Change You Can Believe In

When a team looks as bad as the Yankees have in the last four days, the days leading up to a game are excruciating. You want to fast forward from 1 p.m. to, in tonight's case, 8 so the game can get here already and the team can try and erase their recent awful play. If you're like me and you read the comments of other Yankees fans across the vast internet wasteland, you really want to see the overwhelming negativity about the team and its players silenced for at least 3 hours. I know those negative vibes won't totally go away until the Yankees are breathing down the necks of either Boston or Tampa, a scenario looking less and less likely as the days wear on, but days like today make you dream.

In my dream scenarios, here are five things that will happen across the remainder of the regular season to get this fast-sinking ship turned around:

#1--Melky Cabrera is optioned to AAA Scranton/Wilkes Barre and told to get his mind right and work extensively on his offensive game. He is promised a call-back when rosters expand on September 1st. Called up for the millionth time this year is reliever Chris Britton. Johnny Damon and Justin Christian split the time in CF, with Damon playing center against righty hurlers and Christian spotting him against lefties.


#2--Phil Hughes, after a strong rehab start in Scranton tonight, returns to the rotation this weekend against Kansas City and starts a string where he pitches the kind of baseball that everyone expected from him at the beginning of the season.

#3--Hideki Matsui has a successful rehab stint and rejoins the team as full-time DH during next weekend's series in Baltimore (wishful thinking, early next week in Toronto, but why risk his knee on the artificial turf?).

#4--Joba Chamberlain works himself back with a clean bill of health and returns to the rotation when the team opens a series on the road in Tampa at the beginning of September, taking Dan Giese's spot after he did a serviceable job filling in. The rotation for the stretch run is Mike Mussina, Andy Pettitte, Joba Chamberlain, Phil Hughes and Sidney Ponson.

#5--Jason Giambi, Robinson Cano and Derek Jeter's offensive games come alive, and with the re-insertion of Matsui, the lineup consistently performs to the level that they were expected to coming in to the season.

Basically, all five of those things have to happen for this team to have any chance at making the postseason. The Melky Cabrera demotion, actually, doesn't have to happen--Johnny Damon playing 90% of the time in CF would suffice, although why not at least give Melky a chance to succeed at AAA and get his confidence up?

I don't believe all 5 will happen, and I don't believe this team is postseason bound. I just hope that they don't cash in their chips now and keep playing like a team that is giving in to the fact that injuries and inferior performances from expected contributors have already ended their season. Hank Steinbrenner today basically said he doesn't have a ton of confidence in the team rebounding this year but is psyched for next year. I don't want to give up yet, regardless of what he says.