NEW YORK _ The Yankees closed out April by playing some of their best baseball of the young season, sweeping the Red Sox before taking two of three from the Orioles. They looked nearly unbeatable against their toughest competition in the American League East.
So by starting May with a series against the Blue Jays, who limped through April and entered Monday in last place in the division, the Yankees have an opportunity to continue to assert themselves as a force in the AL East.
But their first chance didn't go so well.
Luis Severino struggled in his worst start of the season, while a Yankees offense that had been mashing was suddenly quiet in a 7-1 loss to Toronto in front of 25,566 at Yankee Stadium.
Aaron Judge, though, provided a pair of highlights for the Yankees. He hit an RBI single in the fourth and then showed off his arm in the ninth.
Jose Bautista walked with two outs, then tried to take third on Kendrys Morales' single to right. Judge fired to third and Ronald Torreyes applied the tag on Bautista, who was called safe.
Yankees manager Joe Girardi challenged the call, and it was overturned after a review of 1:01.
But the rest of the night didn't go the Yankees' way.
Severino was coming off a brilliant outing against the Red Sox in which he allowed just three hits across seven scoreless innings.
But he struggled on Monday, allowing five runs on eight hits in 5 2/3 innings. He walked two and struck out three in the 105-pitch outing.
The right-hander ran into trouble in the second.
Devon Travis singled to right before Ryan Goins drilled a two-run home run to give the Blue Jays an early lead.
Toronto then scored three more runs in the sixth, with two of them coming on a rare play.
Justin Smoak led off with a single and Travis reached on a ground-rule double to right field.
Goins then hit a long fly ball to deep center. Jacoby Ellsbury retreated and crashed up against the wall as he made the catch.
Ellsbury fell to the warning track and by the time the ball got back into the infield, both Smoak and Goins had scored on the two-run sacrifice fly.
Severino's outing then got worse as he surrendered a solo home run to Chris Coghlan that gave the Blue Jays a 5-1 lead.
That ended Severino's night as Girardi brought in Luis Cessa, who was called up from Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on Monday.
The right-hander got the final out of the sixth, but gave up a two-run home run to Bautista in the seventh.
It was Bautista's 34th career home run against the Yankees, the most of any active player.
The Yankees' offense, meanwhile, struggled to get anything going against Marco Estrada aside from Judge's RBI single.
The Blue Jays got off to an awful start to the season.
But they did lose some of their key players to injuries, including stars Troy Tulotwitzki and Josh Donaldson.
The Blue Jays had won two games in a row entering Monday, and their series victory over Tampa Bay this past weekend was the first series they had won all season.
"If you look at the way they've swung the bats the last week, they've swung the bats better," Girardi said before the game. "It seems like they're starting to get going. They won a couple games in a row. They won a series. So to me they're still the Blue Jays that have played us really, really difficult."
