Red Wings squander lead, Worcester rallies with grand slam to split doubleheader
Yohandy Morales powered Rochester to a 4-1 lead, but Tyler McDonough’s sixth homer, a grand slam, flipped Game 1 and Worcester rolled 10-2 in the nightcap.
Tyler McDonough turned a Rochester lead into a Worcester win with one swing, and the Red Wings never steadied after that. The Worcester Red Sox split the doubleheader by erasing a 4-1 deficit in the opener and then cruising to a 10-2 victory in Game 2, leaving Rochester with a day that moved from promising to punishing in a hurry.
Rochester looked in control early in the opener when Yohandy Morales opened the scoring with a 427-foot homer in the first inning and later added his 20th home run of the season to push the Red Wings ahead 2-0. The lead grew to 4-1 in the sixth after Riley Adams homered and Phillip Glasser later scored on a walk, while Andrew Pinckney helped keep the cushion intact with a diving catch in center field. Trevor Williams, sent to Rochester on a Major League rehab assignment earlier in the day, made his first Triple-A start since 2021 and worked 2.2 innings with two strikeouts before handing the game over.
Max Kranick covered the next stretch, but the inning that decided the game belonged to Kyle Nicolas. Activated by Rochester on July 3, Nicolas allowed Tyler McDonough’s grand slam, a sixth homer of the season for McDonough, to right-center field. The blast cleared the bases and scored Jason Delay, Allan Castro and Kristian Campbell, wiping out the Red Wings’ lead and sending Worcester to a 5-4 comeback win.
Game 2 never reached that kind of tension. Worcester held Rochester to three hits and kept the Red Wings from mounting any meaningful response in a 10-2 defeat that stretched the split into a full-day collapse for the home side. Morales still supplied the early power in the first game, but Rochester could not protect the advantage or find enough depth behind it once the bullpen was forced to work through the middle innings.
The losses landed in a tight International League East race. Rochester entered at 51-36, while Worcester came in at 43-42, so each head-to-head game carried weight in the second-half standings. For the Red Wings, the doubleheader became a snapshot of how quickly one missed opportunity can become an unraveling day.
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