BOSTON — The New York Yankees outlasted the Boston Red Sox for the second straight day on Saturday, beating their rivals 4-3 at a sold-out Fenway Park to expand their lead for the top American League Wild Card spot to 1 \u00bd games.<\/p>\n
Overall, the Yankees\u2019 83-65 record ranks third in the American League, three games behind the first-place Toronto Blue Jays in the AL East. With 14 games remaining, New York still has an outside shot at claiming both the AL East title and the league\u2019s top seed for the second consecutive year.<\/p>\n
But Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. doesn\u2019t believe the standings accurately represent the league\u2019s hierarchy. To him, the Yankees are the team to beat in the American League.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like any team that thinks they\u2019re better than us, they should know that when we step on the field that we\u2019re coming with relentlessness and we\u2019re coming to step on necks,\u201d Chisholm Jr. said. \u201cWe\u2019re not here to play around. We\u2019re going to do the job and get the job done.\u201d<\/p>\n
After going 2 for 4 with two stolen bases on Friday, Chisholm Jr. finished Saturday 3 for 4 with a home run and three RBIs to move within one home run of becoming the third Yankee to ever post a 30\/30 season and the first since Alfonso Soriano in 2003.<\/p>\n
He said a recent \u201ctalk\u201d between players away from the ballpark — he said he wasn\u2019t sure when it exactly happened — helped spark the Yankees\u2019 recent turnaround after squandering a comfortable lead in the AL East in mid-June.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, everybody just started locking in,\u201d Chisholm Jr. said.<\/p>\n
The Yankees are 13-5 since Aug. 24, a stretch that began with a win over the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium. The success was buoyed by winning six of seven games against the Washington Nationals and Chicago White Sox — two of the worst teams in the majors — but it has also included the Yankees going 7-4 against the Red Sox, Blue Jays, Houston Astros and Detroit Tigers — four AL clubs currently positioned to reach the postseason.<\/p>\n
New York will complete the four-team gauntlet with Sunday night\u2019s series finale at Fenway Park opposite Cy Young Award candidate Garrett Crochet. It will be the Yankees\u2019 final regular season game against a team over .500; they finish the schedule with three games against the Minnesota Twins, three against the White Sox and seven against the Baltimore Orioles.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll these games are super important,\u201d Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. \u201cSo to get another win in this place against, obviously a really good opponent and crochet waiting tomorrow so this was a good one to get. Hopefully we can go out and and finish off a great series.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through Saturday, the Yankees are 45-43 against teams over .500 this season. They\u2019re 26-29 against AL teams with winning records. They\u2019ll have to be better in October to reach the World Series again.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe said it all year long, that we\u2019ve been playing to everybody else\u2019s level instead of our own level,\u201d Chisholm Jr. said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been letting games go. We\u2019ve been losing games ourselves. Making errors, just having poor at-bats and stuff like that.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, at the end of the day, we finally looked ourselves in the mirror and realized we\u2019re the team to beat and that\u2019s how we\u2019ve been stepping on the field for the last two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BOSTON — The New York Yankees outlasted the Boston Red Sox for the second straight day on Saturday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2375],"tags":[5,141,48,2542,4,47067,89,2543],"class_list":{"0":"post-313868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boston-red-sox","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-boston","10":"tag-boston-red-sox","11":"tag-bostonredsox","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-new-york-yankees-sports-baseball-team-team-statscom-234","14":"tag-red-sox","15":"tag-redsox"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}