Chase Whitley has rocky start as Yankees fall to Orioles

A favorite phrase of Joe Girardi is aI'm not going to make too mucha of one game or series during the course of the long season.

It fit perfectly Saturday afternoon.

Entering the day, Girardi's club had won 16 out of 21 games so a bad outing by fill-in starter Chase Whitley in a 6-2 loss to the Orioles in front of 41,280 at the Stadium hardly gave reason for hand-wringing or panic.

As another well-worn phrase goes: just one of those days.

Both for Whitley, who had not allowed a home run in five combined starts between the minors and the majors but allowed three Saturday, and the Yankees' offense, limited to one run and five hits over seven innings by Baltimore lefthander Wei-Yin Chen.

Whitley, 1-0 with a 0.75 ERA in two starts since taking Masahiro Tanaka's rotation spot, gave up five runs and six hits, three of them home runs by Jimmy Paredes (three hits), Chris Davis and Alejandro De Aza.

Chen, in lowering his ERA to 2.52, walked one and struck out seven.

The Yankees (19-12), winners of the first two games of the series, had eight hits overall compared to nine for the Orioles (13-15).

Whitley struck out five over the first 2 2/3 innings before Paredes, hitting .328 (22-for-67) with four homers and 14 RBI in 16 games since being activated from the DL coming in, took him deep, lining a 1-and-2 slider to right for his fifth homer of the year that made it 1-0.

With one out in the fourth Davis added to the leading, jumping on a flat first-pitch fastball and sending it out to right for his seventh homer of the season to make it 2-0. Whitley hit the next batter, Steve Pearce, and, after J.J. Hardy flew out, De Aza tore into a 2-and-2 off-speed pitch and drilled it into the seats in right for his third homer of the year, making it 4-0.

It was all more than enough for Chen, who came in 2-4 with a 5.18 ERA in 10 career starts against the Yankees.

But the pitcher Saturday experienced almost none of the issues that led to those kind of numbers. The Yankees managed just one runner in scoring position against Chen over the first four innings, and that was Chris Young, who doubled with one out in the first.

After the Orioles made it 5-0 in the top of the fifth a Delmon Young's single brought in Manny Machado, who led off with a double a the Yankees got their second runner of the day to second base in the bottom half.

Chase Headley, who made two fine diving stops at third to help Whitley's final line, ended a streak of nine straight retired by Chen with a one-out single and went to third on Stephen Drew's double into the rightfield corner.

John Ryan Murphy, getting the start at catcher, got Headley home with a sacrifice fly to left, making it 5-1.

Young collected his second RBI of the day in the seventh against David Carpenter, doubling in Paredes, who led off the inning with a triple, to make it 6-1.

The Yankees scored an unearned run off righthander Tommy Hunter in the eighth, getting a two-out RBI single from Carlos Beltran to cut the deficit to 6-2.