NEW YORK — Two rookies and a team elder gave the New York Yankees one of their most thrilling and significant victories of the season, a 6-5 win over the Houston Astros in 10 innings Tuesday night.
Brett Gardner, 34, the oldest position player on the team, hit two home runs, including a game-tying, two-run shot in the bottom of the ninth. Then rookie infielders Miguel Andujar and Gleyber Torres delivered 10th-inning hits that ended the game.
The winning rally began with two outs in the 10th and Andujar facing Astros reliever Brad Peacock with an 0-2 count. Andujar laced the next pitch into the left-field corner for a double.
Torres, who earlier in the day had been named the American League’s Player of the Week for the period ending Sunday, followed with a single to right to drive in the winning run.
The victory tied the three-game series against the Astros, who eliminated the Yankees from the American League Championship Series in seven games last year and then won the World Series, at a game apiece. In the rubber game Wednesday night, Yankees ace Luis Severino will face his team’s playoff nemesis, Dallas Keuchel.
Gardner led off Tuesday’s game with a homer, and the Yankees held a 2-1 lead against Charlie Morton, the Houston starter, who on April 30 had limited them to one run on two hits, and who came into the game with a 7-0 record and 2.04 ERA. But things unraveled for the Yankees amid ragged defensive play and missed opportunities.
They were three outs away from a routine 5-3 defeat in which they weren’t being dominated as they had been Monday against Justin Verlander. They were merely being outclassed by the team that had ended their last two playoff runs and that always seems to be just a little bit better than them.
Then Andujar drew a leadoff walk, and after a strikeout by Torres, Gardner homered off reliever Chris Devenski.
For Gardner, who had homered just once in his first 43 games, this was his third home run in four games.
The Yankees were aided immensely by a fortuitous bounce in the top of the 10th inning after Aroldis Chapman walked Tony Kemp with two out and sent him to second with a wild pitch. Chapman then uncorked a 100-mph fastball that sailed over catcher Gary Sanchez, hit the padding behind home plate and bounced right back to Sanchez, who whirled and easily threw out Kemp as he tried to advance to third.
Then the youngsters struck — Andujar, the 23-year-old third baseman, and Torres, the 21-year-old second baseman.
With only 76 major-league games between them, Torres and Andujar are prone to mistakes. They accounted for three of the Yankees’ five errors Tuesday.
But they are also almost preternaturally calm in pressure-filled situations, as evidenced by the 10th, when Andujar stayed on an 0-2 slider from Peacock and lined it into the left-field corner for a double. Then Torres, who a couple of pitches earlier had seemed rattled by a strike call from umpire Tripp Gibson, laced a fastball the other way, into right field for the game-winning single.
“It’s amazing what these young kids can do these days at 21, 22 years old,” Gardner said.
After allowing Gardner’s first home run and Torres’ second-inning RBI single, Morton settled down, striking out 10 in six innings and leaving with a 5-3 lead after surrendering a solo home run to Aaron Judge in the fifth.
Two of Houston’s runs were the result of a pair of errors, the first on a throw by Andujar that pulled Greg Bird off the bag at first, and the second by starter C.C. Sabathia, who after being hit in the glove by a Jose Altuve line drive, unwisely chose to throw the ball to first — and fired it into right field instead.
Torres — who hit .368 with five home runs and nine RBI in six games last week to win the AL award — committed two errors in the game, one in the first and another in the seventh.
“They’re young,” Sabathia said. “You got to live with the mistakes and see what happens at the end of the game.”
Since his big-league debut April 22, Torres has carried himself with the air of a player who has already been in the majors for years and who intends to stay a while longer.
After arguing rather pointedly with Gibson on the second pitch of his final at-bat, Torres stepped out of the box to collect himself. He took a ball and then fouled off the next two pitches, both fastballs clocked at 94 mph, before stroking the next one into right field to end the game.
“You could feel him really just kind of slow it down and control the moment,” manager Aaron Boone said. “It was just a really mature at-bat from a good player.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.