The Yankees will have to wait at least one more night to clinch the American League East. The second-place Orioles played spoiler Tuesday night in the Bronx, defeating the Yankees, 5-3, to keep the celebratory champagne on ice. But some of the loss was self-inflicted. A seventh-inning Yankees rally was cut short when Gleyber Torres got caught in a rundown for a crucial third out. Trailing 4-2 with runners on second and third, Juan Soto laced an RBI single into right field to cut the Yankees’ deficit to one. Third base coach Luis Rojas held Torres at third, but when Orioles catcher Adley Rutschman threw to second base as Soto slid in safely, Torres started toward home plate. A 9-2-6-2-5-2-6 rundown ensued, and Torres was retired with Aaron Judge on deck. “I think he thought Soto was gonna be out, but you’ve got to commit,” manager Aaron Boone said. “Once Rutchsman squares [to throw], you’re gonna sell out to go or you’re gonna bluff him.” Torres, too, said he was trying to protect Soto. “I was a little in between to go to home plate,” said Torres, who started that two-run rally with an RBI ground-rule double. “I feel like I went a little bit late.” Torres has now been thrown out at home six times this season, tying him with Tampa Bay’s Yandy Diaz for the MLB lead. “It might have been just a little miscommunication, but he was hustling the whole way, and I think he wanted to score and he got the stop sign,” said Judge, who hit his MLB-leading 56th home run earlier in the game. “Just kind of in no-man’s land right there,” Judge continued. “When it comes down to it, stuff like that can’t happen. We can’t keep shooting ourselves in the foot with mistakes like that on the basepaths, but it happens and we’ve got to move on.” The Yankees entered Tuesday with a six-game lead over Baltimore in the East with six games to play, giving them a magic number of one. A win — or an Orioles loss — at any point in the season’s final week would wrap up the division for the Yankees. But neither happened Tuesday. The Yankees trailed, 2-0, after starter Clarke Schmidt surrendered an RBI groundout to Heston Kjerstad in the second inning and a two-out, run-scoring single to Ryan O’Hearn in the fourth. Judge made the score 2-1 with his fourth-inning solo shot against O’s starter Dean Kramer, but Anthony Santander put Baltimore back up by two with a sixth-inning solo homer of his own. That line drive off the right-field foul pole was Santander’s 44th home run, good for second in the American League behind Judge. That was the final batter faced by Schmidt, who allowed three runs and struck out seven over 5.1 innings. Schmidt owns a 2.61 ERA in four starts since returning from a lat strain that kept him out more than three months. Colton Cowser tacked on a run in the eighth inning with a solo homer off of Ian Hamilton, completing the scoring for Baltimore. The Yankees (92-65) and Orioles (87-60) traded blows in their divisional dogfight throughout the first five months of the season, with their head-to-head matchups repeatedly featuring tense moments and, at one point, a benches-clearing spat. This week’s three-game series in the Bronx had long been circled as a potential winner-take-all meeting, but a September surge by the Yankees has them on the precipice of winning the division. The Yankees, who clinched a playoff spot last week, entered Tuesday with 12 wins in their last 16 games, while Baltimore had dropped 11 of 16. “Obviously, we wanted to come and get it done tonight, but credit them,” Boone said. “They held us down, and we just couldn’t play catch up quite enough tonight.” The Orioles’ win, coupled with the Twins’ 4-1 loss to the Marlins on Tuesday, clinched a playoff berth for Baltimore. The Yankees are seeking their first division title since 2022 after missing the playoffs last year. They will try again to claim the crown Wednesday night, with Nestor Cortes (9-10, 3.77 ERA) set to start for the Yankees and Zach Eflin (10-9, 3.53 ERA) scheduled for Baltimore. “This is the toughest division in baseball, and to be able to say we’re division champs would be great,” Judge said. “But we’ll talk about it more when we get there.”