At .500, the Yankees can smell Wild Card

Groundhog Year... again.

It's the Ray Kroc recipe to fry up a Wild Card away-birth contender: Load up against the horse-meat teams - (we have two more orders, coming up) - and lose to the five-dollar foot-longs and whatever packaged food they're selling "at at the corner of Happy and Healthy!"

We have achieved parity - the magical .500 mark, which we once considered mediocrity, but we now hype as a sign of golden rebirth. Look at us, we're walking! The Yankees stand as baseball's newly lobotomized good citizen. Once, we were renegades, despised by all for wanting only to win championships. Now, we're jolly good neighbors, tsk tsk, who appreciate the sportsmanship in that old-fashioned tussle for third. Bob's yer uncle!

Yeah, I do sound like a sore loser, which is especially weird, because we're winning. I just don't want to live in Wild Card fantasy limbo for the next 10 years. I don't want to watch the Angels, Padres and Rockies bottom out, rebuild and pass us, while we're still neck deep in our own McGrease.

Last night, John Sterling expressed the insane hope that this team has somehow figured out how to hit against the over-shift. That's what Hope Week is about, eh? I think the Great Resurgence has more to do with playing the sorry-ass Angels and As. Quickly: name five Angel pitchers over the last four days? Hm-mm, there was a Weaver and a Huff - (sounds like a nursery rhyme: "I love you, a weaver and huff...") For the most part, Mike Scioscia just grimaced in the dugout like a comic book super-villain watching Batman destroy his robots. They are one bad team.

Of course, nothing is ever won in Hope Week - (a week when Hideki Irabu offed himself) - without the Yankees sacrificing at least one feel-good story to the juju gods. We are like a sexy vampire that stays beautiful by eating the livers of her young lovers. Now it's Chris Parmelee, the Yankee mayfly: He lived one day, then perished. "Parm does harm" will go down as one of the saddest cries in The Master's home run arsenal. If he's out for six weeks - and that's not unlikely - we may never hear his homer cry again. I'll never forget Parmelee, stretched out and pulled apart like William Wallace in the finale of Braveheart -- a leggplant Parm. Terrible. And next up is the evil sorcerer Nick Swisher, who surely is pushing pins into dolls down in Scranton.

I still don't know where the hell this team is going, if anywhere. But let's face it: They won't be sellers at the trade deadline. They won't rebuild with youth. They can smell that third place McBacon & Cheese, and they're going to go for it - figuring they can sell tickets through September. I would love to believe in this team. But what I believe in is Groundhog Year. And the beat goes on...