OAKLAND, Calif. — Raise an eyebrow and shake your head at the Yankees sweeping four games from the rapidly fading A’s if you want.
After the way the Yankees played for the first five weeks of the season, it’s easy to ignore taking advantage of a team that is wounded and wasn’t very good before injuries invaded the East Bay.
However, there are signs the Yankees’ season-high winning streak — that grew to five with Sunday’s 5-4 victory over the A’s in front of 25,237 at Oakland Coliseum — has completely washed away the stench of April and early May.
“After going to Arizona and losing those first two games, sometimes you wonder how this road trip is going to be,’’ a sizzling Carlos Beltran said. “We left that in the past and came here and won the first one and the second one. When you are capable of winning ballgames and multiple road games you develop a little confidence, a sense of we are back on track.’’
The Yankees aren’t all the way back from a 9-17 start that threatened to kill the season before Memorial Day. They have won 12 of 17, escaped the AL East cellar and are 5 ½ games behind the first-place Red Sox.
The common thread to the five-game winning streak has been pitching. All five starters delivered quality starts and Dellin Betances, Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman put late-game leads in a vice.
After Nathan Eovaldi, Ivan Nova, CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka all went at least six innings and allowed four runs, it was up to Michael Pineda to continue the ride. Considering the right-hander entered Sunday’s action with a 1-5 ledger and a bloated 6.60 ERA in eight starts, there was some doubt.
“I go to the mound really positive after the team won the first three games,’’ said Pineda, who gave up three runs and six hits in six innings and won for the first time since April 6 when the Yankees scored 16 runs against the Astros. “I wanted to do my best and give an opportunity for the team to win the game.’’
Two runs in the sixth, when Mark Teixeira stopped a 0-for-19 slide with an infield RBI single that scored Brett Gardner from second and was followed by Starlin Castro’s run-producing single, gave the Yankees a 4-3 lead. Beltran, who is hitting .353 (18-for-51) with 15 RBIs in the last 14 games, delivered a two-out RBI double in the seventh.
That gave Betances a two-run bulge and he worked a perfect seventh. Miller had to dance around consecutive fielding errors by Didi Gregorius and Castro to start the eighth. He did well enough to limit the A’s to an unearned run that made it 5-4. Using a fastball that was clocked at 101 mph, Chapman blew the A’s away in a perfect ninth for his sixth save in as many chances.
It was the fifth time the Holy Trinity of Smoke worked the same game. Not surprisingly the Yankees are 5-0 when that happens.
“We have to keep grinding and keep rolling,’’ said Brian McCann, who homered in the second and watched Jacoby Ellsbury do the same an inning later. “We have all phases of the game going well right now.’’
At 21-22 it’s not time to leave October open to follow the Yankees in the postseason. Yet, they were 9-17 on May 5 with real questions about what was in store for the immediate future.