After a delay to break the teams apart, Hyde was ejected and the Yankees went on to complete their victory but after the game, both sides talked about the emotional confrontation.

“I hope Heston’s alright. Nobody ever wants to see that. That is scary in the moment,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “First and foremost, hope he's okay. Obviously, an emotional moment and two teams playing for a lot. So glad it didn't escalate too much.”

Hyde was seen pointing and yelling at someone in the Yankees dugout. Boone was pressed for more information on the interaction, but the skipper did not want to get too into it.

“I understand coming out and being hot and one of your guys gets hit like that is scary,” he said. “Looked like some things were directed at Clay and then, you know, so I'm not going to get too much into it.”

“Just reacted the way I did and saw that they were pointing at me and the whole thing,” Hyde said after the game. “So, just reacted the way I did.”

Hyde said that Kjerstad is undergoing more tests and called it a scary moment. When asked about what set him off, Hyde said he saw Yankees coaches waving and yelling at him, which he “didn’t appreciate at the time.”

“Definitely wasn’t trying to hit him,” Holmes said. “The rain just came, dirts caked on your shoes, it’s humid, that’s baseball. Sometimes the conditions are tough.”

Holmes said the whole incident was unfortunate and he tried to walk over to Kjerstad to make sure he was ok, but the reliever felt the Orioles didn’t like that.

The Yankees and Orioles have faced each other eight times this season after Friday’s contest. In those games, the Yankees have hit 10 batters while Baltimore has hit three. Perhaps that frustration from the previous series has boiled over, but Holmes believes it’s just the atmosphere of two teams competing for a division.

“I mean top two teams in the division, I think there's a very competitive atmosphere to this,” he explained. “We know that these games mean something and we're here to show up. Two teams battling out like that, things are going to fill that atmosphere, you're going to feel the competitive energy and you’ll feel that in this series.”

Baltimore holds a 5-3 season series lead so far, but Friday’s win puts the Yankees just one game behind the Orioles for the AL East division lead.

They’ll play two more times before the All-Star break and won’t see each other again until a three-game set in late September.

But is Boone concerned about potential retaliation this weekend? The longtime Yankees manager said he’s hopeful Kjerstad was alright and grateful no one else was hurt in the scrum but he had a clear message.

“We need to move on and play baseball.”

The Yankees and Orioles do this again Saturday afternoon starting at 4:05 p.m.

Popular in the Community

More from sny