TORONTO — If this were a normal baseball season, you’d be reading a different column. We’d be having a different conversation.
We’d be counting down the days to Mariano Rivera’s retirement and focusing on the makeup of the 2014 Yankees’ starting rotation. We sure as heck wouldn’t be regarding Tuesday night’s game in Toronto, against the Blue Jays, as relevant.
But this 2013 campaign hasn’t played out in ordinary fashion, and that’s why the Yankees still have a slim chance of concluding their exhausting run with a playoff berth.
For this gift from the baseball gods, the Yankees can point to two factors for which they can take no credit:
1) The wild-card field has come back to them.
2) The remaining schedule — not just theirs, but the entire American League’s — is generally favorable to them.
Consider that the day Alex Rodriguez joined the team, Aug. 5, the Yankees went into their game (at the White Sox) with a 57-53 record, which put them on pace to win 84 games. At that point, they trailed the first AL wild card, Tampa Bay (66-45), by 8¹/₂ games (eight in the loss column) and the second wild card, Cleveland (62-49) by 4¹/₂ games, four in the loss column.
With A-Rod, the Yankees have gone 22-18, which has lifted their overall projection to 85 wins. Not surprising, given the success of both A-Rod and Alfonso Soriano in that period, yet certainly not a meteoric rise. Nevertheless, that seemingly modest record ranks as fourth-best in the AL in that stretch. By playing at a solid, .550 pace — a winning percentage that wouldn’t get them a playoff spot in the NL — the Yankees have gained considerable ground on Tampa Bay (15-22) and a little bit on Texas (19-17) as well as Cleveland (19-19) and Baltimore (18-19).
It’s a striking contrast to last year, when the Yankees awoke from an extended nap in early September and finished the schedule on a 19-8 run, which they needed to execute in order to hold off the Orioles (17-10) for the AL East crown.
The Rangers and Rays entered their game Monday night, at Tropicana Field, tied for the top AL wild-card seed and on pace to win 89 games. Last year, the first season in which two wild cards qualified for the postseason, the Orioles won the final AL slot with a 93-69 record. The last time an AL wild-card team won 89 or fewer games was 1996, when the Orioles won 88 to qualify.
So with just two weeks to go, the bar has been set unusually low to qualify for the AL playoffs, even factoring in the addition of the second wild card.
OK, that explains how we’ve gotten to this point. What about what’s left?
Just by not playing Monday, the Yankees gained ground on the second wild card while losing ground on the first wild card, a swap they’ll gladly accept. Between the Texas-Tampa Bay series and Cleveland at Kansas City — three games, starting Monday night — the Yankees can make significant progress by sweeping the Blue Jays
That would be the last-place Blue Jays, after which the Yankees will return home to take on the Giants, who reside in fourth place in the NL West, a game ahead of cellar-dwelling Colorado. And the Yankees end the season at Houston, where the Astros are working diligently to clinch their third straight first overall amateur draft pick by registering baseball’s worst record.
The Yankees’ other three games come against Tampa Bay, which is playing with about the same confidence and competence as the Yankees nowadays. It should help, too, that the Rays have the Orioles at home this weekend and that the Rangers follow their Tampa Bay visit with one to Kansas City, where the Royals are still in the race, and also wrap up their season with an Angels team that entered Monday’s action on a 13-5 run.
On the downside for the Yankees, the Indians will have a cakewalk once they’re done with the Royals — four against Houston at home, two against the White Sox at home and four at Minnesota. And the Royals have an easy final week with three at Seattle and four at the White Sox.
It’s a big mess, just like the Yankees. They’re falling apart physically, and we’ll see what they have left mentally after getting knocked around by the Red Sox over the weekend.
However, they should thank the rest of the league, as well as the schedule-makers, for the fact we’re still discussing their playoff chances with any level of seriousness.
The Pop Quiz answer is Turner Field. If you have a tidbit that correlates baseball to popular culture, please send it to me at kdavidoff@nypost.com.
— Have a great day.