What to Root For

18.  17.

Still think this Yankees team has a chance to win the World Series?  Think again.  The trouble is not just Coops making silly moves around the margins, as he did last season.  No, the foundation, the pilings of this team have been revealed this year to be fundamentally rotten.

Our catcher, who looked like the second coming of Johnny Bench at times over the past couple years, has decided he just can't get up for this game.  The proper sentence is Death by Cincinnati.

Our huge, lovable, orphan slugger...is hitting .205 on the road.  With 17 ribbies.  We combined him with the best home run hitter and MVP of the NL, and together...they are on a pace to hit 30 percent FEWER home runs than they managed last year.

Our ace starter seems to be injured, and the guys behind him are hanging on by a thread.  The bullpen is only in slightly better shape.  The good-natured carrot top who should've been a star outfielder and key part of the Next Dynasty now seems to have a chronic concussion condition.  Our first baseman, once seen as the key lefty bat in the lineup, gets hurt if he looks sideways at a ballfield.

Our manager, sadly, seems pathetically unprepared for the challenge he has taken on.

Our farm system, regularly proclaimed the greatest in the game, is now all but empty, with what little is left wasted for used-up reliever rentals.  At least three other teams in the American League and a couple in the National have now zoomed past us, and more are likely to follow in the years immediately ahead.

What's there to do?  Well, like the song says, pick yourself up, dust yourself off,  start all over again.

That's unlikely to happen, though, as Coops Cashman will certainly spend the rest of his GM career trying to convince us that his every unlucky or unfortunate move was purest genius.  But let us, at least, face facts:

This team is not going to win the World Series this year, or for many years to come.

This team is not going to win the division title this year, or for many years to come.

This team could possibly make the One-Game Bud Selig Memorial Play-In...which would surely be followed by a three-game massacre at the hands of the Red Sox.  Two runaways before their jeering, drunken hordes up in Fenway, then another rout down in the Stadium, with their transplanted fans dancing under the el afterwards.

Do you want to see that?  I for one would just as soon skip it.

So what's there to root for, then?

Well, the bigger picture.  18.  17.

18 is the number of wins the Yankees still need to rack up in order to finish with a winning record.  That would make their 26th winning season in a row, and keep us in the hunt to pass the Giants for the all-time highest number of winning seasons, period (and don't forget, the Giants got a 20-year jump on our crew!)

Since that would only mean going 18-44 the rest of the way, I THINK we are capable of it.  Though noting the general lethargy and disarray of our team, I would not count on it.  But that will only make it all the more exciting coming down the stretch.  Can we get to 82???

17 is the number of games the Red Sox would have to lose over the rest of the season to remove any chance to them surpassing our regular-and-postseason win total record of 125.

This one's a lot tougher, as it would mean that would only go 41-17 the rest of the year (I'm putting tonight's game against Baltimore, which they led 5-0 after two, in the books already) and that doesn't seem likely.  True, Houston or even Cleveland might knock them off in the playoffs, but I'd hate to have to count on that.

We need to see the Sox go "only" 113-49 on the regular season, which would remove any possibility of them breaking our record and being proclaimed by many as baseball's all-time greatest team—the ultimate humiliation, in what has generally been so far The Yankees Century of Humiliation.

(Well, actually the ultimate humiliation will come when they surpass our total of 27 rings, but that will likely take at least 50 years, and with any luck we will all be dead by then.)

C'mon, 18!  C'mon, 17!

Who says this won't be an exciting second half?