NEW YORK — There’s this thing about Giancarlo Stanton — this ability that pitchers know and fear. It’s not just the otherworldly exit velocity, or his ability to rocket balls somewhere in the vicinity of the moon. It’s also that he can look lost in a handful of at-bats and then do all those Stanton things in his next turn at the plate.
As it happens, Stanton had been in one of those lost-looking slumps coming into this series with the Orioles. And, as it also happens, he busted out of it — with gusto, and a hat tip to the history books.
Stanton, who put together a two-hit game Tuesday, came back Wednesday to hit his 350th home run, drive in three runs and go 2-for-3 in the Yankees 5-2 win over the Orioles at Yankee Stadium. His sacrifice fly in the sixth broke a tie at 2. The Yankees scored two insurance runs in the seventh, first on Joey Gallo’s solo homer and then when Isiah Kiner-Falefa singled, moved over on two groundouts and scored on a wild pitch.
Jordan Montgomery, Michael King and Clay Holmes combined to keep the Orioles off the board for all but one inning. King pitched 2 1/3 innings of one-hit ball.
The Yankees, who’d only scored a total of two runs over three starts while Montgomery was on the mound, matched that in the first inning, thanks to Stanton’s milestone.
Aaron Judge singled off Tyler Wells with one out in the inning and, a batter later, Stanton hit a 417-foot homer to right to give the Yankees the 2-0 advantage. Stanton, 32, became the seventh-fastest player to reach 350 homers at 1,341 games.
Montgomery, meanwhile, continued his stretch of brilliant outings — right up until the sixth, that is. He retired nine straight batters at one point, a streak broken up by Cedric Mullins’ one-out single in the sixth. But one batter later, he floated a changeup that stayed middle-in to Anthony Santander, who barreled it 427 feet to left to tie the game at 2. Montgomery then plunked Austin Hays in the foot to end his night in favor of King — a move the lefthander vocally disagreed with while he was on the mound. King allowed a single to put runners on the corners but induced a pop up to third to end the inning.
Montgomery pitched 5 2/3 innings, allowing the two runs on four runs with no walks, four strikeouts and two hit batsmen over just 71 pitches. His ERA jumped slightly, to 2.70, but the Yankees have now averaged just one run per game in the innings Montgomery pitches — all of which has led to a 1-3 record in those games.
“I was really proud of the way he handled” the lack of run support, Aaron Boone said before the game. “He’s a great teammate. He never blames anything and he’s super accountable. He expects a lot of himself and he’s really competitive and that doesn’t change for him when he’s going through a stretch where we haven’t gotten him a lot of runs. I don’t think his mindset changes at all.”
The Yankees offense finally got something going on the basepaths in the bottom of the sixth, after DJ LeMahieu walked with one out. Judge took two straight balls before Joey Krehbiel worked back to strike him out, but then, with LeMahieu attempting to steal, Anthon Rizzo singled to left to put runners on the corners, bring up Stanton and bring in Felix Bautista to face him. Stanton got just under an inside fastball and skied it to center, but it was plenty far enough to score LeMahieu with the go-ahead run.
In all, it seemed to provide proof that Stanton is out of the funk that he brought into Tuesday’s contest. He was 3-for-29 with one RBI before his two-hit game in the series opener, but now has four RBIs between these two first games against the Orioles. He has 12 RBIs on the year — due, in part, to his hot start in the first three games of the season. Stanton was hitting .140 between the fourth game of the season and Tuesday, and his first-inning blast also snapped his homerless streak at 14, which was one shy of his record as a Yankee.
