Yankees, Aaron Boone react to suddenly ugly offense

The Yankees’ typically formidable bats have gone quite in Tampa, but they also haven’t been all that good in June.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The Rays came at the Yankees with two straight bullpen days.

Both times, Tampa Bay silenced what’s been one of the league’s best offenses.

The latest smothering happened in the Yankees’ 4-0 loss to the Rays at Tropicana Field on Saturday.

They have scored just one run in 25 innings. They were held without a home run for just the 15th time this season — the fewest such games in the majors. They have scored just five runs in their last three games.

Yikes, right? What’s going on?

“That’s a good question,” catcher Austin Romine said. “You should ask the hitting coach or some of the other guys. I’m the backup catcher. My job is to catch. I really don’t know. All I know is, baseball’s a long season and sometimes this stuff happens. We’re going to come back tomorrow and we’re going to try to fix that.”

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Manager Aaron Boone said he had an idea.

“You’re going to hit a dry spell like that,” he said.” I actually thought for getting shut down today, there’s probably six or seven balls I feel we hit on the screws, a couple early and we had runners out there. But overall, not really mounting much after that big inning a couple days ago.”

He added, “Yeah, over the. course of 162 (games) that’s going to happen. We just got to keep grinding at it and really come back and have that urgency (Sunday) and try to get out of here with one under our belt.”

Though the Yankees’ offense has been bad lately — and the team will try to avoid its first series sweep of three games or more since Aug. 28-30 — it’s been a weeks-long thing, really.

The Yankees have scored the league’s third-most runs (382) this season.

But in June, it’s scored the 17th most runs, hitting .237 with a team OPS of .751 — well off its league-best full-season mark of .789l

“I think that’s going to happen,” Boone said. “Our goal is to create traffic. There’s going to be times when we really break through but, really, for a few weeks now we haven’t had those big outburst games necessarily. We’ve had big innings. When it’s been winning time, we’ve come up pretty big. I thought with the last two nights we’ve had some OK at-bats with runners out there where we’ve hit balls hard.”

Brendan Kuty may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @BrendanKutyNJ. Find NJ.com Yankees on Facebook.