It was a Nightmare on 161st Street.
The Yankees, who were three outs away from a victory, instead were dealt a crushing 9-6 loss by the Rangers following an interminable rain delay.
Kirby Yates, in relief of Aroldis Chapman after the game was stopped in the top of the ninth for 3:35 (and resumed at 2:15 in the morning), imploded. He hit three batters and allowed a two-run single to Adrian Beltre as the Rangers stormed back with a four-run ninth following a controversial delay.
“It’s hard for me to understand what happened tonight, how it got to this point,” Joe Girardi said. “But it did and we lost.”
Chapman was looking for his 16th save when he entered Monday’s soggy game in The Bronx.
The closer had already walked Robinson Chirinos to start the ninth and fallen behind Shin-Soo Choo when Girardi approached home plate umpire John Tumpane to complain about the conditions — even though rain had been falling for at least three innings.
Amazingly, the ploy worked — or so it seemed — and the game was halted.
“It was tough out there,” Chapman said through a translator. “I couldn’t get a really good grip on the ball [and] was slipping a little bit. It was very wet out there.”
When the rain finally stopped, it was nearly 2 a.m., and there were about 100 fans remaining in the Stadium.
That’s when Yates came on to strike out Choo and then fell apart, allowing three runs in the devastating loss that knocked the Yankees back down below .500 (37-38).
“I felt like I made a lot of good pitches,” Yates said. “Unfortunately, I made some bad ones that cost us a ballgame.”
It was a fitting ending to a game whose start was delayed by 21 minutes despite the lack of rain.
The ninth-inning maneuvers clearly angered the Rangers and their manager, Jeff Bannister, since instead of having an uncomfortable-looking Chapman on the ropes, the Yankees got a mulligan.
“To me, the game should have been stopped earlier than that,” Girardi said. “We played in horrible conditions, and I think you risk injuries to players. … This shouldn’t happen.”
Crew chief Paul Nauert defended the decision.
“I think a lot of things dictated it,” Nauert said. “You’ve got to make it fair for both teams. Our job is to try to get the game in. Just to cut it short for rain is not something that we’re doing. We take that integrity part of it very seriously.”
In the end, though, it didn’t matter, as Chapman blew his second save of the season.
That came after Andrew Miller coughed up a homer in the eighth that brought the Rangers within one run.
It was another rough outing for Ivan Nova, who had a third straight clunker, surrendering four runs in five innings and has allowed 15 runs — 14 earned — over 14 innings in his last three outings.
The most obvious candidate to replace Nova, Luis Severino, hasn’t impressed since being sent to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, but Chad Green has been excellent all season — and again on Monday.
“We can’t stay stagnant,” general manager Brian Cashman said prior to the game. “We can’t keep treading water. I want to be a contender, not a pretender. I don’t want to be a pretender.”
They certainly looked like a pretender on Monday, despite a 16-hit attack from a lineup that was without a benched Alex Rodriguez.
They got three hits apiece from Carlos Beltran, Mark Teixeira and Didi Gregorius — whose two-out single in the fifth gave the Yankees the lead.
And Teixeira’s homer to lead off the seventh provided an insurance run, which proved to not be enough — even though the Yankees got a scoreless inning out of Richard Bleier to provide a bridge to the big three at the back end of the bullpen.
“It’s frustrating,” Girardi said. “It stings.’’