Yankees pummel very familiar Padres reliever for extremely improbable late-game rally

The New York Yankees entered their 36th game of the season Tuesday night without a single late-game comeback to their name. They also entered their 36th game with a league-leading five losses after carrying a lead in the eighth inning or later, with their worst of the quintet occurring Monday night in the sloppy rain.

Needless to say, when Fernando Tatis Jr. took Fernando Cruz into the right-center gap with two outs in the seventh, breaking a 2-2 tie, the feeling of inevitability brought a soothing calm to the depressing inning. The Padres bullpen was too strong. The Yankees would go quietly. They'd rely on Max Fried on Wednesday to salvage something, as they typically tend to do.

Until ... something strange happened. Something strange that turned outright bizarre that turned incredibly inspiring that turned impossible to believe. Somewhere between the time flamethrowing lefty reliever Adrian Morejon's first pitch was socked into the left-center gap by Jasson Dominguez to the time Wandy Peralta was summoned to maintain a tie with the bases loaded and Trent Grisham at the plate, the Baseball Gods decided they planned to remove the wheels from this thing.

Grisham took a walk, then Ben Rice greeted Peralta, a highly familiar lefty who once doggedly took the ball in all five games of the ALDS against Cleveland, with an 0-2 lefty-lefty double to score two more.

Yankees rally with ridiculous 10-run inning against San Diego Padres reliever Wandy Peralta

Three-run lead in the eighth? Seen this before. Saw this last night. More, please.

The Yankees, remarkably, obliged. Cody Bellinger, slumping as always, sliced another lefty-lefty hit to score a seventh. After Dominguez's medium-depth fly ball was deemed too short to score pinch-runner Oswald Peraza (fair), Gold Glover Manny Machado gave Anthony Volpe a gift by short-hopping his grounder into the sky, then back to the dirt.

And Wells, once again, provided the full count lefty-lefty exclamation point.

That's his first career grand slam, and that's the exhale the Yankees desperately needed after their lowest moment of the season in front of the sopping tarp in the opening game. Ironically, this suddenly became the game Devin Williams should've been inserted into.

Who knows where the Yankees' ride ends in 2025? Maybe they never fill their holes. Maybe they alternate underwhelming and explosiveness for the final five months of the year, never finding their stride. But on Tuesday, they finally checked the one box that had been looming low above them since the curtains rose on the season. They finally reversed the trend and did unto others what others kept doing unto them.

And they did it against a damn good team, too.