Longoria breaks up Pineda’s perfecto but can’t ruin awesome outing

As inquiring-mind media types approached Evan Longoria, the Rays third baseman didn’t even wait for questions.

“Pineda was good,” Longoria said before the first syllable was uttered to him.

Yankees right-hander Michael Pineda was pitching one of those games, one that was all too familiar for Longoria. Pineda was perfect for 6 2/3 innings of the Yankees’ eventual 8-1 romp at the Stadium. Perfection ended when Pineda left a first-pitch slider up and Longoria, in his third at-bat, doubled to left.

“Oh, yeah, it had that feel,” Longoria said of Pineda’s outing, which reminded him of perfect games thrown against Tampa Bay by Seattle’s Felix Hernandez (2012) Oakland’s Dallas Braden (2010) and Chicago’s Mark Buehrle (2009). “I was in all three. Once you get through five or six innings, and you’re on the road, you can definitely start to feel it.”

Pineda’s pitches did nothing to snuff the growing apprehension. This was not the same guy the Rays beat at home last week.

“That was the best I’ve seen him so far. He had his slider going pretty good. He could throw it for a strike, bury it, put it on the corner,” Steven Souza said.

“We went against a guy who had everything working,” said Rays starter and losing pitcher Alex Cobb, who pitched well before the bottom fell out in the eighth.

“The slider, he was really commanding it well, throwing it wherever he wanted,” Longoria said. “It was backdoor to lefties and down and away for strikes to the right-handers.”

Logan Morrison, who hom- ered off Pineda in the top of the eighth, claimed the difference in a week was location.

“He was doing a good job of mixing his slider in, putting it in a good spot where it was at just the bottom of the zone or diving down below,” Morrison said. “His fastball was down, spotted a little better.”

But it was Longoria who shattered the tension. The sold-out Stadium crowd rocked on every pitch. Pineda was whatever comes after masterful for 83 pitches. Then came pitch 84, that slider to Longoria, who everyone figured was the biggest obstacle on Pineda’s path to perfection.

“If you get past their best hitter, you’ve got a good shot at it,” Yankees catcher Austin Romine said. “A lot of people are thinking that. I was thinking that. Longo, you don’t want him to beat you, but he’s a great hitter.”

A lot of people thought right.

“I’m thinking about getting a hit. You kind of know what he’s going to throw. … I guessed slider, he made a mistake, left it up,” said Longoria, who saw a firstpitch slider in the first inning and a first-pitch fastball in the fourth, both leading to strikeouts. “If he throws it down and away, I might roll it over. I might swing and miss like I’d done before.”

The crowd gave Pineda a rousing ovation for his spirited outing that ended after 7 2/3 innings, 93 pitches, two hits, one run and 11 strikeouts.

It left the Rays talking to themselves and improvising a song in the clubhouse. Souza made up lyrics to the tune of “New York, New York” after:

“Pineda threw strikes; we lost, we lost.”