Luke Voit returned from the injured list Saturday. His home run hop, which had gone missing since even before he strained an abdominal muscle, finally made its return Thursday night.
On the same day when he was dropped all the way to seventh in the batting order, Voit ripped a solo shot in the fifth inning — his first homer since June 14 — to tie the nightcap and send the Yankees on their way to a 5-1 win over the Rays for a doubleheader sweep.
“It’s hard to believe my last home run was in Chicago,” said Voit, who “for sure” felt like he had gotten the monkey off his back. “But injuries are hard to come back from. Sometimes you try to do too much. I think that’s what I was doing for the last five or six games.”
The first baseman also had an RBI single in the first game to keep a Yankees rally going during a 6-2 win.
Voit went 17 games without a home run — the longest streak of his Yankees career — but had continued to hit before he got injured. In four games back from the IL entering Thursday, though, he had gone 3-for-16 with nine strikeouts and no extra-base hits.
That cold stretch, in part, led manager Aaron Boone to write Voit — who was on the IL from June 30 to July 13 — into the seven-hole for the first game of the doubleheader.
Before Thursday, the lowest Voit had batted all year was fifth, and that was only once. In the rest of his starts this season, he had been a consistent threat at second, third or fourth in the lineup.
“He looked like Luke Voit today,” Boone said after the sweep. “Good to see that.”
Voit was back up to batting fifth for Game 2, when he took Charlie Morton deep for his 18th home run of the year. He drilled the first pitch of his at-bat in the fifth inning, an 87 mph cutter, 419 feet over the wall in left-center field.
“This was my first time coming off the IL,” Voit said. “I wanted to get back so bad that sometimes I was trying to do too much and I wasn’t swinging at good pitches. … I was getting tough pitches, too, so it’s more getting back to my approach and getting comfortable again.”