As the Yankees broke for the first half last Sunday, Anthony Volpe stood at his locker at Camden Yards looking a bit shell-shocked after his fielding error cost his team a win.
Five days later, the young shortstop was central to the Yankees starting off the second half with a win.
On a Friday night when the club’s three top stars all enjoyed big games, it was Volpe who delivered the biggest hit, a three-run double on the way to a 6-1 win over the Rays in front of a sellout crowd of 47,036 in The Bronx.
After a first-half finish to forget, both for Volpe and the Yankees (59-40), they began the second half on a much better note to make sure standout efforts by Juan Soto, Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole did not go to waste.
The Yankees have now won four of their last six games after a brutal 6-17 stretch.
Luis Severino may have been right when he quipped on Friday that the Yankees “only have two good hitters” right now — his response to a group chat with his former teammates who were giving him grief for missing them in next week’s Subway Series — in Judge and Soto.
While the two All-Stars combined for a monster night on Friday — Soto went 4-for-4 with a pair of doubles and a walk while Judge went 2-for-4 with a walk and an RBI — they at least had some help in the series opener against the Rays (48-49), namely Volpe and Austin Wells (three walks).
Volpe had gone into the break batting just .171 with a .433 OPS in his last 35 games, largely undoing his strong start to the season, and then made things worse Sunday with an error in the bottom of the ninth that led to a crushing loss to the Orioles.
But the 23-year-old came back strong on Friday.
After a line-drive single in his first at-bat, Volpe came to the plate in the third inning with the bases loaded, two outs and the Yankees up 1-0.
They had wasted prime chances to score in each of the first two innings and looked like they might let Rays right-hander Zach Eflin off the hook again in the third after pushing only one run across on an Alex Verdugo groundout.
Eflin got ahead 1-2 before Volpe roped a double down the third-base line to clear the bases and stake the Yankees out to a 4-0 lead.
That was plenty of run support for Cole, who looked strong for a second straight start.
The ace struck out eight over six innings of one-run ball, with Brandon Lowe’s solo home run in the sixth inning the only blemish.
The Yankees later added a pair of insurance runs thanks to Soto. In the fourth inning, he hit a little league home run — smacking a double to the gap, hustling for third on a bobble by left fielder Randy Arozarena and then jogging home when the throw to third hit him and trickled into the Rays dugout.
Then in the sixth, Soto drilled another double to the gap and came home to score on Judge’s broken-bat single.