Payton Tolle took a perfect game into the sixth inning and finished with seven shutout innings as the Boston Red Sox beat the Yankees 6-1 on Friday night at Fenway Park. The win gave Boston a second straight game against the American League East leaders and stretched the rotation’s quality-start run to nine games.
Payton Tolle at Fenway Park
Tolle retired the first 16 batters he faced before Spencer Jones broke up the bid with a one-out single to shallow left in the sixth. He struck out seven and allowed one hit, turning in the kind of line that can change a night quickly on a staff that had been stringing together quality starts.
At 23 years and 237 days, he became the youngest Sox pitcher to log at least seven shutout innings since Eduardo Rodriguez on Sept. 4, 2016. His four-seam fastball averaged 94.4 miles per hour, the lowest velocity of any start of his career, which makes the margin for error look even smaller after the game he still put together.
Boston Red Sox Support
The Red Sox gave him an early cushion. Wilyer Abreu tripled to center in the first and scored on a Willson Contreras RBI single for a 1-0 lead, then Boston pushed it to 3-0 in the second on Caleb Durbin's bunt single and Tsung-Che Cheng's run-scoring fielder's choice. Cheng later doubled to center for his first big-league hit and his first RBI of his career, and he said, “I waited for this for a year,” and “It finally showed up.”
Contreras added a solo home run in the third for his 17th homer of the season, sending a hanging sweeper from Will Warren onto Lansdowne Street. That swing turned the game from control into separation, and the Yankees never recovered enough to threaten Tolle’s command.
Will Warren and the Yankees
Tolle said he was bedridden for most of Thursday and Friday because of illness, then still took the mound after waking up Friday morning feeling off. “I woke up [Friday] morning, I was like, ‘I don’t feel great, but I’m going to pitch today,’” he said. He also admitted, “There were a couple of times where I was like, ‘Do I tell anybody?’... [The outing] was a grinder one.”
That grind showed in the fastball number, but not in the result. He said thinking about perfection came too early to matter — “Way too early” — though he added, “I might have thought about it in the third inning.” After the seventh, he walked in slowly because he wanted to take in the moment, and the crowd of 33,353 watched Boston finish a 6-1 win that left the Red Sox with a 4-5 record and a 2.78 ERA for Tolle. A separate look at the roster picture comes into focus through the rotation’s run, and a note on that broader trade puzzle is here: Aroldis Chapman's 1.08 ERA.
