A.J. Burnett against Tim Redding and the injury-ravaged Mets was every bit the mismatch it looked to be on paper yesterday.
Picking up where CC Sabathia left off the night before, Burnett handed the Yankees their fourth win a row and extended the Replace-Mets’ Subway Series misery with a crisp, 5-0 decision at Citi Field.
The Yankees’ combined one-hitter — the third straight lopsided outcome after Friday’s 9-1 laugher and the 15-0 shellacking Johan Santana suffered on June 14 — looked wholly predictable before Burnett even took the mound against the Mets for the second time in 13 days.
The Yankees were missing Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon because of the flu, but that was nothing compared to the host of medical woes forcing the Mets to once again start a lineup that looked like something out of Triple-A.
And with the hapless Redding on the mound, it was even more of a lost cause for Jerry Manuel’s club. Burnett (6-4) had a no-hitter until Alex Cora’s single leading off the sixth and had no problem extending his streak of scoreless innings against the Mets to 14.
It was the third consecutive strong start for Burnett since his Yankee low point, a 2 2/3-inning nightmare in Boston on June 9. In his last three starts, he’s allowed one run in 20 1/3 innings to lower his ERA from 4.89 to 3.93.
“I’m just trusting my stuff,” Burnett said. “That’s what it comes down to — pitching ahead and trusting my stuff. I don’t need to be fine or paint the corner. I just need to stay in my lanes and let my fastball eat, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”
Yankees manager Joe Girardi lifted Burnett after seven innings, 10 strikeouts and 108 pitches, even though Burnett — a Mets draft pick in 1995 — was as firmly in command late as he was at the start of this outing.
With the sham of a lineup the Mets sent out there was no threat to mount a comeback after the Yankees blew the game open in the sixth.
The Mets have now been shut out three times since June 14 — twice by the Yankees — and have four hits combined the past two nights. The last time the Mets had just four hits in a two-game span was April 29-30, 1967.
“It’s going to be hard for us to score runs, no doubt about it, with where we are right now offensively,” Manuel said. “We’ll need a break here or there or error or something like that to amass any type of threat at this point.”
Manuel had tempted fate by leaving Redding in beyond the fifth against his former team. (He made one forgettable start — 1-plus IP, 6 ER against the Red Sox — in 2005.)
The decision blew up in the Mets’ faces when the journeyman right-hander gave up an RBI-single to Alex Rodriguez and an opposite-field, three-run homer to Jorge Posada.
“Our guys had a pretty good idea of what [Redding] was going to try to do to them [by the sixth],” Girardi said. “It looked like he made some mistakes, and our guys didn’t miss them.”
The Yankees have no such worries about Burnett, or at least not when he’s facing the Mets.
The Mets managed baserunners against Burnett in three of his seven innings, and he easily got out of those trouble spots — twice with strikeouts.
This one was only mildly interesting through the first five innings because Redding somehow kept pace with Burnett in Redding’s first start ever against the Yankees.
The Yankees stranded three over the first two innings before breaking through on Nick Swisher’s opposite-field solo homer with one out in the third.
It might as well have been a 10-0 with what Manuel and the Mets had at their disposal, and with Burnett on the mound.
“We’re clicking on all cylinders,” Burnett said. “The offense is swinging the bats and the starters and the bullpen are doing their job. When we click like that, it’s definitely fun to watch and fun to be a part of.”
bhubbuch@nypost.com