TAMPA, Fla. — Giancarlo Stanton is returning to the New York Yankees’ lineup after missing three games with what the team described as general soreness, manager Aaron Boone told radio station WFAN.

Stanton will play right field in one of the two games against the Tampa Bay Rays, but Aaron Judge is not expected to appear in the outfield in either.

There is no set timetable for Judge’s return to the field. He was scheduled to test his right elbow with long toss.

“I don’t know yet,” Boone said. “What I’ve said is I’m waiting on the trainers to say, ‘thumbs up.’ He’s expected to long toss again today, so I don’t expect it here in Tampa. Could it be Boston? Maybe. I just don’t know yet.”

Boone added that Judge may not regain full throwing strength this season.

“I don’t think we’re going to see him throwing like he normally does at any point this year, but that’s OK,” Boone said. “We’ve got to feel like he can go out there and protect himself.”

The Yankees are coming off a three-game sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals and hold a three-game lead for the final American League wild-card spot. Offensively, they will be satisfied if Judge simply can remain productive at the plate. Since being activated from the injured list on Aug. 5, Judge has been limited to designated hitter duties. He entered the week batting .333 with 39 home runs, 91 RBIs and a 1.134 OPS, all among the league leaders. His latest home run was his first extra-base hit since returning.

Judge’s inability to play the field has reduced the team’s flexibility. Stanton is batting .299 with 12 home runs, 34 RBIs and a .953 OPS this season, but his long injury history makes any outfield assignment a risk. He did not debut until mid-June because of tendinitis in both elbows. After playing three straight games in the outfield, he missed three consecutive games with soreness. He has declined to specify where the discomfort occurred.

SAN DIEGO — Xander Bogaerts of the San Diego Padres had a home run overturned due to fan interference, and manager Mike Shildt was ejected for coming out of the dugout to talk to the umpires in the second inning of the game against the San Francisco Giants.

The call turned out to be critical because the Padres lost 4-3.

Bogaerts hit a flyball to left field that appeared to bounce out of Heliot Ramos’ glove and over the fence as two fans, including one in a Giants shirt, reached for it. The ball might have clipped one of the fans’ arms and, after a lengthy review, the home run call was overturned and Bogaerts was called out. Shildt was ejected immediately when he came out of the dugout.

Fans booed the rest of the inning.

“No contact. It was a big run. Huge,” Shildt said. “Listen, I don’t bark at the league a lot, but the definition that we got from replay was that it was clear that there was some impediment that took place. Clearly, he didn’t touch the baseball. ... And if it’s so clear, how come it takes 2 minutes, 40 seconds to figure it out? What are you looking for? If it’s so clear, overturn it early and if it’s not, it’s a home run.

“That’s just really disappointing to go that long and have to come up with a conclusion that’s not conclusive to overturn a home run. It cost us an opportunity to win a baseball game. ... I had a lot of time on my hands and if you can find an angle where the fan touched the baseball, I’d like to see it.”

Ramos wasn’t surprised the call was overturned.

“I did think I had it easier than that, but whenever I was about to catch it, I saw his arm was over me, kind of him, so I’m guessing it hit the arm or something. I saw the replay and it only shows the guy on the bottom, it doesn’t show the guy on the top, but he was like literally over me and his whole body was across the wall. It just clipped the finger a little bit. Before the ball got to my glove, he was already with his hands up.”

Ramos said the fan blocked his view “a little bit because I saw his shadow coming on top of me so I was kind of confused about it.”

Giants manager Bob Melvin said it appeared the fan “reached over. I think it just nicked him. Regardless, if your hand’s over it could affect his vision, too. You don’t see that call often but I think it was the right one.”

Ramos hit a leadoff homer against Nestor Cortes, one of three homers within the first five batters that gave the Giants a 4-0 lead.

DENVER — This was a cool moment for Warming Bernabel — being doused with an icy bucket of water.

Not that long ago, winning moments like this were few and far between for the Colorado Rockies. That winning feeling, though, has returned a little more often in the second half of the season. The Rockies rallied to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 4-3 courtesy of Bernabel’s walk-off single in the ninth inning.

With that, the Rockies snapped a 10-game skid against the Dodgers. They also tied their season-high winning streak of four games.

Even more, they’re 14-15 since the All-Star break, while the NL West-leading Dodgers are 13-15. Colorado still trails the defending World Series champions by 35 games in the standings.

No longer are the Rockies in imminent danger of setting a modern-era major league mark for losses, though. At 36-89, Colorado needs to win six of its final 37 games to steer clear of the dubious record set by the 2024 Chicago White Sox, who finished 41-121.

“We’re at this stage right now where we’re trying to get better as a team,” All-Star catcher Hunter Goodman said. “We’re trying to play the game the right way and do things to put us in a position in the future to get to the spot that some of these teams we’re playing against are in.”

Colorado has won five series since the All-Star break. That after winning just two series before the break.

“You definitely see flashes,” Goodman said. “We’re a super-young team. But getting that learning experience and figuring out how to win at this level and how to do it together as a team has been pretty cool to watch the last month or so.”

The last time Colorado beat the Dodgers was Sept. 21. It’s been a little longer since the Rockies last beat Los Angeles at Coors Field — June 19, 2024, to be precise.

“It’s good to get a win. We’re playing good baseball right now,” Goodman said. “It’s just going out and playing clean baseball and playing the way we’ve been playing.”

The Dodgers entered the four-game series in the Mile High City fresh off a sweep of rival San Diego. Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts insisted his team wouldn’t overlook the Rockies.

“We’re going to get their best. We’re prepared for that,” Roberts said before the game. “But yeah, absolutely, teams try to kind of use us as a marker. We see that.”

