There, Joe Girardi said it. Finally.

"We're a home run-hitting club," the manager said after the Yankees hit three bombs, to run their major-league leading homer total to 108, but still lost 6-4 to the Mets at Citi Field on Friday night. "We are who we are. There are basketball clubs that are built around 3-point shooting and when they don’t make their 3's they don’t win. If we hit two- and three-run homers we usually win games."

The Yankees got solo homers from Alex Rodriguez in the sixth and Andruw Jones in the seventh, and a two-run shot from Robinson Cano in the eighth.

But once again, their inability to manufacture runs with anything other than the long ball cost them. They had runners on first and second in the first inning, but Cano struck out and stranded them. And they had runners on first and second with one out in the ninth, but got nothing out of it when Curtis Granderson struck out looking and Mark Teixeira popped out to end the game.

Although the RISP numbers weren't horrible -- 0-for-4, and only in those two innings -- those clutch failures wound up costing them the game.

When asked about the solution to the Yankees' clutch failures, Girardi said, "I don't know, we ask this question every day. You keep putting them on, eventually it’s gonna change. That’s all I can really tell you."

"We got on base, but we didn't do our job," Cano said. "It's going to change one day. Keep on hitting, keep going out there and playing hard, and keep saying you want the same situation every single day."