Mike Celizic

After another mediocre outing by Randy Johnson, his teammates tried to put a good spin on things. Other than the three runs in the first inning and another solo homer yielded in his sixth and final inning, they repeated as if reading from a list of talking points put out by a P.R. consultant, he’d pitched shutout ball.

Even manager Joe Torre, who admitted the first inning was pretty ugly, said that the loss to the A’s was “a step in the right direction.” And Johnson himself didn’t think there is anything wrong with the state of his health or his psyche.

You wouldn’t expect any of them to say anything different. But that isn’t going to change the fact that it’s been a long time since the big lefty the Yankees hired last year to win them another World Series has lived up to his nickname of the Big Unit. Instead, he’s been more like the Big Question.

The Yankees keep talking as if Johnson’s inability to dominate hitters as he’s always done is of recent vintage. It’s not. Last year, he won 17 games, which isn’t that impressive considering he was pitching for one of the most powerful offenses in the game. His hits allowed per nine innings were up dramatically from 2004, as was his earned run average.

This year, the numbers are up again. He’s won five games, but the wins have been the result more of the Yankee offense than his skill. Meanwhile, after his second straight loss Sunday, his ERA is up to 5.13 and his record down to 5-4. Only once in a career that began in Montreal in 1988 has he given up more hits than he has innings pitched, and that was in 2003 when he was injured; this year, he’s pitched 52 innings and surrendered 54 hits. The man who has averaged 1.2 strikeouts per inning pitched has whiffed just 36 in his 52 innings.

Here’s another number: 42. That’s how old he is, and that clicks over to 43 in September. When you start losing it at that age, it’s not about coming back, it’s about holding on. Roger Clemens has been able to get better with age because he’s pitching better and his splitter is still as nasty as it ever was. Johnson has lost velocity without pitching better, and his slider often sails wimpily over the plate with “Hit Me” written all over it.

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In baseball, numbers don’t lie. But, as dramatic as is the tale told by Johnson’s statistics, even more telling was the first-inning home run Johnson gave up to Mark Kotsay.

Kotsay is a lefty, and, until this year and last, most lefties didn’t even bother trying to hit Johnson, finding his starts a fine time to take a day off and let somebody else try to hit him. But lefties are hitting better than .270 against him, and Kotsay took an inside fastball — the kind of pitch no lefty ever hit — and pulled it into the right field stands.

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Then there was Jay Payton, who had come into the game in the longest home-run drought of his career. Hitters aren’t supposed to get healthy against Johnson, but that’s what Payton did, ripping a nothing pitch into the left field stands in the sixth for his first homer in 55 games.

Lefties and righties alike can pull Johnson because his fastball rarely exceeds 94 mph. That’s not slow — Greg Maddux probably never threw 94 in his life, and it hasn’t stopped him from winning more than 300 games. But it’s a lot more hittable than the 98 Johnson used to throw.

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