Kevin Brown had allowed Oakland to load the bases with no outs in the second inning and was on the verge of falling behind early yet again. When he started Keith Ginter out with a high fastball, Mel Stottlemyre went out to the mound.

“I told him that the way to mini mize the damage was to keep the ball down,” Stottlemyre said.

Brown, according to the pitching coach, responded that Erubiel Durazo had just singled on a low pitch.

“I wasn’t going to argue with him,” Stottlemyre said. “I said: ‘He’s a lowball hitter. This next guy’s a highball hitter.’ “

In truth, Stottlemyre had no idea.

“I was lying,” he said, laughing. “He kind of stumped me.”

Brown wound up jamming Ginter with an inside pitch, getting an out on a soft liner to third baseman Alex Rodriguez. He struck out Eric Byrnes, threw a called third strike to Marco Scutaro, then escaped a two-out, bases loaded jam in the fourth. By the time Brown left after seven innings yesterday, the Yankees were on their way to a 6-0 victory over the Athletics.

Rodriguez hit a go-ahead homer, and slumping Hideki Matsui had a run scoring single off Rich Harden (2-2). Tino Martinez added a three-run homer in the eighth off Kiko Calero and Jorge Posada followed with a solo shot into the upper deck.

New York (13-19) hit back-to-back homers for the first time this season and won consecutive games for the first time since April 24 and April 26.Since George Steinbrenner’s critical comments about Stottlemyre were published Friday, Yankee starters have allowed just three runs, with New York pitching straight shutouts for the first time this year.

New York, which won its 900th game under manager Joe Torre, took two of three from the A’s, its first series win since a two-game sweep at Toronto on April 20-21 and its first at home since the opening series against Boston. Last year, the Yankees bottomed out at 8-11 in late April before sweeping a three game series from the A’s.

Brown (1-4), who lowered his ERA from 8.25 to 6.39, had lost a career-high seven straight starts since beating Toronto on August 28, the first Yankees starter to drop that many starts in a row since Joe Page in 1944-45, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Coming off a horrible outing at Tampa Bay in which he allowed six runs in the first inning, Brown began with a warmup pitch that hit the backstop on the fly. It wasn’t until his 27th pitch that a batter (Ginter) swung and missed.

Brown allowed five hits, struck out four, and walked one, getting out of the fourth-inning jam when Scutaro flied out. Tom Gordon pitched a perfect eighth, and Tanyon Sturtze followed with a two-hit ninth.