NEW YORK _ By the time first pitch had rolled around Monday evening, it had been three days since the Yankees had played a game _ basically an eternity during the everyday grind of a baseball season.
Would they even remember how to hold a bat? Or did their collective rhythm wash away with pretty much everything else in Detroit over the weekend?
The short answer is nope, their rhythm didn't suffer. The longer answer is not only that, but the Yankees on Monday somehow were able to produce three days of offense in about ... oh, three innings. Instead of taking it out on the Tigers, though, they did it against Derek Jeter's Marlins, to the tune of a 12-1 drubbing at Yankee Stadium.
Luis Severino (3-1), who struggled his last time out, returned to form against one of the least dangerous lineups in baseball. He allowed one hit and one walk in six innings, striking out eight.
Didi Gregorius homered twice, Aaron Judge also hit a home run and Gary Sanchez continued his emergence from his early-season slump, going 3-for-4 with three RBIs and twice producing with the bases loaded. He's 7-for-20 in his career with three men on.
Gregorius, who homered in the fourth and seventh, notched his second multi-home run game of the season. Judge extended his hitting streak to 12 games.
The Yankees scored in each of the first five innings and put up a crooked number in four of the five. They led 11-0 by the end of the fifth inning, in which they scored four times.
And for a team like the Yankees that hadn't quite lived up to the hype its potent lineup created, Monday was a much-needed reminder of what these guys can actually do. (Except, that is, for Giancarlo Stanton, who went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts and earned another smattering of boos when he struck out in the seventh against his former team.)
Six players had at least two hits for the Yankees, who had 15 hits (eight for extra bases), drew eight walks and forced the Marlins' first two pitchers, Caleb Smith and Tyler Cloyd, to throw 171 pitches in the first 5 2/3 innings, not many of them very good.
The party got started very early, when the Yankees loaded the bases with none out against a wild Smith in a 42-pitch first and scored twice. Sanchez had an RBI infield single with one out and Smith walked Tyler Austin with two outs to force in another run. Miguel Andujar flied out to the warning track in right, putting a brief jolt in the crowd but otherwise harmlessly ending an inning that could have been far worse for the Marlins.
Judge netted the Yankees another run in the second when he drove Smith's 2-and-1 fastball into the first few rows in right- center. It was his fourth home run of the season and the 60th in his short career, a span of 197 games. He reached that mark more quickly than any other player in MLB history, eclipsing Mark McGwire, who did it in 202 games.
Former Yankees left-hander Smith, meanwhile, continued to have a very bad night. He allowed the first three batters to reach in the third, culminating with Aaron Hicks' two-run double, then got an out and issued his fifth walk. He allowed five runs in 2 1/3 innings and threw 84 pitches en route to those seven painful outs, only 48 for strikes.
The Marlins, who entered the game with the second-worst ERA in the majors (4.93), did themselves no favors in relief, either. After Don Mattingly put in Cloyd with the Marlins already down by five in the third, he allowed six runs and eight hits in 3 1/3 innings before being pulled in the sixth, the first inning in which the Yankees failed to score a run.
Games like these happen when you're the Marlins, a team that's been infamously stripped of so many of its big names (Stanton being the most notable).
The rebuild of a franchise with more debt than talent has led to a few embarrassing games, and so it made a strange sort of sense when, in the later innings, a handful of fans began to chant Jeter's name.
Why wouldn't they be grateful? All these years later, and he was still helping the Yankees score runs.