In the ninth inning, the Dodgers were playing their outfielders deep to prevent a double. It ended up costing them one.

Ezequiel Tovar started a one-out rally with a bloop double that a charging Teoscar Hernández couldn’t haul in.

“It’s a big outfield,” Hernández explained. “I tried to make a play. I didn’t.”

Bernabel followed by sending a pitch from Justin Wrobleski (4-5) up the middle to bring home Tovar.

“There’s no cooler way to win a game in baseball than a walk-off,” Goodman said. “It’s always fun when that happens.”

PITTSBURGH — Toronto Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. left a 5-2 loss to Pittsburgh in the fifth inning with hamstring tightness following a pair of stellar defensive plays.

Guerrero did the splits twice at first to snag tosses from teammates, the last a pretty pick off a long throw by shortstop Bo Bichette to retire Jared Triolo to end the third. Guerrero returned to play the field in the fourth before being replaced by Ty France when his turn in the batting order came around in the top of the fifth.

Blue Jays manager John Schneider said Guerrero was doing “all right,” but that an MRI was scheduled to get a clearer look at things.

“It was after that stretch, obviously,” Schneider said. “At this time of year, everyone is kind of grinding a little bit, and that just irritated his hammy. It’s just tightness.”

Schneider said Guerrero wanted to go out for the fourth inning to get a feel on how hurt he might be. Rather than risk aggravating it, he was pulled in the fifth.

“I trust him, and he knows himself really well,” Schneider said. “We can’t afford to lose him for an extended period of time, so it was partially precautionary, too. Hopefully, he’s good to go in the next day or two. He’s obviously really important to our lineup.”

Guerrero is hitting .298 with 21 home runs and 69 RBIs this season for first-place Toronto.

PITTSBURGH — Paul Skenes is a numbers nerd. Well, most of the time anyway.

The Pittsburgh Pirates ace will make it a point to glance up at the ribbon boards that instantaneously spew out the data following each pitch — velocity, drop, horizontal movement — to get a feel for whether the ball is doing what he wants it to do after it leaves his hands.

He considers the practice educational. A way for the former Air Force cadet who once majored in military strategy before transferring to LSU to decipher what’s working and what’s not during a given start.

Yet there are two numbers the 23-year-old insists he isn’t paying much attention to, at least publicly anyway: his personal win-loss record.

Those numbers remained stuck at 7-9 following six occasionally fiery innings in what became a 5-2 victory over American League-leading Toronto.

Facing a team that entered the night with the highest batting average and fewest strikeouts in the majors — and with almost certain future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer watching intently from the Toronto dugout — Skenes allowed five hits and struck out eight.

When he slowly loped, head down as always, from the mound after fanning Blue Jays third baseman Ernie Clement to end the top of the sixth, a sizable chunk of the PNC Park crowd rose to its feet.

Standing ovations when Skenes is finishing up a day’s work are becoming the norm.

All too often during what has become a frustrating season for a last-place team, so is the result.

When the Pirates failed to break a 2-2 tie in the bottom of the sixth, it meant that Skenes was left a no-decision for the 10th time in 26 starts. In nine of those starts, he’s allowed two runs or fewer, one of the main reasons he could become the first starting pitcher with a losing record to claim the Cy Young.

That prospect puts him at the forefront of the increasingly charged debate around whether “pitcher wins” are a valuable metric in determining a pitcher’s actual worth, something that’s not lost on him.

Yet asked if the lack of “Ws” under his name bothers him, he shrugs.

Yes, he cares about winning. More specifically, he cares about the Pirates winning. Whether he gets credit for it on the days he gets the ball is beside the point.

“I mean definitely the fact that we have more runs than (the opponents) do at the end of the game, that’s the biggest thing,” Skenes said.

Skenes then broke down why reliever Evan Sisk picked up his first big league victory by pitching a scoreless seventh before the Pirates took the lead for good in the bottom of the inning when Henry Davis dashed home following a wild pitch.

“I grinded, frankly, to get through six,” Skenes said.

He pointed directly at a 24-pitch third inning, when Toronto became the first opponent to score an earned run against Skenes at PNC Park since June 3. If he navigates that part of the game a little more efficiently, maybe he’s out there for the seventh. Maybe even the eighth.

“If I do that, there’s probably a ‘win’ next to my name,” he said.

Instead, he stood on the top step of the dugout and watched Sisk, Kyle Nicolas and Dennis Santana get the final nine outs as the Pirates won for just the second time in nine games.

Yes, getting the victory would have been cool. But there was joy in having the 28-year-old Sisk get dumped in a basket after picking up his first major-league victory following seven long seasons in the minors.

As Sisk openly wondered what he might do with the ball commemorating the moment, Skenes jokingly suggested from a couple of stalls away that Sisk might not want to play catch with it.

It was a rare and welcome moment of levity for a team that began the year with heightened expectations (internally anyway) before reality set in.

Skenes’ won-loss record isn’t a reflection of his remarkable performance — he leads the majors in ERA (2.16) and is in the top six in innings, strikeouts and batting average against — but his team’s offensive ineptitude.

The Pirates rank at or near the bottom of the majors in nearly every major statistical category. That part of the equation is out of Skenes’ control. So he is trying to focus on what he can, namely the process of navigating the rigors of a 162-game season and everything that comes with it.

He’s still trying to figure out how to make sure he gets enough sleep given the erratic schedule. To make sure his diet doesn’t slip when the club is on the road. To consistently do all the little things behind the scenes that help him be at his best every fifth day.

“If you aren’t taking care of your routine and everything now, it can catch up to you in five, ten years, two years,” he said. “So you can’t cut corners because at some point, you’re going to run out of paper.”