Rays sweep Yankees out of October, and Yankee Stadium reached over the wall and threw trash on its way out

What happened in the sixth

Tampa Bay led 4-2 with two outs in the bottom of the sixth. George Lombard Jr. was on first. Anthony Volpe drove a ball to left field, Victor Mesa Jr. went up for it at the wall, and a fan in a navy blue Yankees jacket reached out over the fence and got his hands on it. The ball bounced off the fan and into the seats. Yankee Stadium celebrated a game-tying homer for about as long as it took the umpires to put on the headsets.

The replay center looked at it and ruled spectator interference. Crew chief Dan Bellino announced it to 48,865 people, and the announcement came with the finding that mattered: the ball was not leaving the playing field, and Mesa was not going to catch it either. So the replay official scored Lombard, put Volpe on second, and the Yankees had a 4-3 game and an RBI double. Which is exactly what they would have had if the guy in the jacket had kept his hands to himself.

Read that again. The fan did not cost the Yankees a home run. There was no home run. He reached over the wall and risked his team's season for a ball that was going to hit the fence, and the only thing he changed was that the whole building got to believe a lie for a minute and then get it taken away in front of a national audience.

Then they threw garbage at the field

Here is the part that tells you what this fan base is now. After the ruling, people in the left field seats started throwing trash onto the warning track behind Mesa. The game stopped while it was picked up. Spencer Jones then struck out against Griffin Jax to end the inning, and the Yankees never scored again. Ian Seymour and Kevin Kelly got the game to Bryan Baker, and Baker got the last out.

Think about the sequence. One of your own reached into the field of play during a playoff game. The umpires applied the rule correctly, said so over the public address system, and your response was to litter the field your team was trying to come back on. Not boo. Litter. Throw things in the direction of an outfielder who did nothing but jump for a ball. That is not passion. That is a toddler knocking the board over because he lost at Candy Land.

And this is not new. Yankee Stadium has a history with this exact move, objects coming out of the stands when the home team is losing and the crowd decides the rules are a personal insult. The difference tonight is that it happened in an elimination game, on the night the best fan base in baseball, in its own telling, got swept by a team that plays in a dome in St. Petersburg.

Our take: the stands look like the ballot box

We will say the quiet part. A crowd that reaches over the wall to take something it did not earn, and then throws a fit when an adult tells it no, is a pretty fair portrait of how the city votes. New York City elected Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, as its mayor this year. The state has Kathy Hochul running for another term in November. You can like those choices or hate them, that is your business, but a place that keeps electing people who promise that someone else will pay for everything should not be shocked when its ballpark behaves like it is owed a home run it never hit.

The entitlement is the through line. The Yankees payroll is the entitlement. The 27 rings every fan recites while his team commits three errors in one inning is the entitlement. The fan in the jacket is the entitlement, reaching for something because it is close and he wants it. Then the garbage. Then, we would bet a cold one, the talk radio tomorrow about how the umpires and the replay center and the Rays and everyone but New York are the problem.

That is opinion, and it is ours. The facts above are MLB's.

The Rays earned every bit of this

Lost in the garbage is that Tampa Bay ran the Yankees out of October in three games and never trailed in the series. Jonathan Aranda took Gerrit Cole deep for the only run of Game 1 while Drew Rasmussen threw eight innings of one-hit ball with ten strikeouts. In Game 2 the Yankees committed three errors in the first inning, the first team to do that in a postseason game since the 1975 Athletics, and lost 5-2. Tonight Aranda singled in a run in the third, Ryan Vilade homered in the fourth, and Mesa, the man who got garbage thrown at him, hit the two-run homer in the sixth that held up as the difference.

Nick Martinez took a Volpe line drive off the back and left after three and two-thirds, and the Rays bullpen covered the rest. Max Fried went five and two-thirds and gave up all four runs. Tampa Bay finished 98-64, the best record in the American League, and will host the ALCS against whoever survives Cleveland and the White Sox.

Congratulations to the Rays. A team with a fraction of the payroll, playing in a building New York fans make fun of, just swept the New York Yankees and did it without anyone in St. Petersburg reaching over a wall or throwing a cup. That used to be the standard in the Bronx. It is not anymore.

Facts per ESPN box score, ESPN (Buster Olney) on the interference ruling, Yahoo Sports Game 3 recap, ESPN Game 1 recap, CBS Sports Game 2 recap. Opinion is the taproom's.