"Don’t be fooled by the false postseason hopes created by the gimmick of a second wild-card spot. This is the reality of the situation.To find the previous time before that when the Yankees were this far out, you would have to travel back to the Horace Clarke era in 1971 when they were 21 back, and 15 back a year earlier."

Welcome to our world, scribes. 

Yesterday, the Gotham sports media industry finally yanked the Katy Perry mask from that fetching, exciting Yankee wild card pennant race, and instead of Derek Jeter, they found Arturo Lopez.

After months of carrying water for Hal's Pals, the writers realized last night that the Mets are in the same position as the Yankees, in terms of chasing that ridiculous wild card lottery, with one exception: The Mets actually have young players, who might improve next year. The Yankees have - well - Chris Young!

Latest to put down the Kool-Aid is Kevin Kernan of the Murdoch Post, who points out today that the Incompetent Empire is about to finish more than 10 games out for the second straight year - a feat of failed engineering on the level of My Space, or Alaska's famed Bridge to Nowhere. What does it say about the sportswriting corps when the NY Post - (in this case, thanks mostly to Joel Sherman) - turns out to be the most accurate assessor of the Yankee season?

For the last month, the cheerleaders - I mean the courtiers - I mean SPORTSWRITERS - have danced shirtless on the Yankee dugout to applaud Brian Cashman's deadline deals, which basically involved injecting meth into a corpse. For the second straight year, the Yankees ignored the reality of a bad team - a bad roster, a bad plan from April on - and sought to electrify the zombie into movements that resembled living tissue. It didn't work, of course. We traded youngsters, when we should have been trading oldsters. Now, the notion of the Yankees winning their last 17 out of 20 games falls somewhere between Planet of the Apes and Guardians of the Universe, and frankly, both movies have more realistic plot lines.

Last night, while Obama was rallying the Air Force, I checked in to find the Yanks down 4-0 with two outs left in the top of the first, so I went out in the yard, squired fire-starter on a log, and sat next to it for three hours. Lo and behold, when I returned, the Yankees had the lead, and I thought, I wonder who came through? Was it John Ryan Murphy? Austin Romine? Somebody who might have a future in pinstripes? Of course not. It was the 30-year-old Mets castoff, Chris Young.

Wow. I always wondered what the end of the world would look like. This is it, folks: The tip of the long, cold iceberg. We're 100 games out and playing Mets retreads. Really lights up the imaginations of New York City, eh? Who knows, maybe Young can be next year's Alfonso Soriano - the guy who bats fifth between April and July, and turns every RISP into an LOB, in the way alcoholics go through bottles of gin. Wait... who am I kidding? We already have the next generation of  Alfonso/Hafner/Wells/Andruw Jones. His name is Carlos Beltran.

Welcome to our world, scribes. Sharpen your pencils. It gets hot down here.