Torres drove in all five runs for the Yankees. The Guardians, meanwhile, had their game postponed by a coronavirus outbreak.
Gleyber Torres sent a fastball soaring, started jogging toward first base and raised his right arm about the time a young boy in the first row of the right field short porch caught the ball on the fly. Torres followed his go-ahead, three-run homer with a two-run single and led the surging Yankees over the Toronto Blue Jays, 5-3, on Wednesday for their 15th win in 17 games.
“My swing is getting better and better,” Torres said. “I think confidence is back, and that is the most important for me.”
A heralded phenom who is just 25, Torres came up to the Yankees in 2018 and became an All-Star in each of his first two seasons, hitting 62 home runs. But he slumped for the next two seasons, totaling just 12 long balls.
“I got too many opportunities to do things for my team and I missed. I failed,” Torres said. Yankees Manager Aaron Boone benched Torres for six of this season’s first 25 games, including opening day, when Torres’s tying sacrifice fly in the 10th helped the Yankees beat Boston. Torres had a game-ending single against Cleveland on April 23, a walk-off home run in the opener of Sunday’s doubleheader against Texas and drove in all the runs in the series finale against the Blue Jays. Torres has 16 R.B.I. in his last 15 games and four home runs in his last 11. Overall, he is batting.222 with 18 R.
