Larry Brooks

Larry Brooks

MLB

‘We’re taking it personally’: Here they are, your underdog Yankees

The Tigers came to The Bronx with their chorus line of Cy Young Award winners ready to go, a-one and a-two and a-three.

It was Max Scherzer on Monday before it will be David Price on Tuesday and Justin Verlander on Wednesday. Cy 2013, Cy 2012 and Cy 2011, respectively, for Detroit, and Brandon McCarthy, Hiroki Kuroda and Chris Capuano, respectively, for the home team.

That could have been enough to make any jealous Yankees fan — or, for that matter, Yankees pitcher — sigh.

But not McCarthy.

“Not only as an opponent but as a baseball fan, to have the last three Cy Youngs lined up in descending order is kind of ridiculous,” said McCarthy, who gutted through 5 ²/₃ innings to gain the 2-1 victory over Cy One. “I knew going into the game that it was going to be a challenge for me, which I accepted, and we know that it’s a great challenge who we’re up against this series.

“To that extent, we’re taking it personally. When this series is over, we want to be the story.”

McCarthy is one of the primary reasons the Yankees have managed to tread water and stay in the hunt for a playoff berth despite a casualty list of pitchers that seems to multiply pretty much every time you turn around.

For the tall 31-year-old right-hander has gone 4-0 with a 2.08 ERA in five starts since coming to New York from Arizona on July 6 with an assortment that prominently features a sinker and now includes a healthy dollop of mental toughness.

“That’s one of the things I’ve been working on: not backing down on pitches,” McCarthy said after a 116-pitch night through which he yielded only an unearned run on five hits while striking out a pair. “This is pennant-race baseball where you just have to keep grinding.”

The Yankees have turned into a bunch of grinders this season, necessity becoming the mother of reinvention following injuries across an aging roster that has tested the club’s resolve and depth. This is a team that as often as not these days features replacement players, often out of position, as Chase Headley was at first on Monday after Mark Teixeira was a late scratch due to “lightheadedness.”

These aren’t the marquee Yankees that had such a magnificent and enduring run. The marquee names are in the other dugout this series, the Cy Young winners and the reigning double-MVP Miguel Cabrera. Indeed, the Tigers are the team that pulled off the headline deal to get Price from Tampa Bay while the Yankees did some cutting and pasting to get Stephen Drew and Martin Prado.

Blockbusters there. Band-Aids here.

You might say that the Tigers are more of what the Yankees used to be than the Yankees are themselves these days, except of course for the presence of Captain Icon.

“We’ve got the Cy Young winners, the active leader in saves now in Joe [Nathan], Miggy [Cabrera, the 2012 and 2013 MVP], Vic [Victor Martinez], nobody is ever going to be Derek Jeter,” Joba Chamberlain said upon his first visit to The Bronx as an opponent after seven tumultuous years as a Yankee. “No disrespect to anybody on the team, but that’s the way it is.”

But you know what? Résumés don’t win baseball games or championships. The Yankees themselves could have told you as much after losing the 2002 first round to the Angels, the 2003 World Series to the Marlins, the 2006 first round to the Tigers, the 2007 first round to the Indians, the … well, you get the idea.

Scherzer, 34-7 the last two years and 50-14 over the last three seasons, is eligible to become a free agent this winter. There is little doubt the Yankees will be all over the 30-year-old right-hander, who rejected the Tigers’ offer of a six-year, $144 million extension before the season began. That’s a story for another time.

“I hadn’t really thought about the three Cy Young winners in a row, but as a player, you want to go out and compete against the best, and that’s what we’ll have the opportunity to do in this series,” said Jacoby Ellsbury, who drove in the first run with a third-inning sacrifice fly to deep center on which Ezequiel Carrera made a breathtaking, over-the-shoulder, diving catch on the warning track.

“You get up for games like this.”

And now that the Yankees have gotten the first game of the series in which the Tigers did not succeed, there’s only one thing for Detroit to do.

And that is to Cy, Cy again.