BALTIMORE — After everyone involved had cooled down from the benches-clearing fracas at Camden Yards late Friday night, Aaron Boone spoke to Orioles manager Brandon Hyde.
The conversation went “fine,” according to Boone, and that was as far as he wanted to discuss it with reporters Saturday afternoon.
But whether the bad blood that was on full display Friday night — and had seemed to be boiling under the surface in their prior series this season — spilled over into the rest of the weekend remained to be seen.
Clay Holmes’ 0-2 sinker that nailed Heston Kjerstad in the head in the bottom of the ninth inning was clearly not intentional, as the rain had started to pick up and the Yankees were two outs away from finishing off a 4-1 win.
Friday night. Getty Images
The Orioles did not seem to dispute that notion, nor did the Yankees have much issue with Hyde standing up for Kjerstad and charging toward the Yankees dugout — he said he was reacting to their coaches — which led to the benches clearing for some heated pushing and shoving.
But there was also a feeling, at least from the Yankees’ side, that there was too much on the line in this series to get carried away with any high tensions boiling over through the weekend.
After winning Friday night, the Yankees climbed back within one game of the Orioles for first place in the AL East.
“We’re playing for too much to get caught up in that,” Boone said. “We gotta play well, we gotta win ballgames. Same for them.”
The most immediate fallout of Friday’s chaos was Kjerstad’s being scratched from the Orioles’ lineup Saturday, and then being placed on the seven-day concussion list minutes before first pitch.
The rookie left fielder had initially been in the lineup but was not feeling 100 percent after going through pregame drills.
As for longer-lasting effects, after this weekend the Yankees and Orioles will only meet for one more series this year, which comes in the final week of the regular season in The Bronx, when the AL East could be on the line.
“It’s the top two teams in the division” Holmes said. “I think there’s a very competitive atmosphere to this. We know that these games mean something and we’re here to show up. Two teams battling it out like that, you’re going to feel the atmosphere, you’re going to feel the competitive energy. I think that’s the case here in this series.”
Entering Saturday, Yankees pitchers had hit the Orioles 10 times this season.
Orioles pitchers had hit the Yankees only three times, but there was some frustration last month in the Yankees clubhouse during a series in which the Orioles had multiple instances of throwing high and tight (including Aaron Judge and Gleyber Torres both getting hit on the hand).
“Pitching in is a part of the game,” Hyde told reporters Saturday. “Whether they’ve hit more guys than us is not something that I’m really concerned about right now. I want to win and what we’ve done is won, a lot.”
Hyde escalated the fireworks Friday, first yelling at Holmes and then going after the Yankees dugout.
“I was emotional,” Hyde said a day later. “My guy got hit in the head and I might have said some things that, at the time, I reacted to it.”
Gerrit Cole, whose best start of the season Friday was overshadowed by the late-game tussle, described the tensions between the two teams “as just good, hard baseball.”
“The intensity level has pretty much been at that for the entirety of the year,” Cole said. “So I expect it to stay consistent.”
Both the Yankees and Orioles began Friday struggling, with the Yankees having lost 18 of their last 25 games and the Orioles coming off getting swept by the Cubs and losing 12 of their last 20.
Just how much momentum there was to be gained from what went down in the ninth inning Friday night was to be determined.
“Any time the benches clear, all the boys come together,” Judge said. “But it’s baseball. You’re going to struggle, you’re going to have good moments, bad moments, you’re going to have times where the benches are going to clear. But we got to stick together with us in this room and stay focused on what we can do to go out there and keep playing.”
