I MUST GO AGAINST THE GRAIN

of my own pessimism in order to be true to a still more ingrained reflex, my instinct for regarding sports pundits with the contempt they, more than any other form of expert this side of creationism, so richly deserve. What exactly is a sports expert anyway? Clearly, it's not the same thing as a medical expert or a legal expert. There is no agreed body of knowledge one must master, nor is there any agreement on what mastery of such a body might entail. My definition of a sports expert is, an incredibly lucky version of the unemployed guy at the end of whatever bar you happen to be in.

Anyway, this guy at the bar, the one ESPN (which Joyce memorialized in Finnegans Wake as the Everywhere Spilling Puss Network) decided to give a column, has roundly pronounced the Yankees season over, at least as far as the playoffs are concerned, has pronounced them "out" of the postseason hunt. Now make no mistake. I don't think the Yankees will be playing in October. I don't think the Yankees will be above 500 at the end of the year. I take a back seat to noone in viewing Torre as an alchemist of defeat, turning the gold of talent into the lead of failure. But I have to, no one has to, put some qualification on one's ability to read a future so extended. Noone is out of a race, in this case the wild card race, just because they are 8.5 games back near the end of May, and certainly not a team with the residual potential of the Yankees. We could wake up a week from now, Clemens, Pettite, Wang, Mussina, and ultimately Hughes could be giving us 7 quality starts out of 10, while Giambi, Damon, Cano and AROD could all start hitting like they are capable (yeah, I'm having a harder time imagining Abreu doing that). They could turn into one of the hotter teams in the league while Detroit, Cleveland, the suddenly resurgent Twins and the White Sox play and die in that steel cage match they call AL Central. I'm not saying it will happen, but it could. It's not only possible but vaguely plausible. Noone would have thought this would happen, the Yanks at 21-29, when the season started. That's why you play the games. As the Yankees found out to our chagrin; you can't always be winning games just because you are the Yankees. But we should recognize at this point, you can't always be losing games just because you're the Yankees either. You would have to keep playing the way they are playing.