Jorge Posada was the smart one: he asked out of a Yankees lineup so limp you could snake it through a small key hole.
Worried that a stiff lower back would worsen if he were the DH, the slumping Posada told manager Joe Girardi he needed to “clear his head” even though he didn’t inform the manager his back was bothering him. Posada, who was dropped to ninth in the order, then admitted he was miffed how general manager Brian Cashman handled the situation by going on national television to discuss the issue during the game. Finally, he said he has felt disrespected by the only organization he has played for.
So, with Posada sitting in the dugout and being treated by a chiropractor in the clubhouse, Red Sox right-hander Josh Beckett turned the Yankees’ bats to wet noodles on the way to a 6-0 Yankees loss witnessed by a sold-out and crabby crowd of 48,790 at Yankee Stadium.
“He was pretty tough, it was going to be tough to score runs on him,” Mark Teixeira said of Beckett.
Try impossible for a lineup that went 0-for-10 with runners in scoring position and is 7-for-45 (.156) in the last five games swinging in the clutch.
Matched against Yankees ace CC Sabathia, Beckett (3-1) allowed four singles, walked two and fanned nine.
“During my three at-bats against him I didn’t get one good pitch to hit,” said Teixeira, whose eighth-inning single stopped a 0-for-30 slide against Red Sox pitching.
The defeat extended the Yankees’ longest losing streak of the season to four games and was their eighth loss in 11 games.
Tonight, with Freddy Garcia against Jon Lester, the Yankees try to avoid a three-game sweep to their bitter rivals. Then it’s off to St. Petersburg, Fla., for games tomorrow night and Tuesday night with the AL East-leading Rays, who open with stud lefty David Price.
“It’s frustrating,” admitted Girardi, who was tossed in the seventh inning by plate umpire Mike Winters for questioning a call on Jason Varitek in the four-run seventh that was highlighted by a three-run homer from a scalding Adrian Gonzalez. “I thought Mike’s zone, he called some low strikes on us. I thought that was a pivotal point in the game and changed the complexion of the game.”
When the Red Sox bulge went from 2-0 to 6-0, the game was over. The Yankees wasted the only two scoring chances they had, in the first and fifth innings.
Sabathia, who fell to 3-3 by allowing six runs and seven hits in 62/3 innings, isn’t ready to panic.
“It’s a long season,” Sabathia said. “We’ve got a good enough team in here where we can turn it around. Right now, it’s tough to go through it. We have a lot of veteran ballplayers in here and we’ll turn it around.”
Brett Gardner, the only Yankee whose stick isn’t part of the Men Without Bats ensemble, looks at the two-sided coin.
“You can do two things — you can sit around and hang your heads or you can come back here ready to work tomorrow and try to salvage a game from these guys and leave home and head on the road on a decent note instead of a really bad note,” said Gardner, who went 1-for-4 and is batting .408 (20-for-49) in the last 18 games.
Based on the past four games, the note drifting off the Yankees tonight will be sour.
george.king@nypost.com