MINNEAPOLIS — Joe Girardi is correct when he says his club ran into a batch of bad luck Sunday. Broken-bat hits and bloops by the Twins played a large part in the Yankees failing to complete a four-game series sweep of the worst team in the American League.
Yet, luck swings both ways in baseball, so there is a good chance it evens out across a six-month schedule that is nearing the three-month line with the Yankees stuck in idle.
“It’s very disappointing. We felt we had a good shot at getting a win and let one get away,” Alex Rodriguez said of the 7-4 loss in front of 29,553 sun-baked customers at Target Field.
After opening a two-city, six-game trip by losing two to the pitching-poor Rockies in Denver, the Yankees were in position to sweep the inept Twins, go home with a 4-2 road ledger, move to one game over .500 and remain 5 ½ lengths back of the AL East-leading Orioles.
Instead, the road trip ended 3-3, their overall record is 34-35, and the Yankees trail the O’s by 6 ½ games.
Girardi played the bad-luck card in describing Nathan Eovaldi’s day, which consisted of 5 ¹/₃ innings in which he gave up four runs, six hits and was saddled with a second straight loss.
“Bad luck to me — two jam shots, a seeing-eye ground ball — that’s the unfortunate part,” Girardi said. “I think they hit one ball hard that inning — the ball [Kurt] Suzuki hit — but that’s baseball, and they got four runs.”
Girardi was talking about the Twins’ sixth, which started with the Yankees leading 2-1. Brian Dozier’s one-out bloop single fell in front of Jacoby Ellsbury, and the Twins played hit-and-run with Trevor Plouffe, who guided a grounder to where second baseman Starlin Castro would have been if Dozier weren’t on the move. Eovaldi shattered Eduardo Escobar’s bat and it produced a two-run triple.
Girardi called for Dellin Betances, but the luck stayed with the Twins when Max Kepler followed with an RBI bloop single to center and Suzuki rifled a run-producing double into the left-field corner.
“That’s baseball,” said Eovaldi, whose splitter, which had been misbehaving in recent starts, improved. He is 6-4 and hasn’t won since May 29.
Twins starter Ervin Santana entered the game 1-7 with a hefty 5.10 ERA and limited the Yankees to three runs (two earned) and six hits in 7 ¹/₃ innings.
Brian McCann stopped an 0-for-15 slide with a towering home run to center in the second inning that was measured at 439 feet. Rodriguez drove in the Yankees’ second run in the fourth with a bloop single to center.
Santana induced McCann to hit into a double play that started a string of the right-hander retiring eight of nine hitters.
Dozier added a solo homer in the seventh that upped the lead to 7-2, but the Twins tried to give it away in the eighth when reliever Taylor Rogers and Plouffe, the first baseman, made errors. But the Yankees scored only one run because the left-handed Rogers whiffed Carlos Beltran, and Brandon Kintzler, a righty, struck out Rodriguez to end the inning with runners at the corners. McCann hit a second homer in the ninth.
Having won the series’ first three tilts, the Yankees were set up for a sweep on paper with the Eovaldi-Santana matchup, but the games are played on grass and dirt.
“You get greedy when you win the first three of a four-game series,” Girardi said. “We had the lead 2-1, and you figured if you get Eovaldi through the sixth, you go to Dellin and you feel pretty good about your chances. But it didn’t happen.’’