Yankees fall again to Texas, take another series loss

ARLINGTON, Texas — The Yankees followed one of their most soul-crushing losses of the season with an old-fashioned, garden-variety embarrassing one Wednesday night.

Marcus Stroman, who had pitched well of late, failed to make it out of the fourth inning and Nathan Eovaldi mostly controlled the team he played for nearly a decade ago as the Rangers hammered the Yankees, 10-6, in front of 32,223 at Globe Life Field.

The Yankees (80-60), who lost two of three to a Rangers team that long ago gave up hopes of qualifying for the postseason to be able to defend the title it won last season, have lost three straight series and are now an uninspiring 30-38 since reaching an MLB-best 50-22 on June 14 with a victory in Boston.

“We got to do better than that, we have to play better than we are right now,” said Aaron Boone, whose team has lost six of eight. “We’ve lost a few series here in a row that we’ve had chances to win all three of them. We know we have to be better than this if we want to get to where we want to go.”

Said Aaron Judge: “Stuff like that’s going to happen. We’re not happy about it. We’re fighting for the division, fighting for a lot right now, but we just have to keep trusting each other and things are going to go our way.”

All of that said, the Yankees, off on Thursday before starting a three-game series Friday afternoon at Wrigley Field against the Cubs, remained one-half game behind the Orioles in the American League East.

The Orioles lost to the bottom-of-the-barrel White Sox, an occurrence that concluded the good-news portion of Wednesday’s baseball program for the Yankees.

“There’s no reason to panic,” said Alex Verdugo, whom Boone said has been “beat up” of late, the reason the outfielder “picks his spots” when running full-out on the field. “We’ve been in this tight AL race all year long. It’s just a couple series. We’re right there. We’re going to go to Chicago, handle business over there and kind of right the ship and kind of take it day by day.”

He added: “We need to win. At the end of the day, you got to win. We get judged by winning or losing.”

Stroman, 3-0 with a 2.35 ERA over his previous four starts entering the night, allowed five runs and nine hits — the latter number tying a season high — over 3 2⁄3 innings that put his team in a 5-0 deficit.

“Just didn’t execute when I needed to,” said Stroman, who fell to 10-7 with a 4.03 ERA. “They got me into some long counts . . . I think they swung it really good today. They were pretty much laying off balls and swinging at balls in the zone. And when they were swinging, they were getting hits. One of those where I feel like I wasn’t on. Just kind of flush it and look forward to the next one.”

Juan Soto’s 38th homer of the season, a two-run shot in the fifth, made it 5-2, but Tim Mayza allowed three runs in the sixth to turn the remaining innings into garbage time.

Ron Marinaccio, a Sept. 1 call-up, allowed two more runs in the seventh as the Rangers (67-73) bumped their lead to 10-2. Trent Grisham, a late-inning defensive replacement with the game out of hand, hit a two-out grand slam in the ninth off Grant Anderson, that homer coming after Matt Festa walked the bases loaded.

The Yankees were outhit 14-8, three of those hits coming in the ninth when the Rangers bullpen reminded everyone why Texas has been out of contention pretty much from the start of the season. With two on in the ninth, Rangers manager Bruce Bochy was forced to bring on closer Kirby Yates, who saw Giancarlo Stanton scorch a liner to left where Wyatt Langford, who won Tuesday night’s game with a walk-off grand slam off Clay Holmes, appeared to take a homer away from the DH with a leaping catch at the wall to end it.

Eovaldi, an underwhelming Yankee from 2015-16 — he went 23-11 but with a 4.45 ERA — has almost always pitched well against his former team since his departure. The righthander, 4-5 with a 3.61 ERA in his career against the Yankees, allowed two runs and four hits over a season-high matching seven innings.

“He’s really tough when he gets a lead because he fills up the strike zone so much,” Boone said of Eovaldi, typically an elite strike-thrower in his career. “You want to have some patience but he’s ahead of you and he’s after you. He took that lead and kind of ran with it with his aggression.”