The Yankees and manager Joe Girardi were feeling pretty good about themselves before their magic bullpen imploded in the seventh inning yesterday at Yankee Stadium.
That inning will prove to be the real wakeup call for this team.
Just how the Yankees respond after the difficult 7-3 loss to the Orioles will be the true test, beginning with today's game against the White Sox with Phil Hughes on the mound.
In meaningful September games, you can have only so many slipups.
The Yankees have had many things go wrong this season, yet they still find themselves in the middle of the wild-card race. One tough loss should not bury this team. If anything, the 2013 Yankees have shown themselves to be resilient.
Girardi has pushed the right bullpen buttons all year, but yesterday it all went wrong when he replaced Andy Pettitte, who was pitching on fumes, with Shawn Kelley. Pettitte had given up two singles to start the seventh. Girardi went to Kelley to face Matt Wieters, a hitter Pettitte has owned.
"[Pettitte] was up in pitches, they had just squared up two balls in a row,'' Girardi said. "We just felt it was time to make a change. Unfortunately, it didn't work out.''
No, it didn't. It marked the first time this season at home the Yankees lost in which they held a lead of at least two runs, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. They had been 32-0 in those games.
"You can't second guess going to our bullpen,'' Pettitte said.
Wieters singled in a run and then J.J. Hardy blasted a three-run home run to right field, only the eighth opposite-field home run of his career. Joba Chamberlain soon showed up and continued his shocking decline as Adam Jones rocketed another three-run home run to center as a 3-0 Yankee lead became a 7-3 disadvantage.
Chamberlain is a case study in how not to groom a young pitcher, going back to the Joba Rules days, and it is noteworthy that today the Yankees will have to turn to the struggling Hughes to try to get them back on the right path. It wasn't too long ago Chamberlain and Hughes were the Yankees' proud pitching future.
Now they both are on their way out of The Bronx, and Chamberlain has most likely seen his last meaningful inning as a Yankee.
The big danger here would be the Yankees allowing that terrible inning to fester. That inning stunned the Yankees and they were no match for the Orioles the rest of the game as the Baltimore bullpen, including former Met Francisco Rodriguez (acquired in a July trade with the Brewers), shut them down.
"They've got an unbelievable lineup, power up and down. Every ball I left in the zone today, they hit it,'' Pettitte said of the Orioles, who moved back ahead of the Yankees in the wild-card race. The Yankees are four games back of the Rays in the loss column for the second wild card.
Pettitte, with all the wisdom of being in the October of his career filled with Octobers, put it all in perspective for the Yankees.
"We've been playing well,'' he said. "We won the series. We need to focus on Chicago now. We can't worry about everybody else. We need to focus on us playing good baseball, and if we do that, I think we are going to be where we want to be at the end of the season.
"If we don't play well, we'll run ourselves right out of this.''
This loss shows the challenge ahead. One terrible inning dug the hole deeper.
"We don't have much room,'' Pettitte said. "It's a grind and we realize that. But you can't win every game. This is the big leagues. Those guys are pretty good over there. Their eight-hole hitter has [24] home runs.''
Over in that other clubhouse, where the Orioles have lost 11 of 18, that No. 8 hitter, Hardy, said, "Hopefully, this win jump starts our September.''
The Yankees can't let this one difficult September loss stop them.
kevin.kernan@nypost.com
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