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The concept remained true, but the details differed. Pearce, now a reserve outfielder for the Yankees, singled in the seventh to a start a three-run rally that lifted his new team to a 4-3 win over the Orioles on Saturday as the race to the top of the American League East continued to be intriguing.

The victory pushed the Yankees’ division lead back to three games, but their position feels only minimally more secure. The Yankees have one more game against Baltimore to wrap up this homestand and four more this week at Baltimore, and the Orioles have proved they have the means to stick around. In between, the Yankees will play three games on the road against the Tampa Bay Rays, who are four and a half games back in the East.

“This is the team that we’re going to have to beat obviously if we’re going to get to where we want to be,” Manager Joe Girardi said.

The Orioles held a 3-1 lead in the seventh, but Pearce jump-started a two-out rally that flip-flopped the momentum, ultimately handing the Orioles only their seventh loss this season in one-run games.

Eduardo Nunez, a former Yankees regular who was called up Saturday after spending the past three and a half months in the minors, drove Pearce around with a single to cut the lead to 3-2. Derek Jeter then drew a bases-loaded walk to tie the score.

The next batter, Nick Swisher, hit a hot grounder to shortstop that was bobbled by J. J. Hardy to allow the go-ahead run to score.

“It’s amazing,” Nunez said. “To be back here again, to help the team again, it was just exciting.”

For the first six innings, the crowd sat stunned as the Orioles again jumped out to an early lead, knocking around the rookie starter David Phelps. Phelps allowed six of the first nine batters to reach base — three via walks, another hit by a pitch — and lasted only four and two-thirds innings as Baltimore took a 3-0 lead.

“It’s really frustrating,” Phelps said. “You want to come out and set the tone early, and I put them in a hole.”

Baltimore’s starter, Wei-Yin Chen — like the Orioles’ rookie starter the night before, Miguel Gonzalez — threw strikes and mixed his pitches, retiring the first 11 hitters.

And the Yankees’ lineup, already without Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez, lost another powerful bat when Curtis Granderson left the game in the second inning with a tight right hamstring.

A precautionary magnetic resonance imaging test revealed no tear, Girardi said, so Granderson will be considered day to day. He was replaced in the lineup by Pearce, a nomadic utility player — and a common thread between two teams headed in opposite directions in the past six weeks.

After dropping Pearce on July 21, the Orioles went 18-9 in August, quietly gaining significant ground in the divisional race. Pearce was claimed by the Astros before the Yankees, in need of somebody to prop up their struggling offense, traded for him and promptly put him in the cleanup spot in his first game on Tuesday.

Pearce still had not gotten his first Yankees hit until the seventh inning Saturday, and on first base he shared a quick laugh with Mark Reynolds, his former teammate, about his flustering journey.

As Pearce predicted, though, he is in that pennant race, just wearing a different uniform than he expected.

“As much as I like those guys,” Pearce said of the Orioles, “I want to put them down at the same time.”

After Pearce scored on Nunez’s single, knocking out Chen, Baltimore’s bullpen was unable to hold the lead. The hard-throwing reliever Pedro Strop had an 0-2 count on Jeter but ended up walking him with the bases loaded, and then Swisher’s ground ball to Hardy gave the Yankees the lead.

The Yankees’ bullpen held on to close out the game, just the Yankees’ sixth win in their last 15 games. With the calendar flipping to September, the Orioles and the Rays are not the only teams the Yankees need to keep their eye on. The Oakland Athletics entered Saturday leading the A.L. wild-card standings with a 74-57 record, only a game back of the Yankees (76-56) were they to fall into the wild-card race.

“Every game we play at this point is big,” Jeter said. “We need to play well and we need to put a little stretch together where we play well. But we needed this one.”

General Manager Brian Cashman summed up the team’s recent skid as a situation in which the offense, defense and pitching have not complemented one another with solid performances, different aspects falling completely out of sync. But he said there was no sense in panicking.

“I’m glad we’re two games up,” Cashman said, before the Yankees gave themselves an extra game with the win, adding: “It’s 162 games. We’ve certainly got our hands full. But we expect to show up and win every day.”

INSIDE PITCH

Alex Rodriguez was expected to play third base for Class A Tampa on Saturday night in his second rehabilitation game. Rodriguez, returning from a broken left hand, went 0 for 3 as the designated hitter Friday. General Manager Brian Cashman said Rodriguez would be evaluated after the weekend.

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