Will Warren rocked as Yankees miss chance to sweep Red Sox

BOSTON — The New York Yankees squandered an opportunity to complete a sweep of the Boston Red Sox Sunday night as Will Warren was ambushed for six runs in the first inning and Boston held on for a 6-4 victory at Fenway Park.

The loss left the Yankees 83-66 and pushed them to four games behind the Toronto Blue Jays in the AL East with 13 games remaining. The Red Sox improved to 82-68 and narrowed the gap for the top American League wild-card spot to 1 1/2 games.

The decisive sequence came in the bottom of the first. Jarren Duran opened with a fly to left that fell in front of Giancarlo Stanton for a triple. Alex Bregman, Trevor Story and Nathaniel Lowe followed with consecutive singles to make it 2-0, and Romy Gonzalez doubled to push the lead to 3-0. Masataka Yoshida added a sacrifice fly before Rob Refsnyder’s groundout scored a fifth run, and former Yankee Carlos Narváez capped the inning with a solo homer to center to make it 6-0.

Warren, making his start as New York wrapped a 12-game stretch against four contenders, recorded the first out on the sixth batter but ultimately allowed six runs in the opening frame. It was the second time this season Warren yielded six or more runs in the first inning; he gave up seven first-inning runs to Toronto on July 2 and was touched for seven runs total in 1 1/3 innings against the Los Angeles Dodgers on May 31. After the rough start, Warren settled in and completed five innings, sparing the bullpen during a stretch in which the Yankees are playing 13 games in 13 days.

Garrett Crochet delivered a strong outing for Boston, striking out 12 across six innings while limiting the Yankees’ rally attempts. New York chipped away at the deficit, getting a two-run homer from Amed Rosario in the fourth that just cleared the Green Monster and a solo shot from Aaron Judge in the fifth, his 48th of the season. José Caballero’s 423-foot blast onto Lansdowne Street in the seventh pulled the Yankees to 6-4 and briefly revived the comeback bid.

When Judge led off the eighth with a single off Red Sox reliever Garrett Whitlock, the potential rally appeared real. Whitlock, a former Yankees farmhand, responded by striking out Cody Bellinger, Giancarlo Stanton and pinch-hitter Trent Grisham in order to extinguish the threat.

Boston’s bullpen protected the lead the rest of the way after Crochet exited, and the win allowed the Red Sox to salvage the three-game set. The Yankees left Fenway having gone 7-5 in the 12-game gauntlet they entered this week — a performance that, while respectable, ended on a sour note with implications for postseason positioning.

With 13 games remaining, New York faces dwindling margin for error in the division race and a likely path that could include another matchup with Boston in the wild-card series if the Yankees are unable to overtake Toronto. The Red Sox, meanwhile, kept alive their push for a more favorable postseason position by snapping the Yankees’ sweep bid and tightening the wild-card standings.

The teams will head into the final stretch with renewed urgency: the Yankees attempting to protect home-field hopes and limit reliance on the wild-card route, and the Red Sox aiming to climb further in the standings with a slate of games that will determine seeding into October baseball.