Aaron Judge ended a scoreless game with one swing Saturday night, driving a walk-off home run into right-center field in the ninth inning to give the Yankees a 2-0 win over the Rays. It was his first RBI after an 11-game slump, and it came right after Kevin Kelly issued a walk to Trent Grisham on an 0-2 count.
The result was decided by the last pitch, but the game had already been slipping away from Tampa Bay for hours. The Rays wasted a chance in the third inning when Carson Williams, after leading off with a walk, was picked off first by Ryan Weathers. Yandy Diaz and Jonathan Aranda followed with singles, but Junior Caminero grounded into a 6-4-3 double play to end the inning. In the eighth, Diaz opened with a double off the wall, Fernando Cruz intentionally walked Caminero with two outs, and Ryan Vilade lined a single into left. Caminero then tried to go first to third and was thrown out, erasing another opening before Judge finished it.
Weathers held Tampa Bay scoreless through the first seven innings, while Ryan Rasmussen matched him with seven innings on 92 pitches for the Rays, allowing three or fewer runs for the sixth straight start. Rasmussen struck out six, walked one and generated 14 whiffs, but the offense could not turn that work into runs. The loss came in the final game of a five-day, two-game road trip, a fittingly frustrating ending for a club that kept putting runners on and kept taking them off the bases.
For the Yankees, Judge's homer did more than win a game. It snapped his RBI drought and turned a night of missed chances into a clean finish. For the Rays, the unanswered question is not how close they were, but how often they gave those chances away.
