With an injury-depleted lineup and rotation, the Yankees have little margin for error these days, let alone five.
The Yankees threw away a three-game winning streak with a 4-2 loss to the Rangers in The Bronx, committing their most errors in a nine-inning game since 1998.
“It was an ugly game on our part,” Joe Girardi said. “The defense was bad and we didn’t swing the bats particularly well.”
Making matters even worse was the fact the loss came against the American League’s worst team. The Rangers had lost 24 of their previous 28 games.
On Monday, it was the Yankees who looked like cellar-dwellers, with Shane Greene (2-1) making a whopping three errors in his third career start and an offense stuck in neutral. Playing without Mark Teixeira, who is out at least three days with a strained lat, the Yankees had just five hits.
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Jacoby Ellsbury’s homer to lead off the fourth inning gave the Yankees a 2-1 lead, which they took into the sixth. And after Greene retired the first two batters, he seemed set to deliver another excellent outing.
Instead, he ended up facing one too many batters.
Greene gave up a two-out single to Jake Smolinski and then walked Jim Adduci, prompting a visit from pitching coach Larry Rothschild and not a hook from Joe Girardi. Geovany Soto followed with a run-scoring single to left, ending Greene’s night.
“He gave up a jam shot over the third baseman’s head,” Girardi said, pointing out the real damage came against southpaw Matt Thornton, who promptly gave up consecutive singles to Rougned Odor and Shin-Soo Choo, both left-handed hitters.
That made it 4-2 Texas.
Greene could have had a larger cushion to work with, but the Yankees again squandered scoring chances, most notably in the bottom of the fifth, when Derek Jeter grounded into an inning-ending double play with the bases loaded to keep it a one-run game.
No one on the Yankees could quite pinpoint why right-hander Miles Mikolas (1-2) was so effective after the first inning.
“I’m not really sure,” Brett Gardner said, echoing the words of his manager.
In his previous two outings, Mikolas had surrendered 13 earned runs in nine innings, ballooning his ERA to 10.05. Against the Yankees, he gave up just four hits in 7 1/3 innings.
“You can’t hit and field like we did and expect to win,” Gardner said.
And while none of the Yankees’ errors caused any unearned runs, they did lead to Greene throwing 113 pitches in just 5 2/3 innings.
“That’s what killed him,” Girardi said. “Those happen. Unfortunately they all happened in one game. Maybe we’ll get them out of the way.”
In the second, Greene dropped a throw from Kelly Johnson, who was playing first for Teixeira, on Leonys Martin’s grounder with one out. After striking out Smolinski, Greene then fielded Adduci’s slow comebacker and nonchalantly lobbed the ball high over Johnson’s head at first for a two-base error.
“Obviously, I need to work on that,” a stone-faced Greene said, adding he wasn’t frustrated by the outing.
“I’d like to have a couple of pitches back,” Greene said. “Obviously, the single [by Soto] to score that run in the sixth. I think I was just rushing a little bit.”
He also threw another ball away on Soto’s slow grounder in the fourth.
Despite those miscues, he only allowed one run until the sixth. Texas scored in the third, when a Brian Roberts error helped extend the inning following Choo’s leadoff double.
“This isn’t something we’re gonna dwell on,” Roberts said. “You just have to move on.”