For Yanks and O’s, early tests of all varieties

BALTIMORE — The realities of a 162-game season have a way of creeping in. And the Orioles and Yankees are feeling it big-time at the outset of May.

The Orioles opened 2016 with seven consecutive wins but have gone 8-10 since then, including Tuesday night’s 4-1 victory over the Yankees in the opener of a three-game series at Camden Yards. And now they’ve lost J.J. Hardy, their starting shortstop, for at least four to six weeks, and closer Zach Britton probably for at least this series.

The Yankees, at 8-16, are on their worst season-opening run since they started 8-17 in 1984. Matters became even worse for the pinstripes on Tuesday night when Alex Rodriguez sustained a right hamstring injury trying to leg out a grounder to short in the fifth inning. He had just come off a four-RBI game in Boston on Sunday, when he hit his 692nd home run.

A-Rod will undergo an MRI exam on Wednesday morning, and he’s certainly a candidate for the disabled list.

“I don’t know how bad it is; I guess we won’t know until the MRI,” manager Joe Girardi said after the Yanks lost their sixth in a row and seventh in their last eight games. “It’s definitely worrisome. He just started swinging the bat, too.”

Britton sprained his left ankle on Saturday night trying to field an Adam Eaton bunt. And Hardy was injured on Sunday fouling a ball off his left foot.

Hardy went on the DL and was replaced on the roster by Ryan Flaherty. Though Orioles manager Buck Showalter tried to play down the severity of the injury and how long Hardy will be out, the fracture is to the tarsal navicular bone, his teammate Mark Trumbo said after hitting a pair of homers off Luis Severino in Tuesday’s game.

Trumbo is an expert on foot injuries, having broken the tarsal navicular when he was with the Angels before incurring a stress fracture as a member of …

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