BOSTON — You can’t call this your classic collapse. The Yankees are winning too often, playing too well, to draw comparisons to any of the all-time tank jobs.
Then again, that sentiment and about $200 million will get you the 2012 Yankees, who continue to be mired in deadly mediocrity.
“You’ve got to try to string together some wins. That’s the bottom line,” Derek Jeter said last night, after the Yankees dropped a ninth-inning, 4-3 decision to the Red Sox at Fenway Park. “You keep winning and losing, and winning and losing, the other teams … they’re going to gain ground on us.”
With Baltimore thumping Tampa Bay, 9-2 at Camden Yards, the Yankees and Orioles are tied atop the American League East for the fourth time in seven days of action. Each of the three previous times they fell into a tie with Baltimore, the Yankees immediately responded with a victory that gave them a one-game advantage. So it doesn’t fit your standard definition of “choking.”
But we’re damning with faint praise here, and treading water simply won’t get it done this September, not in an AL race in which eight teams — with Texas, the White Sox, Oakland, the Angels and Detroit joining the three AL East contenders — are fighting hard for the five postseason berths.
The Yankees know it. They just can’t figure out how to fix it.
“It’s been a number of reasons why we haven’t gotten on a run,” manager Joe Girardi said. “It hasn’t been just one aspect of the game.”
True. Every aspect of their game features significant room for improvement. You can’t point your finger at one player, or at one component of the team. Instead, you look around and realize the team simply needs more in order to move past this funk.
More from the offense, which enjoyed a resurgence over the weekend in Baltimore and then went 1-for-12 last night with runners in scoring position.
“We had a ton of opportunities to score runs,” Girardi said. “We just didn’t get the hits.”
More from the starting pitching. Sure, Hiroki Kuroda pitched capably, allowing three runs in 6 1/3 innings. Yet after Jeter’s ground-rule double to right field in the sixth inning scored two runs to catapult the Yankees to a 3-2 edge, Kuroda served up a game-tying homer to Dustin Pedroia in the bottom of the inning.
More luck. David Robertson dominated the Red Sox in the eighth, striking out the side, and then gave up seeing-eye groundball hits to Pedro Ciriaco and Mike Aviles with one out in the ninth. Only Jacoby Ellsbury’s game-winner, a crisp shot to right field that brought home Ciriaco from second base, was well struck.
“Balls last year that didn’t sneak through are sneaking through this year,” Robertson said.
And, well, less head-scratchers like pinch runner Eduardo Nunez getting caught stealing second base to make the second out in the ninth. Had he swiped the bag, he would have put himself in scoring position with one out and Alex Rodriguez and Robinson Cano due to hit.
“For whatever reason, he slowed down when he slid, and that’s why he was out,” said Girardi, in a rare public display of anger toward a player.
Asked if he slowed down on the slide — it looked like he did — Nunez said, “I didn’t think so” and maintained that he was safe.
A strong run is still possible Jeter said, “Because we’ve done it all year, pretty much. … We wouldn’t be tied for first unless we found ways to win games throughout the course of that (141) games that we played. We’ve got to do it again.”
They have 21 games left to get off this seesaw and find ways to win more often. If they can’t, no one will care whether they were done in by a historic plummet or merely inconsistency. It’s where you wind up, not how you get there, and the Yankees remain headed down a dangerous path.
ken.davidoff@nypost.com