NEW YORK — Kiké Hernández shrugged his shoulders and urged Brayan Bello to keep pitching early into Sunday evening’s contest against the Yankees.
The communication between the two didn’t need words. A gesture was enough.
With two runners in scoring position during the second inning of Sunday’s rubber match, Jose Trevino grounded a ball up the middle. Hernández was in perfect position to make what would have been the third out of the inning, keeping the Sox in front on the solo homer Justin Turner poked to right-center in the top half of the second.
But the ball had its own intentions, deflecting off the second-base bag and trickling into center field. It scored both runners, handing the Yankees a lead in a series that featured little offense from both clubs.
Bello locked eyes with his veteran, who assured the 24-year-old to keep his head and not become too tied up in his emotions, which can on occasion throw Bello off his game.
“I think I take pride in understanding when the moment calls for a mound visit or just a simple gesture,” Hernández said. “He kind of looked at me like, ‘You gotta be [expletive] kidding me.’ And I’m just like, there’s nothing we can do other than to keep pitching.”
Bello did just that, turning in seven innings where he allowed just three hits and no further runs. That set up a 3-2 Red Sox victory that took extras, and required another hand from Hernández. He drove in the winning run with a go-ahead RBI single during the 10th inning, after he’d scored the tying run on Jarren Duran’s RBI groundout in the eighth.
The offense still fizzled, though, as it has for the last several weeks. The Sox were 0 for 12 with runners in scoring position dating to Friday before Hernández snapped that skid. The numbers with scoring opportunities were stark heading into Sunday. In going 6-12 the 18 games prior to Sunday night, the Red Sox hit .272 with a .449 slugging and .812 OPS with the bases empty, and .197 — second worst in the majors — with MLB-worst slugging (.286) and OPS (.550) with men on.
So for most of Bello’s outing, one manager Alex Cora described as his best, the righthander stood alone on center stage. He powered his sinker-changeup combination through a Yankee lineup that has equally scuffled the past week without Aaron Judge.
“He was amazing,” Cora said of Bello. “He was throwing his best pitches as much as possible. You guys are gonna hear that from me a lot the rest of the season.”
“I think my sinker was very good. The changeup was really good,” said Bello. “The slider I need to work on because I couldn’t command that the way I wanted. But I think everything worked very well for me today.”
The Sox went 3-3 on their road trip, recovering from the troubling move of starter Chris Sale to the 60-day injured list with Garrett Whitlock, Tanner Houck, and Bello yielding just five earned runs over 19⅓ innings.
“The last three days were fun to watch in this scenario against a good team,” Cora said. “The kids grew up a lot.”
Chris Martin earned the save, stranding automatic runner DJ LeMahieu at third by striking out Trevino and Anthony Volpe in the bottom of the 10th. All that went through his mind?
“We get to go home now,” Martin said. “That’s all I was thinking in my mind was in this game, so we could get on a flight and go home.”
The Sox host the Rockies for a three-game set beginning Monday. As they try to find their groove offensively, the pitching has kept them in ball games. Sunday was Bello’s evening to.
It could have gone south after that second inning, but Bello kept everything in order.
“It’s what we want to do,” Cora said. “The Yankees have a good team over there and we pitched well the whole weekend. So we take that home and hopefully at home, we start hitting the ball the other way, get that feeling back, and have a good week.”
Julian McWilliams can be reached at julian.mcwilliams@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @byJulianMack.
June 12, 2023 at 11:00AM
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Runs still hard to come by, but Red Sox find enough to take Yankee Stadium series finale - The Boston Globe
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