Kuroda allowed two solo home runs, including one to Jose Iglesias that Vernon Wells could only watch. (Paul J. Bereswill for The New York Post)
The problem, of course, is that they could have waited out the rain, could have slogged until the middle of the night, waited for a break in the clouds, a break in the bleak, and the way the Yankees are hitting it might not have mattered.
They squeezed an hour and 58 minutes worth of baseball out of it as it was, played 5 1/2 innings, and at the end, you have to give eternal credit to the couple thousand fans who were still seeking shelter under the grandstand overhangs:
They booed.
They were willing to wait it out because there are always a hearty few thousand willing to do that. Hey, they waited until the middle of the night in Cleveland the other night, waited even later in St. Louis the night before that. But Doppler don’t lie. The blobs on the screen weren’t going away.
And neither, it seems, is the reality-check that has forechecked the Yankees all week. They ran into a hot pitcher named Clay Buchholz, but they’ve also run into the pedestrian likes of Dillon Gee and Freddy Garcia the past few weeks, and it was hard to tell the difference.
The final would be 3-0. And somewhere the immortal words of Crash Davis never seemed more appropriate: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”
Well, and sometimes you lose and it rains. That’s the dreadful daily double.
Maybe someone with the Yankees, inspired by the bone-rattling thunderclaps that sent Red Sox and Yankees players scurrying from the dugout to the safety of their clubhouse, that knocked the cable out in Joe Girardi’s office, will seek fallen limbs this morning all across The Bronx, fashion them into fresh bats, the way Roy Hobbs did as a lad in inventing “Wonderboy.”
Or maybe instead of channeling Malamud, they would be better to opt for the old Persian proverb:
This, too, shall pass.
Not the storm. That seemed like it might hang around forever, and it while it occupied the South Bronx it seemed to incorporate each of the Forrest Gump varieties (Little bitty stingin’ rain … and big ol’ fat rain … rain that flew in sideways … and sometimes rain that even seemed to come straight up from underneath … shoot, it even rained at night …)
This funk, that will pass. Look, for so long this season it was really possible to believe in the otherworldly divinity of pinstripes. Vernon Wells was hitting like Roberto Clemente. Travis Hafner looked a decade younger. Every day the Yankees did just enough for eight innings to get a lead, then tossed the ball to Mariano Rivera, and that was that.
Logically, you knew that couldn’t last forever. And intellectually, even if you saw the arrival of Kevin Youkilis and Mark Teixeira this weekend as the first horn blasts of the cavalry, you had to know they were arriving at the ballpark in cars, not atop magic carpets. Youkilis has struggled. Teixeira has seven strikeouts in nine at-bats so far, is hitting .111, and probably has Ike Davis shaking his head sympathetically.
But Teixeira always starts slowly. The Yankees — and every other team, even the upper-division ones — always have their slippery slopes, even when it’s not aided by a miniature monsoon.
“It’s a team-wide thing we’re going through,” Girardi said after the game was finally called.
And if it feels different than that, it’s only because the division they’ve ruled for most of the last two decades is different now, too. Seeing the Yankees and Red Sox battle these past three days for first place has been something of a nostalgic throwback to the way things used to be but back in those days, 1999 through 2005, this was a two-horse race, and the Sox and Yanks could get good and fat on the 54 games apiece they played against the JV teams in Toronto, Tampa Bay and Baltimore.
No more. The difference between first place and fourth place in the East this morning — which is to say, the difference between the Sox and the Yankees (and Rays) is three games, two in the loss column. This is a legit four-team race, and there’s four months left, plenty of time, plenty of ballgame, plenty of calendar.
Which will be fine when they start playing better. And yes, for now, we use the “when.” We’ll wait on the “if.” For now.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com