BOSTON -- Compared to his previous outing, in which he allowed seven earned runs and four home runs to the light-hitting Tampa Bay Rays, New York Yankees pitcher Michael Pineda was practically lights-out against the powerful Boston Red Sox on Saturday, when he limited them to two runs in five innings.

Both those runs scored on a freak hit, a bloop double by Mookie Betts that dropped between Carlos Beltran and Starlin Castro in short right field. That should have been a decent enough performance by Pineda to give his team at least a chance to even this three-game series with the Red Sox, but these days, two runs by the opposition might as well be 20.

Once again, the Yankees' offense, which had scored just nine runs in the previous five games, of which the Yankees lost four, sputtered and failed to score a run against Rick Porcello, who scattered five singles over seven innings. When the Red Sox added two more runs off Chasen Shreve in the sixth, the game was officially out of reach, as the Yankees have scored more than four runs only once in their past 17 games.

Of course, David Ortiz, whose two-run blast off Dellin Betances won Friday's game, added a cherry to the sundae with a bomb of a solo home run to lead off the seventh. It was his 49th career home run against the Yankees. By the time the middle relief imploded later in the inning -- Johnny Barbato allowed four runs, three of them earned -- the game had turned into a laugher and an 8-0 win for the Red Sox. Once again, there was nothing funny about the Yankees' offense.

Unlike in Friday's 4-2 loss, the Yankees were not done in by bad luck (four double plays) or bad baserunning (running their way into two of those DPs). This was a case of bad hitting. Coming the day after the manager applied what he called "tough love" -- and clubhouse witnesses described as an angry tirade -- this Yankees performance raised the question of what, if anything, can light a fire under the Yankees' bats.

Now the Yankees face the distasteful prospect of a sweep at the hands of the hated Red Sox, who are starting David Price in the nationally-televised series finale Sunday night, and starting May the way they played most of April: inoffensively.