BALTIMORE — The Yankees and Orioles got their steps in, but that was just about all that was accomplished when the benches cleared in the bottom of the fourth inning Wednesday night.
The snafu stemmed from Orioles outfielder Heston Kjerstad getting upset at Pablo Reyes for incidentally landing on his head on the way back down to earth after leaping to knock down a throw as Kjerstad stole second base.
Reyes had nowhere else to go, but straddled his legs out as Kjerstad slid underneath him and then came down on his head and took an extra second to catch his balance.
After Kjerstad slid into second, he got up and started chirping at Reyes, who walked toward the bag to engage, which set off the benches and bullpens clearing.
“Maybe at the beginning, he thought I did it on purpose,” Reyes said through an interpreter after the Yankees’ 5-4 loss, adding that Kjerstad said “a couple words” that “disrespected me.”
“But obviously he couldn’t see the throw or how the play developed and the effort that I had to put in to make a play there.”
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Everyone did a whole lot of standing around near second base, but the situation quickly fizzled out.
“It was a weird bench clearing,” Aaron Judge said. “[Reyes] is jumping up to make a play, I don’t know what [Kjerstad] is mad about.”
Kjerstad was at the center of tensions spilling over between the two teams last July when Clay Holmes drilled him in the head with a pitch in the bottom of the ninth, which led to the benches clearing.
Jazz Chisholm Jr. was out of the lineup Wednesday after leaving Tuesday’s game in the first inning with an oblique/flank injury that he sustained on a swing.
But Chisholm again said he was feeling good and joked that he ate some flank (steak) on Wednesday afternoon, though things will get more serious on Thursday when he undergoes an MRI back in New York that will determine his next steps.
“Seems all right,” manager Aaron Boone said. “He’s got some soreness in there. … So we’ll see if this is going to be truly a couple-day thing or if it turns into week, it’d probably be an IL situation because we want to avoid that longer-term thing. But it doesn’t feel like it’s a major thing. But we’re going to know a lot more [Thursday] and then we’ll make that decision.”
Chisholm was unlikely to do any baseball activities on Wednesday as he underwent treatment, with Reyes getting the start at second base and Oswald Peraza playing third against a lefty.
“[Chisholm] seems to have a really good feel for his body,” Boone said. “He has actually been a very historically heal-fast kind of guy. Last year when he hurt the elbow, he was kind of saying the same things and he was right [Chisholm missed the minimum 10 days on the IL with an elbow sprain].
“So we’ll see how the next couple days are and make a call.”
The caution is that the last time the word “flank” (essentially the oblique) was tossed around, it was for Tyler Matzek this spring.
The reliever did not think his oblique was an issue until he got an MRI that revealed a moderate strain.
The expectation is that DJ LeMahieu will resume his rehab assignment on Friday after “preemptively” receiving a cortisone injection in his hip on Tuesday.
“That’s the hope,” Boone said. “I actually just spoke with him, he felt good today coming out of [Tuesday]. We got to get there, but the plan is hopefully Friday.”
Jonathan Loáisiga (UCL surgery) threw another scoreless inning with three strikeouts in his second rehab outing on Wednesday with Single-A Tampa.