TORONTO — It happens to Cy Young winners, so why should anyone believe Chase Whitley’s pedestrian stuff was immune to getting punished.
When the rookie right-hander was done getting rocked by the Blue Jays Monday night Whitley had his first butt-whipping to go with the seven solid outings in his first seven big league games.
After giving up a run and three hits in the first inning Whitely was smoked by the hosts in the second when the Blue Jays scored six runs on the way to an 8-3 victory that was enjoyed by a Rogers Centre crowd of 31,554.
“It’s frustrating, a poor performance and move on. I didn’t execute what I wanted to do. I couldn’t command the baseball at all,’’ said Whitley, who gave up eight runs, 11 hits and walked three in 3 ²/₃ innings. “I got away from the game plan and I couldn’t execute the pitches I wanted to throw.’’
The Yankees’ third straight loss dropped them 2 ½ lengths behind the AL East-leading Blue Jays who had lost seven of 10 and were swept three games by the Yankees last week at Yankee Stadium and added more questions to the back of a rotation that already houses the struggling Vidal Nuno.
And that’s before you get to a lineup that has gone limp in the past three games.
Whitley opened the evening with a 3-0 record and nifty 2.56 ERA in seven big league starts, but there was no way he was going to breeze through an entire season.
“It happens to every pitcher, even the greatest pitchers have bad nights,’’ Joe Girardi said. “It’s part of it.’’
The beating was administered by a team that was missing Jose Bautista (left hamstring) and Brett Lawrie (fractured right index finger), who were injured Sunday. Lawrie went on the disabled list Monday and Bautista is expected to miss a few games.
Their absence didn’t hinder the Blue Jays in the second when they scored six runs, three of them coming on Adam Lind’s homer to center. Jose Reyes, Melky Cabrera and Dioner Navarro also drove in runs.
For one night a team the Yankees have dominated lately had its way against them.
The Yankees won five of the previous six games against the Blue Jays this season, were 24-8 versus them since Sept. 19, 2012 and 41-20 since the beginning of the 2011 schedule.
Whitley beat the Blue Jays, 7-3, on June 18 when he allowed two runs and five hits in five innings, so he was facing the same team twice within a week.
“He made some mistakes,’’ said manager Joe Girardi, who eschewed the theory the Blue Jays had a better understanding of Whitley having seen him recently. “The ball to Lind was up in the zone.’’
While the severity of Whitley’s drubbing grabbed most of the attention the Yankees’ lineup didn’t do much with rookie right-hander Marcus Stroman, who gave up two runs and four hits in 3 ²/₃ innings to the Yankees in The Bronx on June 17 in a 3-1 Blue Jays defeat.
Stroman, a first-round pick from Medford, N.Y., and Duke, made his fifth big league start and allowed a run and three hits in eight innings. He is 4-2.
During the three-game losing streak the Yankees have scored four runs, are batting .179 (17-for-95) and are 2-for-19 (.105) with runners in scoring position.
They didn’t bat with a runner in scoring position against Stroman during his eight-inning stint and scored what amounted to a pair of garbage-time runs in the ninth.
“It’s disappointing. We have to swing the bats better,’’ said Mark Teixeira, who homered in the fourth. “We are used to scoring runs around here.’’