Developing The Yankees Hit Two Home Runs and Lost by Three, Because They Made Three Errors in the First Inning for the First Time Since 1975

Ryan McMahon whiffed on a ground ball. Jazz Chisholm Jr. threw away a double play. Austin Wells was charged with catcher's interference. George Lombard Jr. got pulled off first base on a 4-6-3 that should have ended the inning. All of that happened in the bottom of the first on Monday night, and three of those were errors, which made the New York Yankees the first team to commit three errors in the first inning of a postseason game since the Oakland Athletics did it against Boston in Game 1 of the 1975 American League Championship Series.

They lost 5-2. Ben Rice hit two home runs. That is not a sentence that should go in that order.

What actually beat New York

Three of the Yankees' four errors produced unearned runs, and the unearned runs were the margin. Cam Schlittler was charged with four runs in 4⅓ innings and only two of them were his. The fifth inning is where it came apart completely: Lombard booted a Chandler Simpson grounder and Junior Caminero scored, Chisholm could not get to Liam Hicks' bouncer, and then Lombard threw wide of first on Jonny DeLuca's grounder for the fourth error of the night. Tampa Bay did not hit a home run. Tampa Bay hit the ball on the ground at a defense that could not field it, which is what the Rays have done for twenty years.

New York has now scored two runs in two games. Aaron Judge is out with a calf injury, which matters enormously and explains the run total and explains none of the fielding. Rice is 7-for-15 with four homers through four postseason games and his team is down 2-0, because a $304.6 million payroll bought a lineup and did not buy an infield.

Freddy Peralta gave Tampa Bay 4⅔ innings and a run. Cam Booser got out of a bases-loaded fifth and got the win for it. Bryan Baker finished it, a perfect ninth, his second save in two games. In Game 1 Drew Rasmussen had already taken the Yankees apart. The Rays are 98-64, the best record in the American League, on $98.3 million.

The other 2-0, and the trade underneath it

Chicago went into Progressive Field on Monday and trailed for the first time all postseason. That is a real sentence: 27 innings into October, the White Sox had not been behind, and then Cleveland put two on the board in the first off Anthony Kay and Sean Newcomb with a throwing error in the middle of it.

Sean Burke then threw 5⅓ innings of one-hit, one-run baseball with six strikeouts, which is the single best pitching performance of the series and will be the fourth thing anyone remembers about the game. Miguel Vargas opened the sixth with a single. Braden Montgomery doubled the other way, down the right-field line, and scored two. Chase Meidroth dropped in a single for a fourth run. Jo Adell tripled off Grant Taylor in the eighth and the lead held at one. Kyle Teel, who scored Chicago's first run, said afterwards: "Shout out to all the fans that stuck with us through the struggles."

Montgomery, Meidroth and Teel combined for four hits and three runs driven in. All three arrived in the same transaction.

On December 11, 2024, the White Sox traded Garrett Crochet to Boston. Crochet had just thrown 146 innings over 32 starts with a 3.58 ERA, a 2.69 FIP, 209 strikeouts against 33 unintentional walks, and the highest strikeout rate of any regular starting pitcher in baseball at 35.1 per cent. He was 25 and cheap and the best left-handed starter available. Chicago got back Teel, Montgomery, Meidroth and Wikelman Gonzalez, and the consensus at the time was that Boston had bought an ace at a fair price.

Twenty-two months later, three of those four players won a Division Series game that put the White Sox one victory from the American League Championship Series. The franchise lost 101 games in 2023, 121 in 2024 — the most in modern history — and 102 in 2025. It won 84 this year, clinched on September 24, and is the first club ever to reach the postseason immediately after three consecutive 100-loss seasons. It is 4-0 in October, every win on the road, and it is now going home to Rate Field.

The rookie who has been the loudest part of it is Munetaka Murakami, whose 440-foot, 112.2-mph two-run homer off Parker Messick in the fourth inning of Game 1 on Saturday was the hardest-hit ball of the postseason. Several aggregated accounts have moved that home run into Monday's game. It was Saturday's. The distinction matters because Monday was won by a double down the line and a bloop single, not by anything that travelled 440 feet, and that is the actual story.

The pattern, and the number that frames it

Three of the four Division Series are 2-0. The leaders are Tampa Bay at $98.3 million, Chicago at $98.0 million and Milwaukee at $143.5 million — 25th, 26th and 19th in baseball. The teams trailing them are New York at $304.6 million, Cleveland at $74.2 million and San Diego at $223.9 million. In two of the three, the cheaper club is beating a club spending between $125 million and $206 million more. The Mets spent $346.8 million, the most in the game, and are not in the bracket at all.

Milwaukee's Game 2 was its own version of the same thing: Jackson Chourio's two-run single off Mason Miller with two outs in the ninth, hit at 101.3 mph past a diving second baseman, for a walk-off. Not a home run. A single that found grass.

The strongest objection, which deserves a real answer

A five-game series is close to a coin flip between two good teams, and 2-0 leads are the most over-interpreted data in sport. The Braves and Dodgers are 1-1, which immediately breaks any clean "cheap teams are winning" narrative; Cleveland is the single poorest team in baseball at $74.2 million and is down 2-0 to a club spending $24 million more. Monday's games were decided by one and three runs. Run the ALDS again and New York probably wins it, because over any long horizon a $304.6 million roster is better than a $98.3 million one, and it is not close.

All of that is correct, and the conclusion people draw from it is wrong. The claim worth making is not that poverty is an advantage. It is that the postseason format converts a payroll advantage into something very near zero, and that when it does, the attributes that decide games are the ones money buys least efficiently: catching the ball, putting it in play, and having a sixth-best reliever who can escape a bases-loaded inning. New York did not lose Monday because it was outspent in reverse. It lost because four of its fielders could not complete routine plays in a game its hitters won.

Where this falsifies: if New York and San Diego both come back to win in five, and Cleveland does too, then October 5 was variance and we overfit it. Three Game 3s on Wednesday will say something. The Rays, White Sox and Brewers each need one win.