Steady rotation key to Yankees’ winning streak

NEW YORK — No one has confused this Yankees rotation with some of the more dominant in franchise history, but their stellar performance during a seven-game road trip has produced the team’s longest winning streak of the season, allowing the club to return home just a game under .500 at 21-22.

Beginning with Nathan Eovaldi’s effort on Wednesday at Arizona, the Yanks have made up ground in a hurry, executing a turn through the starting five that resulted in the club’s first four-game sweep in Oakland since 1979.

“You’re not going to be a championship team without a good rotation,” Mark Teixeira said. “When those guys step up, they can be as good as anybody, and we’ve seen that. We’ve seen every single one of those guys go out there and pitch very well. If they can do that consistently, I like our chances over a long season.”

To date, the 2016 Yankees have been defined more by their dominant bullpen trio of Dellin Betances, Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman than their offense (inconsistent) or their starting pitching (shaky), outside of the majority of Masahiro Tanaka’s efforts. Their hope is that it is all evening out.

“I just think some numbers are hard to comprehend,” said pitching coach Larry Rothschild, noting the starters’ strikeouts (220, seventh in the American League), walks (64, 29th in the Majors) and ground-ball-to-air-out ratio (1.48, best in the AL). “None of it makes any sense to me.”

The Yanks play 12 of their next 13 games against AL East clubs, so they are hopeful that the West Coast trip was not an outlier. Here is a look at how the trip came together:

Wednesday, Chase Field: Yankees 4, D-backs 2 The fireballing Eovaldi played the role of stopper after the Yanks dropped the first two games of the series behind Chad Green’s Major League debut and a poor outing from Michael Pineda that had Rothschild saying, “We need to end this right now.”

Eovaldi …

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