BEN WALKER
AP Baseball Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Mark Buehrle took a few steps off the mound, turned around and didn’t bother to watch Jacoby Ellsbury’s home run sail deep to right field.
He’s seen this all too often.
Buehrle lost his 12th straight decision to the New York Yankees, a winless streak that’s over a decade after the Toronto Blue Jays fell 5-3 Friday night for their season-worst sixth straight loss.
“That is the way it goes, it is almost getting to the point where you want to laugh it off,” he said.
Buehrle, who has pitched a perfect game and has 198 career victories, dropped to 0-4 against the Yankees this season and 1-14 overall.
“They have Buehrle’s number,” manager John Gibbons summed up.
Buehrle (12-10) hasn’t beaten the Yankees in 17 starts since April 2004. His losing streak against New York is the longest by any pitcher against a single opponent since Bobby Witt dropped 12 in a row to Cleveland from 1991-99, STATS said.
Buehrle gave up five runs on eight hits and two walks in six innings. He has at least one start left, and needs to pitch six more innings to reach 200 for the 14th straight year.
The left-hander was the first pitcher to earn 10 wins this season, doing it on June 1 and helping Toronto take the AL East lead, but that was long ago.
“I do not know where to pinpoint where things went wrong this year,” he said. “We had streaks where we could be in the playoff standings, looking like the best team in baseball, then we had weeks where we looked like the worse team in baseball.”
New York won its third in a row to preserve its faint AL wild-card hopes.
Ellsbury opened with a double off the wall and Derek Jeter and Brian McCann followed with singles, a rough start for Buehrle. Ellsbury’s two-run shot made it 3-2 in the third.
The cheers for Jeter kept getting louder and louder during his final homestand, and fans chanted his name throughout the ninth inning.
Jeter delivered two singles, giving him back-to-back multihit games for the first time since late July. The retiring captain later hit a long fly that really got the crowd hollering before it was caught on the warning track.
The 40-year-old shortstop also alertly tricked speedy Jose Reyes off second by bluffing a throw to first, trapping him in a rundown. Reyes doubled twice and singled, and also made a throwing error.
Ellsbury drove in three runs. He hustled to beat a double-play relay as the Yankees took a 5-2 lead in the fourth inning, and left before the fifth with a strained right hamstring.
Hiroki Kuroda (11-9) gave up Edwin Encarnacion’s two-run homer off the left-field foul pole in the first, and little else.
Reliever Esmil Rogers, who was waived twice this season by Toronto, retired Encarnacion on a bases-loaded grounder to end the seventh. Adam Warren pitched 1 2-3 innings for his third save.
NICE JOB, KID
Canadian rookie Dalton Pompey got his first major league hit for Toronto in the second. Jeter got the ball back from the outfield and tossed it into the dugout, then gave the 21-year-old newcomer a slap on the back when the inning ended.
“He said ‘Congrats, I hope for a great career for you,'” Pompey said. “And I said, ‘Thanks, it is a pleasure to meet you.’ And he said, ‘Likewise, keep swinging it.’ So it was good words from him.”
“I just talked to Derek Jeter,” Pompey said. “Surreal, right?”
TRAINER’S ROOM
Blue Jays: Encarnacion had an MRI on his back before the game. Gibbons said it flared up this week in Baltimore.
UP NEXT
Blue Jays: Rookie RHP Marcus Stroman (10-6, 3.80) starts on Saturday. He is currently appealing a six-game suspension imposed this week by Major League Baseball for throwing at the head of a Baltimore hitter in his last start. Gibbons said the team wants to get the matter resolved before the end of the season so there is no carry-over next year.
Yankees: LHP Chris Capuano (2-3, 4.55) is set to pitch against the Blue Jays for the sixth time this year. He faced them three times in relief with Boston, and has started twice against them for New York.
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