BALTIMORE — Jasson Domínguez doubled twice and hit his first homer of the season Sunday, driving the Yankees past the Orioles 11-3 in a game that gave the 23-year-old a long-awaited breakout at the plate. He started at designated hitter because Giancarlo Stanton was on the injured list with a calf injury, and after opening with two hitless at-bats, Domínguez doubled down the left field line in the sixth inning and scored the go-ahead run.
He kept going in the eighth. Domínguez hit a two-run homer from the left side, then later doubled again from the right side in the same inning, becoming the only Yankee to hit from both sides of the plate in the same inning since Mark Teixeira did it in 2016. Domínguez called the three-hit game “awesome,” a night that ended with the Yankees piling on in a seven-run inning and putting the game away.
Boone said Domínguez’s right-handed swing is “his natural side,” and that mattered because the Yankees have spent years waiting for him to become a consistent threat from that side of the plate. Domínguez first came up to the Yankees late in 2023, but he had not yet shown he could settle in as a full-time major league player. This season, he spent about a month at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre while working to get more comfortable from the right side, and he said the challenge is part of the job: “Adversity is always tough, but that’s what I’ve got to do,” he said. “I’ve got to do my job.”
The performance mattered beyond one afternoon because the Yankees have been trying to find out what Domínguez can be when he is not just flashing talent but producing from both sides. His left-handed power has never been in doubt. The question has been whether the right-handed swing can hold up against major league pitching. On Sunday, it did, and Domínguez said that made a difference: it “definitely helps.”
The tension for the Yankees is that one game does not resolve the larger test. Domínguez has been up and down since arriving nearly seven years ago as one of the organization’s most watched young players, and Sunday was a reminder of both his ceiling and the uncertainty that still follows him. The club still needs that version of him to show up often, not once, if it wants the promise to become something sturdier than a loud afternoon against the Orioles.