Winfield’s Bat and Griffey’s Glove Lift Streaking Yankees Past Red Sox

Dave Winfield used his bat, Ken Griffey used his glove and Bruce Hurst used his logic.

“It’s two extremes,” Hurst, the starting and losing pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, said Monday. “They’re on one extreme and we’re on the other, but we’re going in opposite directions. We wanted to beat them because they’re in front of us, but it just didn’t work out that way.”

The Red Sox lost to the New York Yankees, 6-5, because Winfield hit a two-run homer off Hurst in the first inning and a two-run single off Mark Clear in the seventh while Griffey robbed Boston’s Marty Barrett of a game-tying home run in the ninth with a spectacular catch.

“I’ve been getting some big hits,” Winfield said after the Yankees stretched their winning streak to five games, “but one has been here and one has been there kind of sporadically. I haven’t been getting multi-hit games like I did today. When I see my batting average at .280 I know I’m at rock-bottom and I’ve got to start producing.”

Griffey capped a day of frustration for the Red Sox. With one out in the ninth, Barrett hit a drive off Bob Shirley that cleared the left-field wall. But Griffey, who entered the game as a pinch hitter in the seventh inning, used his right foot to boost himself up the 8-foot-high fence, balanced himself on top of the fence with his left hand and reached several feet over the wall to make the catch. As he came down, he stumbled and turned a somersault but held the ball.

Griffey made a somewhat similar catch on April 16, robbing Chicago’s Ron Kittle of a potential game-winning home run.

“This year, I’ve had the best defensive year of my career,” said Griffey. “One good thing is that both of those catches saved games. I didn’t think it would go out, but as I got close to the fence I saw that it would. I timed my jump and leaped. The one thing I thought about after the catch was that the fans didn’t interfere with me. That was a break.”

Rich Bordi then came on to strike out pinch hitter Tony Armas for his second save.