TORONTO — Can it get worse? For the Yankees, it can. And it continues to.

An already brutal week became something more than that Thursday night. Not only did the Blue Jays complete a four-game sweep of the Yankees with an 8-5 victory in front of 36,848 at Rogers Centre, but Clarke Schmidt left after three innings with what the team initially called right forearm tightness.

But speaking after the game, Schmidt, who will go for an MRI on Friday, twice mentioned his elbow before saying of the affected area: “It’s kind of hard to pinpoint, but just the general forearm/elbow area. So we’ll see.”

Schmidt, 4-4 with a 3.09 ERA coming into the night and two starts removed from throwing seven no-hit innings against the Orioles on June 21 — and matching a career high with 103 pitches — said the tightness is something he’s dealt with the past three to four weeks.

Until Thursday night, it was something he felt more during recovery between starts rather than in-game. That changed during a 55-pitch outing Thursday in which he allowed three runs, four hits and two walks.

“Earlier on in the game, it felt OK, and then as the game progressed, it started tightening up on me,” Schmidt said.

His concern level?

“I mean, any time you’re getting an MRI on your forearm or whatever the body part is, you’re not feeling happy about it,” he said. “I’m praying everything’s going to be clean and minor, but we’ll see what happens.”

The Yankees, meanwhile, are a listing ship heading into Citi Field this weekend, a team that is increasingly taking on water, but facing the skidding Mets no longer is the safe harbor it may have appeared to be.

The Yankees have lost 14 of their last 20 in falling one game behind the AL East-leading Blue Jays (49-38), the first time they haven’t been in first place since April 13. They’re tied for second with the Rays at 48-39.

“You can’t panic. That’s not going to help the situation,” Aaron Judge said. “We came up here, things didn’t go our way, we have to focus on a big series against the Mets. That’s all we can do.”

Judge went 1-for-2 with two walks, including one intentional. That was his fifth intentional walk of the series, setting the franchise record for the most in a series since that became an official statistic in 1955.

After Clayton Beeter replaced Schmidt in the fourth, Nathan Lukes won a 14-pitch at-bat, rifling a two-run double to leftfield to make it 5-3.

Trailing 6-3, the Yankees scored twice in the seventh on Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s RBI double and Anthony Volpe’s RBI groundout against rookie Braydon Fisher, who entered the game having not allowed a run in his first 21 appearances.

George Springer hit his second homer of the night — a two-run shot off Luke Weaver, who had allowed a grand slam by Springer on Tuesday — to make it 8-5 in the eighth.

The Yankees were outscored 36-23 in the series and went 9-for-50 with runners in scoring position, leaving 40 on base. They went 2-for-14 with runners in scoring position and left 12 on base on Thursday.

Jasson Dominguez had a triple, a double and two singles, Trent Grisham hit his 16th homer and Volpe had two RBIs.

In the final three games of the series, Springer went 8-for-12 with four homers, 11 RBIs and three walks and Addison Barger went 6-for-9 with two homers, two doubles and six RBIs.

After the game, Aaron Boone said he spoke “briefly” to his slumping team.

“That we’re the best team in the league, and we knew we were going to hit a speed bump,” Chisholm said of his manager’s message. “But just block out the noise and do what we do. This happened here but leave this here.”

Boone, in his eighth season, has seen pretty much every one of his teams go through this kind of stretch. It’s the kind of downturn most clubs experience during the 162-game season.

“It’s no fun going through it; it sucks when you get your [butt] kicked in a division rival series on the road,” Boone said. “But we’re ready-made for this and we’ll get through this.

“We obviously know we need to play better, we need to do better.  I really like the way we swung the bats in this series. Hopefully that’s a sign of us really getting it going a little bit. But we’ll stick together through this and, again, embrace the adversity of it. This will make us stronger as we navigate through the season.

“I know nobody likes hearing that, but that’s what this is. We know this time is coming for us and it will make us stronger, especially as we rally together.”

The hope being, of course, that it doesn’t get much worse before starting to get better.