Taj tunes into mom, tunes out hecklers and shoves vs. Yanks

NEW YORK -- When Taj Bradley was a 17-year-old pitching in the former Gulf Coast League, fresh out of high school, he used to hear about days like Saturday. Coaches would tell a young Bradley and his Rookie-level teammates about pitching on the road in front of the hostile, high-intensity crowds of Philadelphia and New York, warning them that they weren’t ready.

That was still fresh in Bradley’s mind when he arrived at Yankee Stadium on Friday, preparing for his first career start in the Bronx on Saturday afternoon. Before the game, he got an early taste of what the crowd had in store.

“I was excited,” Bradley said, smiling. “Even in the bullpen, you get heckled and stuff, like, 'He's already sweating!' I'm like, 'Yeah, there's humidity out here. Yeah, I'm sweating.'”

But the stage, opponent and atmosphere couldn’t slow Bradley’s roll.

Tampa Bay’s emerging ace allowed just one hit over seven spectacular innings, and the Rays’ bats broke out with a season-high-tying four home runs -- two of them by Randy Arozarena -- as they cruised to a 9-1 win over the Yankees that brought them back to .500, at 49-49.

In eight starts since June 8, Bradley has put together an MLB-best 0.92 ERA with 58 strikeouts and only 17 walks in 49 innings, the lowest ERA over an eight-start span in a single season in franchise history. The 23-year-old has pitched at least five innings while allowing two runs or fewer in each of those eight outings, and the Rays have won six of them.

“You talk about elite pitchers and aces and No. 1s, you get there by being really good and doing it consistently,” manager Kevin Cash said Saturday morning. “And he is doing a lot of things at a high level consistently right now.”

Bradley allowed a leadoff double to Ben Rice in the first inning and didn’t permit another hit. Even after Juan Soto’s groundout moved Rice to third base, Bradley escaped the first with the poise and calm of a veteran, striking out Aaron Judge with a splitter and Austin Wells with a cutter.

Cash said that inning “probably set the tone” for the rest of the game. So did a little help from Bradley’s mother, Ana Mosley.

Bradley said he found his mom while warming up in the outfield. He locked in on her, seated behind home plate, and waved when he got to the mound. And he had no trouble hearing her, even with 43,173 people in the ballpark.

“She's loud,” Bradley said, laughing. “I've been hearing her for 23 years, so that's the voice that I key in on even if I'm not paying attention.”

Bradley didn’t necessarily overpower the Yankees, although he threw Tampa Bay’s two fastest pitches of the season on Saturday afternoon: a 99.4 mph fastball to retire Soto in the third and a 100.1 mph heater to Judge in the fourth. But he thoroughly dominated them even without his usual swing-and-miss stuff.

“Taj came in throwing the ball really well, and that continued today,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “He was off our barrel enough to not allow us to do much against him.”

The right-hander picked up five strikeouts while inducing only eight swinging strikes. But he forced the Yankees to put the ball on the ground, with 13 groundouts, two key double plays and only two outs hit in the air.

Bradley issued a pair of leadoff walks, one in the second and another in the fourth, but erased both by inducing double-play grounders on the next pitch each time.

“The stuff is unbelievable. The poise that he has on the mound. He's a competitor. He's having fun,” catcher Alex Jackson said. “You get that combination and everything's pulling in the right direction, and it's pretty apparent what you get.”

Bradley had plenty of help from Tampa Bay’s lineup, and the biggest hit of the day was by Jackson, who has played a key role in Bradley’s emergence with his work behind the plate. With two outs and the Rays up 1-0 in the fourth, Jackson clubbed a three-run homer out to right-center off Yankees starter Nestor Cortes.

Isaac Paredes pulled his team-leading 16th home run out to left in the fifth. Called up from Triple-A Durham on Saturday morning, Curtis Mead delivered a career-high-tying three hits, including an RBI double in the third.

And Arozarena blasted a solo shot in the fifth and a two-run homer in the seventh for his seventh career multihomer game, part of a career-high-tying four-hit performance.

“If Randy hits two home runs or if Randy strikes out three times, I'm still going to go out there very happy and try to do everything I can to help my team,” Arozarena said.