Yankees' offense stymied again in second straight loss to A's

OAKLAND, Calif. — It was a series split that felt like a series loss.

The awful A’s, after all, didn’t exactly send Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer at the Yankees the last two days. But their offense responded as if they had.

Held to one hit in an 11-inning loss Saturday night that ended their winning streak at five games, the Yankees managed only four hits Sunday afternoon in a 4-1 loss in front of 29,498 at Oakland Coliseum.

The Yankees (78-50) had begun the series with 20 hits in a 13-4 victory on Thursday night, but aside from Aaron Judge’s three-run homer Friday night, they didn’t accomplish much after that at the plate against the A’s (48-81).

“You have to tip your cap sometimes,” said Judge, who went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts and stayed put at his MLB-leading total of 49 homers. “They’ve got some good pitchers over there who made pitches when they had to and kind of kept us off balance the past couple of days. That’s baseball.

“You’re going to have a couple of nights like that . . . This is the time of year when it’s kind of a grind, and the team knows that. We got our butt kicked. Now we have to step up and respond in Anaheim.”

The Yankees saw their recent skid at the plate reach 1-for-53 over the equivalent of 18 innings before Aaron Hicks singled with two outs in the fifth.

A’s righthander Adrian Martinez, 2-3 with a 6.08 ERA this season and recalled earlier in the day from Triple-A Las Vegas for his fourth stint with Oakland, allowed one run and three hits in 5 1⁄3 innings. That came on the heels of Adam Oller allowing one hit in eight scoreless innings Saturday after bringing a 6.41 ERA into the game.

“I thought Martinez threw the ball well today. He’s got a good arm,” Aaron Boone said. “But we should be able to put together more offense and we’ve got to if we’re going to be the kind of team we expect to be.”

The Yankees did not record a hit after Giancarlo Stanton’s one-out single in the sixth.

Clarke Schmidt, with a 2.18 ERA in 17 appearances spread over several stints with the big-league club, took his first turn in the rotation in place of the injured Nestor Cortes and wasn’t particularly sharp.

Making his second start of the season — and first since June 6 against the Rays — Schmidt allowed four runs and eight hits in 4 1⁄3 innings in which he walked one and struck out seven.

“You look at the outing, you strike out a good bit, but when there were runners in scoring position and you had two strikes, you have to do a better job of getting the put-away pitch,” Schmidt said. “Moving forward, that’s definitely going to be a focus. Overall command was really good. Can’t let those [two-strike] pitches get away from you.”

Seth Brown singled with two outs in the first inning and Stephen Vogt, whose pinch-hit two-run homer off Ron Marinaccio tied Saturday night’s game in the 10th inning, roped a 0-and-1 sinker off the wall in right-center for an RBI double. Dermis Garcia lined an RBI single to left for a 2-0 lead, although he was thrown out at second trying to advance on the throw home.

The A’s doubled their lead in the third.

Nick Allen led off with a double and scored on Tony Kemp’s single to left. Schmidt struck out Shea Langeliers, but Brown singled.

After Vogt struck out looking, Garcia, an international signee of the Yankees in 2014 who at last made his big-league debut with the A’s this season, came through with a ground shot up the middle for an RBI single and a 4-0 lead. That made it an 8-0 advantage in hits for the A’s.

Hicks collected the Yankees’ first hit of the day in the fifth on a liner to center and eventually scored on Kyle Higashioka’s two-out single. That made it 4-1 and ended the Yankees’ offensive output for the day.

“The last 22-plus hours have not been very good for us offensively,” Boone said. “We have to do a better job.”

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.