Yankees Slide Back in Loss to Red Sox

RED SOX 4, YANKEES 3

BOSTON — Fenway Park has had very few opportunities for celebration over the past calendar year. After one of the most excruciating collapses in baseball history last season, the Red Sox are coming to the end of another agonizing season in which their fans have soured on a team fraught with controversy, negativity and mounting losses.

But the one event that always galvanizes the fan base and energizes the stadium is a victory over theYankees and, even more exhilarating, one that puts a dent in their playoff drive.

The Red Sox entered Tuesday’s game last in the American League East, losers of 11 of their past 12 and 15 games under .500. But a capacity crowd behaved as if the Red Sox were actually a factor in the playoff picture.

And for a night, they were.

For only the third time this season, the Red Sox won a game in their final at-bat, surprising the Yankees, 4-3, on Jacoby Ellsbury’s run-scoring single with one out in the ninth.

As Pedro Ciriaco, who continues to play like a most valuable player against the Yankees, slid home with the winning run, the Red Sox players poured out of the dugout to jump and dance with Ellsbury as the announced crowd of 37,437 screamed as if it had been the Red Sox, and not a rival, who pulled into a first-place tie.

Instead, it was the Baltimore Orioles — the same team that played spoiler to the Red Sox on the final day of the season last year with a game-ending play at the plate — who benefited from this outcome. The Orioles beat the Tampa Bay Rays, 9-2, to tie the Yankees for first place in the division again.

It was the fourth time in a week that the Orioles drew even with the Yankees atop the standings, and the sixth straight game in which the Yankees have alternated between a win and a loss. The Yankees have not won two games in a row since the middle of August.

“We win a game and then we lose a game, and then we win a game and then we lose a game,” Derek Jeter said. “That’s pretty much it. We’ve got to try and string together some wins, that’s the bottom line. If we keep winning and losing and winning and losing, the other teams are going to gain ground on you.”

This was certainly a game the Yankees could have won, especially considering that Jon Lester, the Red Sox starter, had enough control problems to walk seven batters. But following the script from earlier this season, the Yankees went 1 for 12 with runners in scoring position and left nine men on base.

In May and June, the Yankees overcame that deficiency by hitting more home runs than anyone else in baseball. But there were no long balls to be had Tuesday, and the Yankees fell to 4-22 in games in which they do not hit a ball over the fence.

Jeter, again, summed up the situation: “Bottom line, we have to find ways to score more runs. Tip your cap to the pitcher sometimes, too. But he didn’t have a lot of control, so we had a lot of opportunities that we let slip away from us.”

The only home run was hit by Dustin Pedroia, the scrappy Red Sox second baseman who evened the score, 3-3, in the bottom of the sixth with a sizzling line drive into the seats above the Green Monster against Hiroki Kuroda.

The score remained tied until the ninth. Ciriaco, who finished with two hits, pulled a ground ball single through the left side of the infield against Dave Robertson and went to second on Mike Aviles’s infield single. Ellsbury then singled to right field on a changeup that Robertson left up in the zone. Ichiro Suzuki made a strong throw home, but the speedy Ciriaco, who also made two great defensive plays, slid hard into home, forcing Russell Martin’s leg out of the way.

In nine career games against the Yankees, Ciriaco is 17 for 35 (.486) with 11 runs scored and 7 runs batted in. He has 13 multihit games this season, and five have come against the Yankees.

“He was struggling coming in, too,” Yankees Manager Joe Girardi said, referring to Ciriaco’s .114 batting average in his previous 10 games. “He hits a ball off his shoe tops to get a hit in the ninth. He just finds a way against us.”

As the Yankees try to follow Jeter’s directive to string together consecutive wins, they will attempt it without Mark Teixeira, who traveled with the team despite getting the news from doctors Monday that he would be out another 10 to 14 days with a strained calf muscle.

Teixeira’s decision to play Saturday against the Orioles when his calf was not fully healed will not be forgotten when it comes time to make a similar decision within the next couple of weeks. He missed 12 days with a Grade 1 strain of his left calf, and no sooner did he come back to play than he reinjured it.

Teixeira said that 10 to 14 days is only a general guideline. More depends on how the calf feels at the end of that time, and there is no guarantee that in two weeks he will be ready.

“I don’t really know what 10 to 14 days means,” he said, “because 12 didn’t work last time.”

That means players like Alex Rodriguez, whose 13-game hitting streak came to an end with three strikeouts, will need to fill the void.

“He needs to play well, but he’s not the only one,” Girardi said. “There’s a lot of guys. We need to play well down the stretch if we’re going to accomplish what we want to accomplish.”