Yankees Find a New Way to Win While Ending Red Sox’ Streaky Season

NEW YORK — The sweetness of summer is so gone it can be hard to remember. Its memory is subsumed by the earlier nightfall, the zipping of a jacket, trees giving up their leaves in surrender to the coming cold and, if you’re the Boston Red Sox, the relentless might of the New York Yankees. The 37 midsummer games when the Red Sox saved their season and won in ways that were almost laughable are now dried flowers in an album, a poor placeholder for what once was.

Can you remember? Maybe not if you saw the Yankees—without Aaron Judge—steamroll Boston in a wild-card sweep, 9–0 in Game 1 Tuesday and 9–2 in Game 2 Wednesday. And it wasn’t that close.

“That,” New York manager Aaron Boone says, “was about as good as we can play. I just told the guys, ‘If we play like that, we can beat anybody.’”