Yankeemetrics: Nightmare on River Avenue [April 19-21]

Bonus cantos is no bueno
Free baseball is a great thing most of the time – except if you’re a Yankee fan watching the team at the friendly confines. Following their 3-2 loss in extra innings to the A’s on Tuesday night, no team has more extra-inning losses at home since the start of last season than the Yankees (eight). This latest disaster was their first loss to the A’s in the 11th inning or later at Yankee Stadium since August 9, 2002.

What made this loss so deflating – aside from their continued inability to cash in on scoring opportunities – was that the Yankees wasted Michael Pineda’s best start of the season. He delivered six strong innings, limiting Oakland to two runs while striking out seven. That lowered his career ERA against the A’s to 2.25 in four starts, the sixth-lowest by any pitcher with than many starts versus the A’s since his debut in 2011.

Johnny Barbato gave up the game-winning hit with two outs in the top of the 11th, ending a run of brilliance to start his rookie season. He had pitched at least one inning in each of his first five outings, allowing zero runs and no more than one hit in each game. The only Yankee in the last 100 years with a longer streak like that to begin his major-league career was Joba Chamberlain in 2007.

The definition of insanity is …
Well, at least the Yankees are consistent — a consistently bad and frustrating team right now, that is. The Yankees fell into last place in the AL East after losing to the A’s, 5-2, in the middle game of this three-game series. The last time they were in the basement of the division this late into the season (game No. 13 or later) was 2008.

They keep finding new ways to lose, adding boneheaded baserunning plays (no, Didi, no) on Wednesday night to the stable of offensive woes, lack of clutch hitting and defensive miscues that has defined this awful stretch of baseball in the past week.

Nathan Eovaldi’s performance was marred by one bad inning, but otherwise he spun a bare-minimum quality start (6 innings, 3 earned runs) with seven strikeouts and had probably his best effort of the season. It was his seventh straight start striking out at least seven batters, tying the longest such streak in franchise history, done previously by CC Sabathia (2009, 2011), Mike Mussina (2003) and Ron Guidry (1978).

The most obscure statistical nugget of the game probably came from the visiting squad, when the A’s were forced to have pitcher Kendall Graveman bat cleanup after infielder Danny Valencia got injured and the A’s lost their DH. Graveman became the first starting pitcher to bat in a game at Yankee Stadium since the designated hitter rule was enacted in 1973.

Party like it’s 1990
If there is something deeper than rock bottom, the Yankees have hit it — and there’s no light at the end of this tunnel yet.

Despite scoring first in each of the three games in this series, the Yankees were swept by the A’s after dropping Thursday night’s contest, 7-3. It is the first time Oakland has swept the Yankees at Yankee Stadium since June 9-11, 2006. Their 5-9 record overall is their worst 14-game start since 2005; the only other season in the Wild Card era that they lost nine of their first 14 games was 1997.

Following the loss, the Yankees are now an unfathomable 2-7 when drawing first blood this season; last year, they won 75 percent of the games in which they scored first. They’ve held a lead in 12 of 14 games this season, yet have gone just 5-7 in those 12 contests. Their seven blown losses are tied with the Blue Jays and Braves for the most in the majors.

Once again a Yankee starter — this time Luis Severino — delivered a solid outing, yet the Yankees couldn’t capitalize on the strong pitching performance. This game marked the seventh time that a Yankee starter allowed three runs or fewer and the team lost the game, tied with the Twins for the most such games by a rotation this season.

The most shocking part of this loss, though, was that the supposed strength of this team — the almighty bullpen — proved to be a weakness (along with the perennially slumping offense). They surrendered five runs in three innings, and four of those scores came via home runs. The Yankees bullpen had faced 173 batters in the first 13 games and had yielded just one homer, tied for the fewest given up in the majors entering Thursday’s slate.