His Boston counterpart, Nathan Eovaldi, dominated the Yankees through five innings, but in the sixth Anthony Rizzo hit a towering home run that curled around the foul pole in right field. Then Aaron Judge reached base on an infield hit, which brought Alex Cora, Boston’s manager, out of the dugout.
Eovaldi had given up only two hard hits — a ball of the Green Monster by Giancarlo Stanton in the first and the Rizzo home run — and the Red Sox bullpen has been a spotty, at best, for most of the season. But the Boston relief corps had shown improvement in the final few weeks, and Cora called on Ryan Brasier, one of the team’s most reliable relievers down the stretch.
Brasier’s first assignment was to face Stanton, who hit another shot off the Green Monster. Phil Nevin, the Yankees’ third base coach, aggressively sent Judge homeward, but Enrique Hernandez fielded the ball cleanly and threw quickly to Bogaerts, whose relay to catcher Kevin Plawecki was perfectly on target for the second out.
Brasier got Joey Gallo to pop up for the final out. In the bottom of the inning, Boston regained its three-run lead on a Verdugo double that scored Bogaerts ahead of the tag.
Tuesday night marked the fifth time the Yankees and Red Sox had played an elimination game, in which the winner advanced and the loser’s season ended. The first was in 1949 when the Yankees won a regular-season tiebreaker. Then came 1978. In Game 7 of the 2003 A.L. Championship Series, Boone, then the Yankees’ third baseman, hit a game-winning homer in the 11th inning off Tim Wakefield.
But in 2004, the Red Sox drastically changed the script, coming back from an 0-3 deficit to win that series in seven games. Since then, the nature of the rivalry has changed, and Boston has won four World Series titles, while the Yankees have claimed one, in 2009.