As we near the cliff, the Yankee pitching staff is about to get shredded

Crazy Fred Nietzsche once said, "When you gaze into The Abyss, The Abyss gazes back into you."

Comrades, The Abyss is licking its chops.

Three double-headers in five days. Twenty-two games in 19 days. A dead reckoning in Tampa. The trade deadline. 

Yep. The Abyss sees us, and it's rubbing its tummy.

Today, we pitch Gerrit Cole and, I believe, Masahiro Tanaka. Friday, Jordan Montgomery and Whomever. Saturday, it's either JA Happ or the cast of "This Is Us." Sunday, it's John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur, who are working to bring about a more just and verdant world. Monday, we press REPEAT.

Somewhere in between, we might promote Clarke Schmidt and/or Deivi Garcia from the Scranton refugee camp. Or we might sign Dopey Dildox from the Korean Beach League. Monday - the dreaded annual trade deadline - everything culminates with a showdown in Timbuktu - yes, Tampa - a team that recently mocked us in our own stadium. Yes, The Abyss has a knife and fork in hand, a napkin on its lap, and a Nicholas Sandmann smirk. A week from now, the fog will have lifted. 

The next few days will either set us on course toward the playoffs, allowing us to keep our farm system intact. Or it will crush our pitching staff and push Cooperstown Cashman into trading for other teams' mistakes, binding our next few seasons into bloated contracts and aging spare tires. Every year, we go through the same tired exercise, looking for saviors that do not exist. We spend five years nurturing a young prospect, then trade him and assure ourselves that he was never any good.    

This is surely the last site on the Internet to invoke Yankee hyperbole. There is no cooler set of heads in the Yankiverse, no more astute gathering of scientific minds, than those who meet here to empirically discuss our chances. Other sites get nervous. Not here. We maintain that steady hand on the till, never getting rattled, always assessing reality with cool, clear eyes.

That's why it's so critical to recognize that, if we flop this week, we are fucking dead - I mean dish-rag dead, I mean soiled and slurped, done and dug, fling the dirt on us, hit the the "Cremation" button and fling us into the ocean - and I'm talking about the 2020 decade, not this Tom Thumb of a season. 

The next week, folks. Three doubleheaders and a trade deadline. 

The Abyss awaits us.