FIVE OFA KIND
Homer-happy Yanks destroy Indians, regain wild-card spot
Joey Gallo admires his second-inning home run, the first of his two in the Yankees’ 8-0 laugher over the Indians on Friday night. Aaron Judge, Brett Gardner and Giancarlo Stanton also went deep in the win that helped the Bombers climb back into the second wild-card spot.
There will be a lot of breath-holding between now and the end of the regular season as the Yankees try to make the playoffs.
But while they’re currently in a tight battle with the Blue Jays and Red Sox for the two AL wild-card spots, they at least got to exhale for a bit on Friday, when they finally beat a team with ease.
A day after manager Aaron Boone knocked his team for its failure to add on to leads in what turned into an ugly extra-inning loss, the Yankees scored four runs in the seventh to put away the Indians in a 8-0 win.
“That’s what we need to do when we have the opportunity,’’ Boone said following the win. “We haven’t had a lot of games where we scored a couple and pulled away like that.”
That four-run inning was capped by a three-run blast from Brett Gardner that made it 6-0, as the Yankees matched a season-high with five homers for the second time in four games.
Afterward, Gardner — with more postseason experience than anyone on the Yankees — told the team to just focus on each day and “not look too far ahead.”
“I feel good about our chances,’’ Gardner said. “We’re in position to make the postseason if we play well enough down the stretch.”
More games like Friday’s would help. The Yankees homered for a 10thstraight game, their best stretch of the year.
“It was nice to win a game handily,’’ said Joey Gallo, who homered twice. “We’ve been playing really, really close games. … We have a lineup that can do that. We have to do that more.”
Coupled with the Blue Jays’ loss to the Twins, the Yankees hopped over Toronto and back into a wild-card spot by half a game with 14 games to play. They remained half a game back of the Red Sox, who beat the Orioles, the team that rallied to defeat the Yankees on Thursday.
In just the Yankees’ fourth win by more than one run since Aug. 24, Corey Kluber gave them six shutout innings.
“We’ve got to win every night,’’ Kluber said.
Kluber hadn’t pitched more than four innings since his no-hitter at Texas on May 19, but he was able to turn back the clock against Cleveland, his former team.
In the second inning, Gallo drilled a leadoff homer into the second deck in right to give the Yankees a 1-0 lead. It was his fourth straight start with a homer, as he looks to find his groove as a Yankee.
Judge, who entered in an 0-for-13 skid, opened the bottom of the fourth with a homer to right-center. It was his 35th blast of the season — and fifth in his last seven games.
Kluber ran into trouble again with the bottom of the order in the fifth, walking Perez and giving up a bloop hit to Andres Gimenez — after getting ahead of both, 0-2 — before escaping any damage.
The Yankees turned another double play to get Kluber out of a jam in the sixth.
He was replaced by Michael King to start the seventh. King retired the side in order with some help from DJ LeMahieu, who made a nice charging play on a slow grounder by Owen Miller for the second out.
King tossed two scoreless innings before the Yankees got some muchneeded insurance in the seventh, with an RBI single from Gio Urshela that made it 3-0.
Gardner followed with his three-run homer off Nick Wittgren.
“We just hadn’t had that one swing to put us apart and with one swing, he calms everybody down,’’ Judge said of Gardner.
Stanton and Gallo homered back-toback in the eighth before Lucas Luetge pitched the ninth.