Caballero Crushes Two, Schlittler Dominates as Yankees Silence Rays
Jose Caballero hit two home runs and drove in four runs as the Yankees beat the Rays 5-1 on July 6. The timing couldn't have been sharper — ESPN had just ranked Tampa Bay No. 3 in its latest power rankings, leapfrogging New York.
The story of the night was Caballero, and it wasn't particularly close. The Yankees entered the fifth inning in a scoreless game, and then Caballero unloaded a 395-foot shot to left center, scoring Domínguez and Chisholm Jr. to put New York up 3-0. That single swing moved Tampa Bay's win probability from 41% to 13% — a 27-point collapse in one at-bat. The Rays answered immediately in the bottom half when Palacios singled to left to score Simpson, trimming it to 3-1, but that would be the extent of Tampa's offense for the night.
Caballero wasn't done. He came back in the eighth and parked another one to left center — 398 feet this time — to make it 4-1. Ben Rice added a 400-foot shot to right center in the ninth to close the scoring at 5-1. Three home runs in the final five innings against a Rays staff that, on paper, looked formidable. Griffin Jax struck out 10 over five innings but allowed three earned runs on two walks, and the bullpen couldn't hold the line — Chris Roycroft gave up two earned runs over two innings with four strikeouts. The Yankees, it appears, simply didn't care about the strikeout totals.
On the other side, Cam Schlittler was quietly exceptional. Eight innings, four hits, one earned run, zero walks, eight strikeouts — that's a line that makes a manager's job easy. Schlittler never let Tampa string anything together after Palacios's RBI single in the fifth, and the result was a complete-game-adjacent performance that the Yankees' bullpen barely had to acknowledge. The optics here are worth noting: ESPN spent the week asking whether the Rays are a better team than the Yankees, and Tampa Bay had just climbed to No. 3 in the power rankings. Monday night looked like New York's direct, unambiguous response to that conversation. Whether it changes the broader narrative is a question for another day, but Caballero's two-homer, four-RBI night against a top-three team is the kind of performance that tends to shift the discourse.