The Stadium Strikes Back

            Okay.  So the Yankees, as I tap the keys, are three-and-a-half out of first place.  They are two behind Boston in the loss column, and could conceivably be one behind Boston if Seattle can man up tonight (never going to happen).  They are undefeated coming out of the all-star break, and the offense, finally, has shown signs of life.  How's that?  Everybody feeling good?  Good.  Because I'm going to send it crashing down.

            I'm not a negative guy, and I'm certainly not a negative Yankee fan.  I started this blog back in '05 because I thought I had a good cache of reasons why the Yankees weren't as bad as that 11-19 record.  Last year when they were 21-29 I kept saying that there were anomalies that hadn't righted themselves yet.  All three seasons of the BPS I insisted the Yankees were a playoff team, and they were.  I'm not that guy this year.  At least not right now.  Here's my problem.  I'm looking at the Yankees.  I'm looking at the personnel; I'm looking at the schedule.  They just are not, in my opinion, one of the four best teams in the American League.  Forget Posada for a minute.  Right now, the Yankees are playing the role that so many other teams played when the Yankees were perennially on top of the hill.  This year they are the beneficiaries of the MLB scheduling game instead of the victims.  Quick two-part trivia question for those of you who have followed the BPS - which is the only team in Major League Baseball with a winning record against the Yankees in the last 10 years?  Easy.  The Angels.  Now.  Which is the only team in baseball outside of the AL East that the Yankees have played 9 or 10 times every year for the last ten years?  You guessed it.  And they always play more in Anaheim than they do at the Stadium.  Funny how that coincidence keeps happening year after year with the one team that owns the Yankees, no?  So, this year, instead of front-loading the Yankees schedule with the tougher teams to create the illusion of a race, they did it to the Red Sox, who were the preseason favorites.  And it worked.  Here we are, on July 22^nd, and everyone thinks we have a race.  We don't.  The Yankees have played exactly 100 games.  They have 62 games left.  And 19 of those games, basically one out of every three games the Yankees will play for the rest of the year, will be against the Angels or the Red Sox.  And 12 of those 19 are on the road.  Not going to work, guys.  At least not with the lineup the Yankees are trotting out there these days.  It's not enough.

            The Red Sox and Angels are the class of the American League.  What can you say.  What's true is true.  As I've been saying all year, the Red Sox aren't as good as they think they are, and they're not as good as they were last year, but there isn't another team that can play with them, save for the Angels.  And the Angels can't beat the Red Sox when it counts.  The difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox is that the Red Sox have a lot of tough outs up and down the lineup.  Youkilis, Pedroia, Lowell, Drew (this year), and Manny are all tough outs.  They all get their money's worth at the plate, and any one of them can start a rally against anybody.  The Yankees do not have a lot of tough outs.  They have a lot of guys who swing at the first pitch.  The crazy thing is that Sean Casey would probably bat third in the Yankee lineup, but he doesn't even start in Boston.  And I don't know why the Red Sox have been so horrid on the road.  It really doesn't make any sense.  But my thought is that they will gravitate towards the middle of the two polar ends of the spectrum that they're on right now - magic at home and the Royals on the road. 

            The Yankees have still not shown they can consistently score runs.  The good news is that Cano has turned the corner coming out of the break, and if you can get anything at all out of Melky, you might be able to put some more runs on the board.  But the Yankees have just played too many games in which the runners could not score and the bats just drifted off to sleep.  Of course the team is just so much better with Damon in the lineup, but now Posada and the Ferocious Lion are both most likely out for the year.  The Yankees need one more big bat to knock in runs.  And that guy, by the way, is not Ritchie Sexson, although I liked to see him succeed with a ribby single in his first opportunity.  And I love that the one name you've seen on the Yankees radar as the trading deadline nears is Brian Fuentes.  A middle reliever.  Please.  That's the one thing they don't need.  You're trotting Darrell Rasner and John Goodman, aka Sid the Kid out there two out of every five starts, you've gone a stretch of nine games in which you've scored 14 or so runs, and you're chasing a middle reliever.  Nice....

            So here's the next problem.  With this schedule, they are going to have a problem with this Wild Card.  I'm not really worried about the recently castrated A's, and the Twins don't scare me either.  The Rays are enjoying the last of their 15 minutes.  The team that worries me is Detroit.  They're still loaded with talent.  I'm looking at them to sneak in and steal the Wild Card.  The Yankees have too much stacked against them with that schedule.  I hope I'm wrong.  But that's the way it looks to me.

            I got an email from Mannino and a comment from Mark (mlblogs) mistaking the Manny incident for the Pedro/Zim incident of a few years back.  Here's a blurb from the Boston Globe about the theory that was first put forth in the BPS on July 9^th.

            Mikey Juice, Tony Sherry, Vino, Big Willie, and I were in section 24 last night (Monday) for a big win.  Vino was back in section 24 tonight, and Acc will be there tomorrow.  Bring home a win, big boy...