The problem is, it’s so easy to believe in optical illusions if you want to believe in them. That’s what the wild card is now for the Yankees: an optical illusion, the number still small enough that you are allowed to believe — as Joe Girardi still does — that anything is possible, and if you have the time, there’s dozens of examples to cite.
But it’s the other optic that is more telling: what your eyes see, day after day, game after game, the reality that is starting to trump the illusion. This has been a team that has loitered above .500 thanks mostly to the grace of God and some fancy footwork in close games. It has looked like a sub-.500 team more often than not.
It never has looked like anything resembling a contender, except for the 18 times when Masahiro Tanaka took the mound this year, the magic elixir of an ace lifting the rest of the nine to his own level. By rights and by the holy grail of run differential, they should be precisely where the Red Sox are: drifting through a meaningless September, counting the days to the finish.
Instead, they kicked off a critical homestand Tuesday night, with the last-place, playing-out-the-string Red Sox in the house, a perfect opportunity to reboot and refocus and …
And … well, it did not go so well.
“These series are extremely important,” a glum Girardi said. “That’s not how you want to start it.”
The final score was 9-4 and it wasn’t just the fact that the Yankees were trounced by a team that actually has even more difficulty scoring than they do, it was how it happened, a lousy outing from the heretofore resplendent Shane Greene, some slapstick base running by (and, later, yet another nagging injury to) Martin Prado.
There was a temporary and costly brain cramp by the normally cerebral Brett Gardner, who was called out on strikes on a ball a foot out of the strike zone and illustrated his displeasure by spiking his helmet, leaving Tim Timmons no choice but to run him, leaving Girardi no choice but to insert Stephen Drew and his princely .153 batting average in the No. 3 hole.
Drew’s one plate appearance ended as you would expect: looking at strike three.
By then the game was probably a lost cause, but it’s hard to say you’re looking at a team worthy of October when you’re getting creamed by a team that last played a meaningful game in May, when one of your most reliable hitters loses his head that way, when there are banana peels littering the basepaths and when Yankees fans were rubbing their eyes in the ninth inning watching Chris Young — !! — pinch hit for Prado, look at three pitches, and walk back to the dugout, having reassured everyone that he’s just as finished in The Bronx as he was in Flushing.
Other than that, it was a fantastic night at the yard.
“I wouldn’t say this is do-or-die, but very important,” Girardi said before the game, before the Sox would apply what was at least a backbender of a loss, if not a backbreaker. “We obviously need to win some games on this homestand. And for us to be successful, we need a lot of guys to get hot this month.”
For months, that has been Girardi’s mantra and his fervent wish. It was on June 20 when the Yankees rallied in the ninth inning to stun the Orioles at the Stadium, with Mark Teixeira, Brian McCann and, most notably, Carlos Beltran contributing to a four-run rally capped by Beltran’s three-run homer. They were 39-33, they were finding a groove, and their three paragons of underachievement had started hitting.
“Sometimes,” Girardi said that night, after the Yankees inched two games ahead of the O’s, “you have to be patient and realize that you don’t just forget how to play this game.”
They haven’t forgotten. They just haven’t played it very well, individually, collectively, all of it. Sixty-four games later, they are 31-33 in that stretch, the Orioles have lapped them, and last night the Tigers rallied in the ninth to push their lead over the Yankees to five full games. Baseball is a leisurely game, but at some point there has to be some urgency, and some sign you are more than what your record says you are.
And time is running out for the Yankees to convince us otherwise.