Fork time?

Last night in Texas, the Yankees lost to the Rangers, and maybe the rest of their playoff hopes. Staff ace Joba Chamberlain left with a bum wing, which is just about the last thing that a team that's trying to get wins out of Darrell Rasner and Sidney Ponson needed to see. This, combined with a bullpen blowup, dropped the Bombers to 5.5 out of the division and 2.5 games out of the wildcard, and the teams that they're fighting for those positions -- Boston, Tampa, Minnesota and Chicago, and you can even count the Rangers in the mix now -- don't have their pitching problems.

The late great A's announcer Bill King refused to go to Texas in his latter years. He hated everything about the place, from the bandbox ballpark to the stifling heat, and he was old enough and revered enough to just opt out of the assignment. The Yankees might want to take up his example, as it was at this park that Phil Hughes got hurt a year ago, while he was in the process of no-hitting the home club.

The real problem for the Yanks is that their margin for error -- an offense that turned bad pitchers into hamburger and good pitchers into spectators by the sixth, because they just worked them ragged -- has been a sputtering mess for most of the year. When you pay what they pay everyday players, you don't expect the ninth-most runs in the majors. (But, of course, this is what happens when you spend all your cash on aging vets, and have no reasonable minor league vets to call up for the inevitable injuries.)

The clock is now starting to become a serious problem, too. Yankee Fan (and, to a lesser extent, Baseball Fan) doesn't usually think 3 to 5 games is a big deal in the standings, because sweeps and streaks happen. But when you look at the historical pattern for this kind of thing, teams that have leads keep them much more often than they lose them, because it's just damned deadly difficult to be a game a week better than your opponents. With less than a third of the season left -- the Yanks have 50 to go -- they needed to put the hammer down now. Chamberlain on the sidelines could very well make that impossible. (Now, if we can only get Tampa to hold on to the lead, and the Twins to make a big fat run to keep the Red Sox out... Fox will cancel the playoffs. Dream a little dream...)