You've been fighting it off as best you can, but the weight of the evidence is starting to hit your hips, knees and ankles in a series of small electric spasms. You've tried to explain it away as "Well, the league's weird this year," and while you're right no matter what league you're referring to, the disorientation is still there and getting worse.
The Tampa Bay Rays look like they are going to win their American League Division Series, but that's not the thing that's making you nickname your persistent migraine as though it were a mischievous nephew. It's that they're making the New York Yankees look like the Los Angeles Angels, which is not just laughing at the power of branding but making a fresh mockery of a town that already has to put up with the Mets.
The Rays gnaw at a game like hyperactive beavers, eschewing home runs (except for Junior Caminero) and embracing the annoying little things that modern baseball once disdained: speed, defense, and even the occasional bunt. The Yankees have struggled with stuff like catching the ball or throwing it in a useful direction, which have always been in fashion. That is how Game 2, a 5-2 Rays win, played out Monday night. The Yankees' four errors were spectacular, the second-most put up by the team in its 448 all-time postseason games, highlighted but by no means concluded by Jazz Chisholm Jr.'s comprehensive mangling of a double-play pivot on the Rays' third at-bat of the game. Had it not been for Ben Rice's two solo homers, the Yankees would have looked utterly Angelic in all the worst ways.
The Yankees' heel turn has been as remarkable as it has been swift. They beat Boston twice, 9-0 and 9-2, to scratch a traditional itch, but after traveling to Florida to face the ultra-modest and scrupulously mistake-averse Rays, they have reverted to a deeply dark place. They were one-hit and utterly baffled by Drew Rasmussen over eight innings in a 1-0 Game 1 loss, and farted away Game 2 in an inning; they suddenly look light years worse than a Rays team that won just five more games than them in the regular season.
By logic, this should be close. Thus far, it really hasn't been. Optically, the Yankees look like they're starting a rebuild—unfinished, unpolished, and fragrant in worrying ways. Mostly they've looked confused. Their worldview in this series can be summed up by Spencer Jones staring stupefied at the catwalk he hit with a fly ball that was caught for an out. The ball would have been an out anyway judging by the body language of center fielder Jonny DeLuca, who was waiting for the ball to come down before it introduced itself to the local infrastructure. The fact that it turned wacky because Tampa plays in a glorified ball pit doesn't change the fact that an out only became a slightly different out. The significant thing was that it amounted to nothing.
It should be said here that our well-developed sense of glorified perversity demands that we get not only an ALCS that involves Tampa and the second team in Chicago, but a potential World Series between those teams and the Milwaukee Brewers. Anything that helps undermine the owners' argument for a salary cap is objectively admirable and to be desired, so there's that. But beyond that targeted billionaire schadenfreude, the Yankees have been abject in this series, playing like a team that is either ready to go on vacation or already on one. They were dramatically less competitive in Game 2 than they were in a game in which they were nearly no-hit. Even after you caveat the small sample size, the Yankees are slashing .086/.145/.224, which is less Angelic than sub-Cherubic.
Worse still, New York had more players commit an error than players who got a hit on Monday night, the first time that has happened since Roy Halladay no-hit the Reds in 2010. You have to believe to an inordinate level in the power of history and the weight of Yankee Stadium to see a long-term escape for them, here. The Rays were better for six months, and they are better now.
That can turn in a short series, of course, but the Yankees have been placed in a position where they have to react to the Rays, rather than other way around. They may not butcher an evening's entertainment in the slapstick fashion they did last night, but if they're going to get back into the series, they'll have to do it the hardest possible way, without inherited swagger. The Rays and Brewers, optimized and seamless as they are, currently feel like the future of a game that pretends not to have one, and the first two games of this series—grounder to short, Lombard snares it, and the throw to first SAILS INTO THE SEATS, and that will score two runs—have been proof that this is so.
