Fillmyer unable to contain Yankees' big bats

NEW YORK -- Right-hander Heath Fillmyer struggled with his command on Saturday afternoon, and the Yankees played home run derby against him to defeat the Royals, 9-2, at Yankee Stadium.

Fillmyer lasted four innings and was stung by keeping the ball up in the zone. He surrendered four home runs, starting in the first inning when Aaron Judge hit a 2-1 pitch over the right-field wall to give New York a 1-0 lead.

An inning later, Clint Frazier took Fillmyer deep. That ball also went into the right-field seats for Frazier's fifth home run of the season. In the fourth, the Yankees hit back-to-back home runs for the first time this season. Mike Tauchman hit a three-run homer and DJ LeMahieu followed with a solo shot.

"Coming in, you know you have to keep the ball down, especially in this park," Fillmyer said. "I left too many balls in on the outer half. It got too much plate and [the Yankees] took advantage of it."

Royals manager Ned Yost felt the game would have been different if played at Kauffman Stadium, a bigger ballpark. Yankee Stadium is known as a hitter's paradise, and Whit Merrifield and Chris Owings cleared the fences in the later innings to get the Royals on the scoreboard.

"If we were in our park, we would be talking about a great game by Fillmyer, but we are not in our park," Yost said. "We hit two homers, too, that wouldn't have been homers in our park.

"The pitches were up. You make a little bit of a mistake, it doesn't take too much to get burned on it."

It could have been worse for Fillmyer, but a Royals challenge prevented the Yankees from a fifth home run. In the third inning, it appeared that Gleyber Torres hit a three-run homer just over the wall in left field. But Alex Gordon thought he had a shot at catching the ball and claimed a fan prevented him from catching the ball.

The umpires looked at the replay and ruled that Torres was out because of fan interference, erasing three runs for the Yankees.

"It's such a tough play where you are jumping [at the wall]," Gordon said. "When it happened, I don't know. I thought I was going to catch it for sure. At the last minute, [the fan] engulfed my glove.

"At the moment, I thought it was catchable. Is it the right call? I don't know. It turned out to be the benefit for us. It was good."

Yankees manager Aaron Boone disagreed with the call and was ejected from the game.

"I just wanted to let everyone know how bad of a call I thought it was, taking a three-run homer off the board, in that spot on what would've been a miracle catch in my eyes," Boone said.