‘RODA KILL: Hiroki Kuroda reacts after giving up a home run to J.J. Hardy during the sixth inning of the Yankees 6-1 loss to the Orioles last night in The Bronx. (
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Joe Girardi was asked before last night’s game how he would know if his team was panicking and responded with an attempt at humor.
“If they didn’t show up today, I’d be concerned,” the manager said.
The wise-cracking manager was referring to his players literally not arriving for the game, but given their performance in last night’s 6-1 loss to the hard-charging Orioles, Girardi should be very concerned.
Because if you were looking for signs of life from a Yankees’ team beginning the most critical stretch of the season, you’d be searching for quite a while. And their lead in the division, 10 games just over a month ago, is down to two over Baltimore.
“Right now, where we are, if you had told me at the end of spring training we’d been up two games at the start of September, I would have signed up for that,” said Nick Swisher, who struck out four times.
But he also knows nothing is guaranteed.
“We have to wait and see what happens at the end of the season, but we’ve got a lot of veteran guys in here who have been through this stuff,” Swisher said.
The right fielder quickly dismissed the notion something might need to be said to the team.
“No, I think that 6-0 loss was enough,” said Swisher, understandably forgetting Curtis Granderson’s ninth-inning homer.
Among the guilty parties last night was Hiroki Kuroda (12-10), done in again by early-inning trouble and a mind-boggling lack of run support. The Yankees have scored a combined two runs in his last three losses.
The offense collected just four hits- all of them singles— until Granderson’s home run and went 0-for-4 with runners in scoring position.
They managed to make unheralded starter Miguel Gonzalez (6-3) look like a young Jim Palmer. The right-hander retired the first nine hitters he faced before Derek Jeter started the fourth with a hit.
When they finally did start a rally, getting two runners on with no one out and the top of the lineup coming up in the sixth the Yankees failed to get another base runner.
“We’ve got to find a way to get out of this little rut we’re in,” Girardi said. “Right now, it’s not happening for us.”
It didn’t help that Baltimore’s Mark Reynolds, normally a stiff at first base, made two diving plays and hit a pair of long homers. His towering shot in the second gave the Orioles a 3-0 lead.
Though Eric Chavez called it “just a loss,” he admitted the team is paying attention to its surroundings.
“It’s that time of year when we know what’s going on,” the third baseman said. “We don’t really have to look at the scoreboard because we’re playing the team we’d be looking at. We’re probably gonna be doing that for the next couple weeks.”
Scoreboard-watching won’t help if the Yankees don’t play better.
“We need to clean up what we’re doing in here and take care of what going on with our play,” Chavez said.
Especially because the Orioles have now won six-of-seven and are in position to tie the Yankees atop the division with wins the next two days.
“Two weeks ago when we got swept in Chicago, I said we need to play better,” Girardi said. “When we lost two-of-three to Toronto we need to play better.”
It’s still true.