The Magic Number is 10. Which Is Not Good News.

All the Yanks need is 10 more wins to clinch their 28th straight winning season.  Which is not good news.  Usually, with 21 game to go, that would be a given.  Not so much this year.

I cite this goal as the only one the Yanks still have a reasonable chance to attain—but even that is growing increasingly unlikely.

It won't much matter, of course, not in this sad, rump season.  No one is going to take anything the Yankees do or do not do very seriously, which is the problem.

People have already started to forget just how well this fragment of a campaign was set up for the Yankees.  Only 60 games for their fragile veterans to get through.  No games played until they had recovered from what has become the usual wave of spring training injuries.  Two sets of short series in the first two rounds of playoffs.

The Yanks were a gimme to make it to the ALCS—and with the AL pennant winners of the last three years now forbidden to cheat, why, how hard could it be to make the World Series?

Alack and alas, this Yankees team is not even going to make the playoffs, which is singularly disgraceful.  Gary Sanchez hitting all of .130?  Lineups, day after day, night after night, with half the team hitting below .200?

No doubt, we'll be told after it's all over that the Sanchise and the like had very, very severe injuries.  Which they might well have.  But that's only to underscore just how dysfunctional this team that can't stay on the field really is.

Back in the old days, they used to talk about how players became better when they came to the Yankees.  Now, it's sort of the opposite.  Joining the Yanks is sort of like catching the pandemic.  The worst thing about this Yankees team is how even their best hopes for the future have been exposed.

Gerrit Cole, all but unbeatable for the past two seasons, has now shown himself to be nothing close to a big-time stopper.  (I expect we'll soon hear that he has loose bone chips in the elbow, or maybe a lat strain.)

Gleyber Torres?  Well, I have a confession to make.  With this guy, I feel like I did with Phil Hughes.  Everybody always told me he was sure to be a superstar, but I just couldn't see it.  Everything he threw seemed to be a slow fastball down the middle.

He had some spectacular games, even a good couple of seasons, so what did I know?  But he sure wasn't a superstar.

I'm beginning to think the same of The Gleyber, our new, surefire superstar who once hit .278, and can't play the position we were told he was destined for.  Oh, I know:  he's been injured much of this year, for the fourth straight season.  Well, that just makes him a Yankee, right?