WE HAVE officially reached the dress-rehearsal portion of the Yankees season, where you can derive hours of enjoyment pretending the three games the Yankees just played in Anaheim, and the three to come this weekend against the Red Sox, are as meaningful as late-September encounters with other playoff teams are supposed to be.
We know that’s not the case. From the moment the Red Sox lightened the Yankees’ load by blowing two separate six-run leads in the rain in Kansas City on Monday night, the AL East race once again became a matter of when, and not if. That’s the good.
The bad? Well it’s not so bad, but let’s be very honest: The Yankees beat the Angels two out of three in Anaheim, ending any talk of hexes and vexes and things that go bump in the California night, but does anyone really think a seven-game series with the Angels wouldn’t be a minefield for the Yankees? A wildly entertaining minefield, sure, but even in defeat the Angels kept making like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” and you kept expecting them to jump out of the bathtub, knife in hand.
“If we come back [here] in the playoffs, we don’t have to answer the questions about not playing well here,” Mark Teixeira said before the Yankees jumped on their charter flight Wednesday.
And if that quote sounds familiar it should. It wasn’t all that long ago the Yankees were forced to answer similar doubts about their ability to beat the ’09 Red Sox.
Those uncertainties dissolved in the heat of August, thanks to six wins in seven games at Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park, the surge that likely will earn for the Yankees everything they could possibly want from the regular season: the No. 1 seed in the AL, the ability to stay away from both Boston and Anaheim in a deadly five-game series, while turning those two against each other to bloody each other up in a division series death match.
So, no, this weekend’s three-game revival of the ancient Sox-Yanks blood feud won’t carry quite the emotional load it normally does, or anywhere close to the buzz that a similar encounter in a month’s time will. But there are still three things that bear close watching:
1. What else? Joba, Joba, Joba: We have clearly arrived at the precipice of a problem: What do the Yankees do with Joba Chamberlain, whose brain seems as mixed up as his arm right now? They will catch a break by having to postpone this decision until the ALCS — if they get there — but the Yankees need to know for themselves that they can still trust him. He has good history against the Sox, and an elite match-up with Jon Lester — one year younger and light-years ahead of Joba right now — tonight should bring out the inner competitor in him, if nothing else.
2. Bullpen: There was a time when the Sox had the clear advantage in this one, but that time was in the spring and right now there are still too many nights — Monday’s fiasco in Kansas City being Example A — when the Sox appear vulnerable late in games. Phil Hughes got tagged with a blown save Tuesday that was less his fault and more Robinson Cano’s. The ’pen has become the distinct place where the Yankees have to feel better than the Sox, especially since we’ve all seen Billy Wagner’s body of big-game work.
3. The skipper: This weekend won’t turn the spotlight as much on Joe Girardi and Terry Francona as the weeks to come will, but as good as Girardi has been this year, here is something to think about: Of the four presumptive AL playoff managers (including the Tigers’ Jim Leyland), Girardi is the only one without a ring earned as a manager; of the eight presumptive managers in the whole playoffs, only Colorado’s Jim Tracy has yet to win one, and if somehow Bobby Cox’ Braves figure out a way to catch the Rockies, it’ll be seven out of eight.