Ken Davidoff

Ken Davidoff

MLB

Yankees right back at the brink of irrelevance

BALTIMORE — This one stung, so much so that Joe Girardi couldn’t even find his mask of tranquility late Monday night.

So much so that the Yankees coaches sat en masse in their dressing room at Camden Yards, not yet showered, about a half hour after it ended.

So much so that, yet again in this frenetic season, the Yankees find themselves on the precipice of irrelevance.

The Yankees lost a game they needed badly, a game in which they led, and they lost it definitively. The Orioles pounded them, 11-3, surviving significant early adversity and then beating up on the Yankees’ bullpen to turn it into a blowout and the Yankees’ third straight loss.

“That was a tough one,” losing pitcher Chris Capuano said, in the night’s biggest understatement.

The Yankees (61-57) now trail the Orioles (68-50) by a season-worst seven games in the AL East, and they’re three games behind the Tigers (63-53) in the hunt for the second AL wild card.

“It’s one game,” said Girardi, his frown right-side up. “I talked about the importance of winning the series. We need to win [Tuesday].”

For all of the injuries the Yankees have suffered this season, external circumstances have urged Girardi’s group to come forward. To join the party. Monday served another example of the Yankees politely declining. Which leaves them down the block from the fun.

The Yankees broke a 1-1 tie in the second inning in about the least likely manner possible: a blown hit-and-run that turned into a two-error, two-run circus. Then they saw the Orioles’ franchise player, Manny Machado, leave the game with a scary-looking right knee injury in the third. The indicators shone positively.

But Capuano, one of Brian Cashman’s many useful July acquisitions, couldn’t hold onto that lead, and in a cruel twist, the man who replaced Machado in the lineup, lefty-hitting slugger Chris Davis, slammed a two-run, fifth-inning homer off the southpaw Capuano to catapult the O’s from down, 3-2, to up, 4-3. Yankees relievers Adam Warren and Chase Whitley allowed the game to get out of hand by giving up three and four runs in the seventh and eighth, respectively.

Throw in your standard lackluster Yankees offense, and you have the same roller-coaster operation that has teased and aggravated its fans all season long and finds itself in the midst of another plummet.

“All season long, we’ve been disappointed,” Mark Teixeira said. “We haven’t really gotten it going.”

Even as they lost five starting pitchers (Ivan Nova, David Phelps, Michael Pineda, CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka) to the disabled list, the Yankees also have seen the industry open up and invite them to stick around. Most notably, the teams many baseball observers (including me) viewed as the AL East’s top teams, Boston and Tampa Bay, faltered and traded away top talents in order to retool for next season. The AL as a whole has come down, with the leader for the second wild-card entry, Detroit, on pace to win a modest 88 games.

Then you have Buck Showalter’s Orioles, who have surged to the top of this disjointed AL East, only to seemingly fall down to the Yankees’ level as the series kicked off.

First came the botched hit-and-run, in which Martin Prado failed to offer at an inside pitch from Baltimore starter Bud Norris and the result was both Carlos Beltran and Chase Headley scoring on errors by Machado and Norris. Then, disturbingly, Machado left the game with the assistance of Showalter and a team trainer when he injured his right knee swinging at a third-inning pitch from Capuano.

“Your heart goes into your stomach when you see something like that,” Headley said.

The Orioles proved undeterred, however, and the Yankees couldn’t capitalize on getting Norris out of the game after just five innings and 108 pitches. The visitors went hitless in eight at-bats with runners in scoring position.

Much was going the Yankees’ way Monday, until it wasn’t. It’s a running narrative of this Yankees season, and they’re running out of time to change that and get back inside the party.