Filed under: Rays, Yankees, AL EastCome October, the Steinbrenner Doctrine is the harshest standard by which any team in professional sports is judged.
Its beauty is its simplicity -- win the World Series or else the season was a failure -- and while that carries with it loads of pressure, the heavy weight of expectations and so on, it makes life incredibly simple for manager Joe Girardi and the rest of the Yankees right now.
New York returns home Monday on the heels of a rough 3-6 road trip and welcomes the Rays to town for a four-game set that could very well decide the American League East. Tampa Bay is in hot pursuit, just a 1/2 game back of the Yankees in the standings, and if this were 1991, or if teams from the Central or West could compete with the big boys in the East over a full season, it'd have a whole lot more meaning.
But it's not '91. Those other teams can't hang with New York and Tampa Bay, or even Boston, a distant third in baseball's toughest division, in most cases. Both clubs are virtually assured of a playoff spot by virtue of a massive gap -- 6 1/2 games entering play Monday -- between the Rays and the next closest team in the wild-card standings, the Red Sox. And because of that, this showdown is about little more than bragging rights, playoff seeding and what city to book a hotel in on Oct. 6, the day the playoffs open. Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
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