Five Days Later, The Batting Dead: Run, everybody, the Yankee Apocalypse has begun

You passed out in the wild party, after Overbay's HR beat Tampa. You wake up in an empty clubhouse, the lockers and showers horribly smeared with chalk and pine tar. 

Outside, on the field, a roving horde of Yankees seems to be feeding on something. You climb the dugout steps for a better look. My God, it's the carcass of Joe Girardi! 

One of them sees you. It's Vernon Wells. You know it's him, because when he swings his bat, driving Brennan Boesch's head from its shoulders, he hits a grounder to shortstop. 

OMG! Can it be? Yes... there's Ichiro - or what's left. What happened to his batting average? It's so withered, down to skin and bones. Can it really be him? He hits a pop-up. Yep, it's him all right. 

It's been five days since the miracle in Tampa. Just five. But it feels like another Hangover sequel, this time, with blood. The first third of our season is over, and it has been a painful microcosm of 2012: Adversity, success, collapse... soul-crushing despair.

Every year, the Yankees endure one bad spell. Last year's horror arrived in October, and it was so overwhelming that it obscured the entire season. Everything ended with Arod pleading injury, Jeet on a gurney and Robbie hiding his face - it was so bad, you wished you were a Royals fan.

Well, the last four nights against the Mets have been a terror-filled flashback to last October against the Tigers. But there is one difference: Our season didn't end.

Today, we trot out Youkilis and Teixeira - both rusty from lack of playing time. But what can we expect? Neither plays the outfield - where the grand experiment of Vernon Wells, Ichiro, Brennan Boesch, et al, is coming to an end: We have confirmed what their former teams knew. 

What we haven't done is try any young outfielders from Scranton. (Basically, there are no young outfielders from Scranton.) We keep restocking veterans, who have brief flings with competency, and then revert to old, career-ending habits. We keep bringing out old guys who get hurt, and then we scream at the heavens, "Why us?" Without a core of young players - early 20s, not late 20s - we will always be a five game series away from oblivion.

This is it, folks...  that long overdue Yankee Apocalypse. The Redsocks went through theirs two years ago. We delayed ours - for awhile. This is the same basic team that rotted through its flesh last October. The only difference is that we have 100 games left to play.