YANKEETORIAL: Time Travel and Yankee fans

(Note: I'm on location, rather than in my steel-plated Fortress of Yankitude, so I cannot go to my instant data file and relate every Yankee with the name of Eric, to compare Chavez with Soderholm and Hinskey. I apologize, but server access atop this mountain is difficult, and it was hard enough convincing the sherpas to haul up the coffee maker and foot-massage, much less my hard drives.)

To the Yankiverse:

Some people claim the most difficult task in sports is hitting a curveball.

Those people are fools.

The most difficult task in sports is being a Yankee fan.

The reason: We do not experience time as others do.

For a KC Royals fan, an inning is an inning. Five minutes. Three up, three down. For Yankee fans, an inning is a fortnight. Each batter is an epic saga of birth (ball one) and death (strike three.) Each game is a month. Each week is a -- aw fukthis, you get the idea - a lotta time, right?

So today, although the "regular" calendar says April twentysomething, the Yankee fan biological clock says August 30.

In that time period (for you movie buffs, remindful of dream time in "Inception"), we have witnessed the staggering career collapses of Brett Gardner and Phil Hughes, who grew old before their times, without explanation, and who were dispatched to the Netherworlds (batting 9th, DL), never to be heard from again (aside from song and oral legend.)

Fortunately, they were replace by the TV movie of the week-intensity comebacks of Bartolo C and Freddy G, and now Eric Chavez, the former A. (Of all the distinctions in sports, only one club allows its players to always have been A's.)

But no one has been reborn more than Brian Cashman, the Yankee Professor X. In the span of a week (remember, that's umm, eight years, I think), Cash has gone from being the clod GM who was outsmarted all winter by Theo "Brian" Epstein of the Redsocks... to the silver-tailed fox of recycling, master of salvation and king of the scrapyard.

It's early, even though it seems late. We have shown mastery over every team but one. We must try to remember the passage of Real Time, as opposed to Yankee Time. But right NOW -- which is the same time for everybody -- we have a nice team chemistry.

If in the next life we can fix Gardner and Hughes, who knows?