Yankeetorial: Why do we always stink in May?

For the Yankees, May is Hell Month, the dog days, the twilight zone, the trench of the calendar. It is a time when Jeter - yes, Jeter - was once finished, washed-up, stuck in the worst slump of his career. Bobby Abreu couldn't hit a battleship with a champagne bottle, and these days, Teixeira is being fitted for the Hebrew Home at Riverside. (I've been there; it's like a college campus.) Every May we hit Skid Row like a human Charlie Sheen bomb. We become a disgrace, and the front office, or the players, or somebody gadammit, needs to go, to be boiled in oil - that is, after being shot. May sucks.

Why? Why must we endure this? Why can't we enjoy the cherry blossoms and horse races the way Baltimorites and Torontorians do? We spring from the loins of April like everyone else. We look hopefully at the season and then - poof - we're North Korea in a missile test. Is it management? Is it the nature of veteran players who need a crisis to wake up?

I ask because there is no guarantee that the Yankees will wake up this year. We sure didn't in 2008. And one of these days, unless we stop destroying young arms, we're going to experience a few season-long Mays. It happened in the 1960s in the 1980s. You can spend a lot of money and still be horrible. Last night, we beat KC  - Kansas City! in NEW YORK, no less! - and you'd think we won an Oscar.

Are we dead and don't know it? Hard to say.

It's May. We always stink in May. But why, dammit, why?