It’s hard to imagine the Yankees playing worse than they did less than a week ago, when they were in the midst of losing 10 of 11 games.
But manager Joe Girardi didn’t have to look back much further than that to find a stretch that was even more putrid.
“I would question that,” Girardi said after the Yankees completed a three-game sweep over the Royals, 4-2 on Wednesday. “I thought we looked worse the first week.”
You can joke about losing streaks when they are in the rearview mirror. Now, the Yankees will try to carry their recent success with them to the West Coast, where they open a series Thursday night in Oakland.
On Wednesday, they got a bounce-back start from Michael Pineda, a three-run homer from Alex Rodriguez and more dominant work from the back end of the bullpen.
That’s why, somewhat unbelievably given all their struggles, they left The Bronx with a 1 ½ game lead over the Rays in the AL East.
Pineda, who struggled in his two outings following his 16-strikeout performance against the Orioles, regained control of his slider and pitched well after a shaky start. He struck out eight over 6²/₃ innings to improve to 6-2.
He was hit hard in the first, as Mike Moustakas crushed a slider over the right-center field fence to give the Royals a 1-0 lead just two batters into the game.
But Pineda was aided by two nice defensive plays from Chase Headley at third and then settled down as the Yankees’ offense came to life.
Pineda said he worked on his slider between starts, trying to stay back with the pitch and keep it down. The results followed, as Brian McCann said there was “more tilt” on the pitch against the Royals after Pineda surrendered 12 runs over his previous two starts.
He struck out eight, including the last three batters he faced and didn’t disagree with Girardi’s decision to remove him with two outs in the seventh.
“They told me I was at 106 pitches,” said Pineda, who has never pitched more than 171 innings in a season and is on pace for well over 200 innings this year. “And I want to pitch the whole season, not just one game.”
McCann tied the game with a homer in the second before Rodriguez hit his 11th home run of the season to make it 4-1 against soft-tossing Kansas City starter Chris Young, who entered the game 4-0 with a 0.78 ERA.
“We desperately needed these three wins against a great team,” Rodriguez said. “That’s a team over there we’ll hopefully see in October.”
Rodriguez also made more history, passing Lou Gehrig on the all-time list for career RBIs with 1995. Rodriguez now has the most in AL history and is third overall.
“It is amazing,” Girardi said of the RBI feat.
But Rodriguez said he was just as pleased with the recent turnaround in the team’s play.
“It’s important for us to play this caliber of baseball,” Rodriguez said. “It’s what we expect. What we did for the last 10 games is not tolerable. We’re not going to accept that.”
Fair enough, but at some point, they wouldn’t mind some consistency.
“Over the long run, things balance out,” Girardi said. “You’re never as good as when you’re playing great and you’re never as bad as when you’re playing like we’ve played at times. We’re probably somewhere in-between there. It starts with starting pitching.”