Sunday might have been the most encouraging day for Aaron Boone’s club since Aaron Judge had two pain-free big toes.
Judge hit, and then the Yankees followed the captain’s lead.
After Judge swung against Jonathan Loaisiga in his first time facing live pitching since he went down in early June, the Yankees’ lineup kept up the positive momentum.
The Yankees poured on four runs in the first inning on the way to an 8-5 victory over the Royals, completing a sweep in front of 44,130 in The Bronx.
The Yankees (53-47) have won three games in a row for the first time since they won four straight from May 27-30, when Judge’s bat was still carrying the team.
On an otherwise excellent day for the club, there were two concerns arising from the matinee.
The first occurred in the seventh inning, when Anthony Volpe pinch-hit for Gleyber Torres, who left the game with left hip tightness.
The only other negative development involved the Royals (28-73) leaving town, with the Yankees next hosting the Mets for two games.
After scoring seven runs in three losses in Anaheim, the Yankees bounced back against poor Kansas City pitching for 18 runs in the sweep.
Sunday starter Jordan Lyles entered with a 6.05 ERA and left with a 6.19 mark.
Previously, the Yankees had not been able to hit even struggling pitching.
On an afternoon of encouraging at-bats, Anthony Rizzo’s connections loomed particularly large.
The ice-cold slugger knocked his first home run in more than two months and finished 4-for-4, spraying an RBI double to left-center, two singles through the middle and pulling a 364-foot shot to right.
Rizzo’s home run marked his first since May 20.
In the 45 games between those homers, the first baseman hit .182 and struck out 46 times in 165 at-bats, a stunning downturn through a largely Judge-less, critical segment of the season.
He has tried anything to snap out of the funk, including abandoning his batting gloves Saturday.
After smoking a Lyles sinker in the eighth pitch of his third-inning at-bat, Rizzo returned to a dugout that ignored him.
The Yankees gave Rizzo the silent treatment as he bounced his way through the dugout until his teammates exploded with joy.
The positive signs team-wide began immediately.
The Yankees scored four runs in the first, when they tagged Lyles for five hits.
Jake Bauers, in his first game off the IL, singled and then strolled around the bases as Torres blasted his 16th homer of the season.
Giancarlo Stanton’s bat continued to show life with a single before he scored on Rizzo’s double.
Luis Severino’s stuff — including a fastball that maxed out at 100.2 mph — impressed, though a two-out, two-run home run from Michael Massey in the sixth inning marred his statline (5 ²/₃ innings, three runs on eight hits).
Massey is an apparent Yankee killer.
The second-year infielder has four home runs in 71 games against teams that are not the Yankees, and three in three games against the Yankees.
But with the Royals threatening in a two-run game, with runners on the corners in the eighth inning, Michael King struck out Massey for the frame’s final out.
The Yankees’ bullpen was dented in the ninth inning, when Ron Marinaccio allowed two homers, but otherwise pitched well — with some help from one more positive Yankees sign.
In the seventh inning, Kansas City’s Nick Pratto smacked an Ian Hamilton four-seamer to deep right-center, but Harrison Bader was on the move.
Making his first start since he was drilled in the ribs Wednesday, the center fielder ran a long way, reached up at the warning track and smacked against the wall with a fully upright left arm, robbing Pratto of extra bases.
Hamilton could exhale. So could the Yankees, particularly after they added three eighth-inning runs.
They loaded the bases for Oswald Peraza, whose sharp ground ball to first base scored two on a Royals error before Kyle Higashioka lifted a sacrifice fly for the eighth run.
As Judge nears a return, perhaps the club can begin to breathe again, too.
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