TORONTO – Forty minutes after Roy Halladay made the Yankees look silly, Derek Jeter paid him the biggest compliment a hitter can throw a pitcher.
“He is the best starter in baseball,” Jeter said of the Blue Jays right-hander.
Anybody who watched Halladay handcuff the Yankees on the way to a 5-0, two-hit shutout in front of 43,078 last night at Rogers Centre would be crazy to disagree.
“He was as good as anyone has been that I have caught,” catcher Rod Barajas said of Halladay’s complete-game shutout, in which he allowed a tainted single to Alex Rodriguez in the fourth and a trash-time, ground-rule double to Jeter in the ninth.
“It was remarkable. Everything was perfect.”
Considering the Yankees scored 20 runs in the previous seven games and were batting .224 overall and .222 with runners in scoring position during that stretch in which they went 4-3, Halladay was the last pitcher they wanted to see.
So when the Blue Jays scored twice in the third inning off Joba Chamberlain, one was a tainted run because first baseman Wilson Betemit failed to turn a ground ball into a double play, a 2-0 lead might has well been 20-0.
“Any time you face Halladay and there is a deficit, you feel it is larger than it is,” said Rodriguez, whose fourth- inning fly to center was misplayed into a single by Brad Wilkerson.
The Yankees’ second straight defeat didn’t cost them ground in the AL East since the first-place Rays and second-place Red Sox lost. The Yankees are 6½ games out of first.
The Yankees’ inability to hit lately – .207 overall and .203 with runners in scoring position across the last eight games isn’t a secret. Yet, even if the Yankees’ wood was sizzling, Halladay would have turned the bats to dust.
“[Thursday night] was a lot more puzzling,” Rodriguez said of Pirate lefty Paul Maholm limiting the Yankees to two runs in seven innings. “Tonight was domination.”
Halladay, who is 12-5 in 29 games against the Yankees, won his third straight and takes an 11-6 ledger into the All Star Game. His sterling performance made a loser out of Chamberlain (2-3).
“[Halladay] has done what he has done for a long time and is very good at it,” said Chamberlain, who gave up three runs, seven hits, didn’t issue a walk and tied a season high in strikeouts with nine in 62/3 innings.
Chamberlain, who is 1-1 in eight starts, gave up two runs in the third and a solo homer to Barajas in the sixth. “I tried my best to keep my team in the game; it’s on me,” Chamberlain said. “I gave up three runs; there is no way of getting around it.”
The way Halladay was going, it might as well been 30 runs.
“He pretty much does the same thing every time out for eight or nine innings no matter whom he faces,” Jeter said. “He never throws the ball over the middle of the plate. He goes corner to corner as [well] as anybody.”
Blue Jays 5 Yankees 0