"Let Me Tell You How It Will Be."

With apologies to the Fab Four's classic complaint about the burdens of the progressive income tax, which has surely limited their collective wealth to a tad under $536 gazillion.

Gotta go against the usual perspicacity of our Dauntless Leader, Alphonso, for once.  I think the Yanks actually got a break, thanks to the Mets' Covid outbreak (and not that I would wish the disease on anyone).

The Metsies, of course, always treat their annual 4-6 games against our boys like their World Series.  Now, with the Polar Bear just starting to hit again, Jogginson C. obviously in possession of some great new PEDs, and a bullpen of former Yanks Dellin Betances, Justin Wilson, and Chasen Shreve, they were all set up to rout us in at least 4-5 of our scheduled contests in this rump season.

The showdown against the team that Bernie Madoff built was to be 6 of the next 11 contests, with the others against Atlanta and our new nemesis,the Tampa Bay Witness Protection Program.  We were staring at a possible 14 straight losses, which must surely be a Bombers record of some kind.

The Met part of that may all be thrown off now, at least in that they get 3 days to lose their mojo.  When you're bad and hurting, you always want to be the team with days off, as opposed to when you've just finished thrashing those Miami Marlins, as our Flushing friends managed to do.

In any case, though, the last 24 games were against a perfect array of patsies:  the Orioles, the Blue Jays, the Red Sox, and a final 3 against Miami.

Say the Yankees had somehow managed to pull out 4 of the Evil 11 games—which is saying a lot—and then gone 16-8 versus The Collected Hamburger Meats of the World, and we were talking a final record of 36-24.

Good enough to make the playoffs, maybe even good enough to win the division, and CERTAINLY good enough for the collected muddlebrains of the New York sporting press to proclaim again what a genius Brian Cashman is, and moan about all those bad-luck injuries when this team is, inevitably bounced in the first best-of-three series because—surprise, surprise—it has no starting pitching behind Gerrit Cole.

Well, que sera, sera, and that may still well happen depending on time and tide and aerially transmitted disease.  But this is what drives so many of us so crazy:  the insistence, year after year after year, that a team we all KNOW cannot win a World Series still has a genuine chance.