Despite Yankees beat the Orioles 4-1 on Friday night was what happened in the final moments that got everyone talking.
Both benches were cleared after the Yankees approached clay holmes to knock Heston Kjerstad on the side of the head with a fastball with one out in the ninth inning. Orioles manager Brandon Hyde and the team’s coach went out to look at Kjerstad, but as the young slugger was leaving the game, Hyde began chirping and moving toward the Yankees’ dugout.
This resulted in the Yankees dugout and the Baltimore dugout being cleaned out.
After a delay to separate the teams, Hyde was ejected and the Yankees headed to complete your victory but after the game both sides talked about the emotional confrontation.
“I hope Heston is okay. No one ever wants to see that. That’s scary right now,” the Yankees manager said. Aaron Boone he said. “First of all, I hope he is okay. Obviously an exciting moment and two teams playing hard. I’m glad it didn’t increase too much.”
Hyde was seen pointing and yelling at someone in the Yankees dugout. Boone was pressed for more information about the interaction, but the captain didn’t want to get into it too much.
“I understand that coming out and being hot and one of your guys getting hit like that is scary,” he said. “It seems like some things were directed at Clay and so, you know, so I’m not going to get into that too much.”
“I just reacted the way I did and saw they were pointing at me and everything,” Hyde said after the game. “So I just reacted the way I reacted.”
Hyde said Kjerstad is undergoing further testing and called it a scary time. When asked what angered him, Hyde said he saw Yankees coaches waving and yelling at him, which he “didn’t like at the time.”
“I definitely wasn’t trying to hit him,” Holmes said. “The rain just came, your shoes are dirty, it’s wet, this is baseball. Sometimes conditions are difficult.”
Holmes said the entire incident was unfortunate and tried to go to Kjerstad to make sure he was OK, but the reliever felt the Orioles didn’t like that.
The Yankees and Orioles have met eight times this season after Friday’s game. In those games, the Yankees walked 10 batters, while Baltimore struck out three. Perhaps the frustration from the previous series has boiled over, but Holmes believes it’s just the atmosphere of two teams competing for a division.
“I mean, the two best teams in the division, I think there’s a very competitive atmosphere there,” he explained. “We know that these games have some meaning and we are here to show that. Two teams fighting like that, things will fill that atmosphere, you will feel the competitive energy and you will feel that in this series.”
Baltimore holds a 5-3 lead in the season series so far, but Friday’s win puts the Yankees just one game behind the Orioles for the AL East division lead.
They will play two more times before the All-Star break and will not see each other again until three scheduled games in late September.
But is Boone worried about possible retaliation this weekend? The Yankees’ longtime manager said he was hopeful Kjerstad was OK and thankful no one else was hurt in the scrum, but he had a clear message.
“We need to move on and play baseball.”
The Yankees and Orioles do it again Saturday afternoon starting at 4:05 p.m.
