BOSTON -- Compared to his last outing, in which he allowed seven earned runs and four home runs to the light-hitting Tampa Bay Rays, New York Yankees pitcher Michael Pineda was practically lights-out against the powerful Boston Red Sox on Saturday night, limiting them to two runs in five innings.
Both of those runs scored on a freak hit, a bloop double by Mookie Betts that dropped between Carlos Beltran and Starlin Castro in short right field.
That should have been a decent enough performance by Pineda to at least give his team a chance to even this three-game series with the Red Sox, but these days, two runs by the opposition might as well be 20.