TORONTO — For the first time this series, the Yankees and Blue Jays played a game on Wednesday night in which the only action occurred within the foul lines.
There just wasn’t much of it going on.
Instead, Gerrit Cole and Chris Bassitt locked into a pitchers’ duel for 6 ½ innings before handing the shutout over to a battle of the bullpens that kept it going to extras.
The dam finally broke in the bottom of the 10th, when Danny Jansen hit a walk-off home run against Wandy Peralta to lift the Blue Jays to a 3-0 win over the Yankees at Rogers Centre.
A fielding error by shortstop Anthony Volpe — “a play I should make,” he said — allowed the leadoff man to reach in the 10th and put runners on the corners.
The Yankees (25-20) went to a five-man infield and it worked initially when Peralta induced a groundout. But his first pitch to Jansen was clobbered into the left-field seats, giving the Blue Jays (25-18) their first win of the series.
After a chaotic first two games, mostly stemming from the Blue Jays accusing Aaron Judge of looking at his first-base coach to pick up signs against a pitcher who was tipping his pitches, the only hint of drama on Wednesday night was who would score first.
“It’s been a lot going on, obviously,” manager Aaron Boone said. “Tonight was actually kind of quiet considering the first two nights and not a lot of scoring. We just gotta wash this one off and come out ready to go and hopefully try to win a series [Thursday].”
The Yankees had a runner on third with one out in the top of the 10th but could not get him the final 90 feet as Jordan Romano struck out Gleyber Torres and Anthony Rizzo around an intentional walk to Judge.
With Domingo German accepting his 10-game suspension for Tuesday’s failed foreign-substance check shortly before first pitch, the Yankees began playing a man short on Wednesday. That put some extra onus on Cole to provide length, especially with the bullpen having to cover six innings on Tuesday.
Cole only had one clean inning all night, but he worked around trouble to deliver six scoreless frames. He gave up back-to-back singles to start the bottom of the seventh before being pulled at 104 pitches.
“You just do all that good work and it comes down to a handful of pitches, really,” Cole said. “[In the seventh] I just gotta be better there.”
Cole was grateful for a “fantastic” Clay Holmes, who bailed him out by retiring the heart of the Blue Jays order and keeping the scoreless game intact.
Bassitt, meanwhile, tossed seven shutout innings to extend his scoreless streak to 27 innings. Featuring seven different pitches, the former Mets right-hander scattered just three singles, one walk and one hit batter, allowing only one Yankee to reach second base all night.
“I think his unpredictability helps,” Boone said. “He’ll really slow you down with a slow breaking ball or sweeper and then he may two-strike speed you up and try to sneak a sinker by you or a four-seam, he’ll mix in that cutter. He’s hard to get a track on because he continues to mix.”
The Yankees had their best scoring chance in the eighth against the Jays bullpen, drawing three straight walks to load the bases with two outs. But Volpe, as a pinch hitter for Jake Bauers, struck out looking to waste the threat.
For an offense that had been thriving lately against tough competition, the Yankees just could not muster much of anything Wednesday, going 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position.
The Blue Jays were 0-for-16 with runners in scoring position before Jansen’s game-winning blast.
“That’s just how baseball is sometimes,” Volpe said. “We put together good [at-bats] and had a really good approach, but [Bassitt] was definitely executing tonight.”
