Given a quick lead, R.A. Dickey relinquished it in all of three pitches.
Jacoby Ellsbury overcame a first-inning deficit with a two-run homer, then added an RBI single against the knuckleballer to lead the New York Yankees over the Toronto Blue Jays 5-3 on Monday.
“I had a lot of movement on it,” Dickey said of his knuckler. “Sometimes this game’s a matter of centimeters, you know, one that gets off the barrel, doesn’t get off the barrel and it’s popped out to right field.”
Jose Bautista was thrown out twice on the basepaths for the American League East-leading Blue Jays (77-60), who remained one game ahead of Boston.
Toronto had been 9-3 against the Yankees this year, winning seven of the previous eight games, and the Blue Jays needed only seven pitches to jump in front when Devon Travis doubled and Bautista singled, both on 0-2 counts.
However, Brett Gardner took a strike in the bottom half and singled, and Ellsbury drove a high knuckler over the right-field short porch for his seventh home run.
Ellsbury added an RBI single in the third and rookie Travis Austin hit his second double of the game in the fourth, a drive off the wall in left-center that drove in two runs for a 5-1 lead.
“I thought he was a little inconsistent with the knuckleball today,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said.
Dickey (9-14) gave up five runs and seven hits in four innings on a blustery afternoon, his second shortest start this season. He is 0-6 in his past nine starts at Yankee Stadium.
Masahiro Tanaka (12-4) won his fifth straight decision, allowing two runs and seven hits in 6-1/3 innings. He left after a leadoff walk and a fly ball by pinch hitter Dioner Navarro that Aaron Judge caught against the top of the right-field wall.
Jonathan Holder, who made his major league debut on Friday last week, got an out, but walked his next two batters. Edwin Encarnacion hit a two-run, opposite-field single to right off Ben Heller for his third hit and Tommy Layne retired pitch hitter Russell Martin on a looping ball to second baseman Starlin Castro.
Four pitchers and three pinch-hitters saw action in the half inning.
“That’s the beauty, too, of September, you can do those things,” Gibbons said. “The beauty and then the drawback of September.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier