A-Rod's Grand Slam Leads Yanks To 5-1 Win Over The Giants

Somewhere off in the distance, you can almost hear Bud Selig smashing his TV with a baseball bat.

Heading towards another poor offensive showing, and a pitching battle that looked like we could be playing all night, Alex Rodriguez blasted his major league record 24th career grand slam in the 7th inning to lead the Yankees to a 5-1 victory over the Giants Friday night in the Bronx.

"You just want to come up in a big spot and get a big hit," said Rodriguez. "Hopefully, that hit gets your offense going."

CC Sabathia wasn't at his best once again, but he battled for the Yankees to give them seven innings of one-run ball, keeping the Yanks in the game long enough for A-Rod to break the 1-1 tie in the 7th.

"We really needed it," manager Joe Girardi said. "Like I've said, I don't know if we can afford to lose any more games. That's the bottom line at this point. I kind of look at every game from here on out as extremely, extremely important."

The Yankees entered the 7th inning against former Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum, who came into the inning have given up just one-run on a solo homerun by Alfonso Soriano in the 2nd inning. Eduardo Nunez singled to open the frame, then after a strikeout by Lyle Overbay, Nunie stole second and Brendan Ryan was hit by a pitch.

JR Murphy hit a groundball the third base that was stopped on a nice play by Pablo Sandoval, by the throw to first was offline, leaving Murphy safe at first. Then Ichiro walked against Lincecum to load the bases, forcing Giants manager Bruce Bochy to bring in George Kontos, who the Yankees traded for Chris Stewart last season.

Lincecum had been pitching pretty well all night against the Yankees, but he just seemed to run out of gas at the end, as he wasn't able to finish off the 7th, getting tagged with four runs on five hits, while walking two and striking out six on 121 pitches over 6.2 innings. Then, of course, A-Rod hit a grand slam off Kontos to put the Bombers up 5-1.

"That's a nice job by Tim, and he just had some tough luck there that last inning," Bochy said.

That set up a scoreless 8th inning by David Robertson, paving the way for the great Mariano Rivera to start off his final homestand with a perfect 1-2-3 9th inning -- non-save situation -- to shutout the Giants and give the Yankees only their second win in the last seven games.

"You don't want to get in a situation where they have a couple guys on and you have to bring [Rivera] in," Girardi said. "This way you have wiggle room. We have an off-day on Monday, so I figure I can use him three days in a row."

In between, Sabathia was on the mound for the Yankees, and although he pitched at the level that would have warranted more than just one run against any other team -- like the Red Sox, who hit CC hard last Saturday -- he still managed to fight through seven innings, giving up one run on seven hits, while walking three and striking out four on 107 pitches.

"I was kind of erratic a little bit with the control, but we were able to make pitches and keep them off the board for the most part," Sabathia said.

Follow @GavinEwbank2013 on Twitter.