off.”
“I think we’re capable of the same stuff,” McMahon said. “I thought they did a really good job against Cam today and worked really hard. We didn’t do the same to their guy.”
Schlittler took the blame for his early exit, saying, “As a starter, if you can’t get through five, that’s not a good sign. … Especially in the first game of a doubleheader.”
Andy Pages’ soft RBI double in the fifth chased Schlittler, whose ERA rose from 2.05 to 2.20. That continues to lead the American League; only the Brewers’ Jacob Misiorowski (1.62) and the Braves’ Chris Sale (2.06) have lower ERAs among qualified Major Leaguers.
The floodgates opened in a five-run eighth inning, sparked when McMahon couldn’t find a Max Muncy foul pop-up in the sun. Right fielder Max Schuemann similarly lost a second-inning fly ball that fell for a Muncy double.
“It was a big, bright sun,” McMahon said. “The ball got right into the middle of it for a couple of us today.”
In the eighth, Muncy walked and the frame went off the rails from there, with Jake Bird surrendering five runs in one-third of an inning.
Bird was optioned to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre after the game, with the club recalling right-hander Kervin Castro and appointing Elmer Rodríguez as its 27th man for the doubleheader.
Those fresh arms could help, but not as much as stringing together a few Dodgers-quality at-bats.
“Even when you’re rolling offensively, there’s going to be days when you get shut down a little bit,” Boone said. “But we want that feeling of, ‘Man, that was a grind,’ that the opposing pitcher goes through. For the last few weeks, we haven’t done that enough.”