PITTSBURGH -- Technically, LaTroy Hawkins' official job is an assignment to pitch long relief, though he knows that so-called role isn't much of one.

This was not the way Hawkins anticipated his season going when he signed a one-year, $3.5 million contract with the Yankees last winter, trudging out of the bullpen to pitch in mop-up game situations like Tuesday's, when Hawkins entered trailing by six runs and allowed four more in a season-high 2 2/3 innings.

"Is it eating me up? Yeah," Hawkins said. "You like competing and you like to be at your best all of the time. You want to succeed. When you go out there and you don't have the success that you're looking for, it eats you up. This is the big leagues, and you've got to keep fighting."

Bumped out of his original job description of handling the sixth and seventh innings on the path to closer Mariano Rivera, Hawkins now carries a 6.12 ERA in 26 appearances, along with a win and a loss.

"I make good pitches and they get hit; I make bad pitches and they get hit," Hawkins said. "That's the way it goes. That's baseball. Sometimes you go out there and you make those same pitches and you get outs."

There haven't been a whole lot of outs lately. Hawkins has pitched in just six games since suffering a May 27 loss at Baltimore, where Hawkins entered with a one-run lead in the bottom of the 11th inning and wound up taking the loss by serving up run-scoring hits to Aubrey Huff and Alex Cintron.

Since that frustrating evening when Hawkins said he'd let the whole team down, the 35-year-old's role has mostly come sporadically in blowout affairs. He pitched a scoreless ninth inning in a 6-0 loss to the Reds on Saturday and worked an inning in a 13-0 victory at Houston on June 15.

Yankees manager Joe Girardi said the timing is a coincidence, but for whatever reason, Hawkins has found himself supplanted. Jose Veras has assumed duties in the innings leading to Rivera and setup man Edwar Ramirez.

"That [Baltimore] game didn't have anything to do with it," Girardi said. "Veras has been throwing the ball very well, so obviously he moved up, and so has Eddie. They both moved up, and one of the big things is getting a lot of distance out of our starters. There's less opportunities sometimes for the other guys."

Still, Girardi said that Hawkins did a "tremendous job" in throwing 49 pitches to help eat up 2 2/3 innings at Pittsburgh on Tuesday, and acknowledged that he wasn't surprised if Hawkins may have looked a little rusty.

"We haven't used him much lately," Girardi said. "Our starters have been going deep into games, and we've been using Veras, [Kyle] Farnsworth and Rivera a lot. Hawkins hasn't had a lot of work, and sometimes it's hard to get on a roll when you're not getting a lot of work. But it's a good problem to have."

Not necessarily for Hawkins, who ideally would like to pitch his way back into the role he had coming out of Spring Training.

He said pitchers can always create their own opportunities -- "Pitch well, plain and simple" -- but actually finding his way to earning the manager's confidence in a pressure situation may be difficult, given how the first few months of the season have gone.

"If I pitched well, I wouldn't have to worry about that stuff," Hawkins said. "You can't point the finger without pointing the thumb -- and what does that point back to?"