The best organizations in baseball will each feel the sting of defeat roughly five dozen times during the regular season. If you can imagine losing every night for two straight months, well, that’s what major league teams basically do, though over a six-month span. 

The best teams, not the worst. 

And the Yankees (62-28) are still the best of the best, and still on track to win the AL East by Secretariat lengths, even after their 5-4, 11-inning loss to the Red Sox on Friday night. 

It was one of those wild, old-school Yankees-Red Sox finishes, with the home team tying it in the ninth after manager Aaron Boone was ejected over home plate ump D.J. Reyburn’s strike zone. Following the ejection, the manager threw his chewing gum as wildly as Red Sox reliever Tanner Houck later threw the ball to third on a fielded bunt. 

The Yankees somehow blew no-out and one-out bases-loaded opportunities for the win in the ninth and 10th, and after Xander Bogaerts scored on Michael King’s wild pitch in the 11th, Red Sox reliever Ryan Brasier ghosted the ghost runner and gave the Yankees their third straight loss to their defining rivals, and their seventh loss in their past 11 games. 

When it was over, while Boone and Aaron Judge were expressing their frustration over a series of low-strike calls, Jose Trevino, the All-Star catcher in the middle of the decisive breakdowns, framed everything in proper perspective for a team with a 12-game divisional lead when he said: “A little adversity never hurts anybody.” 

So yes, it seemed the perfect time to remind Yankees fans that they can’t have it both ways. They can’t say that nothing else matters beyond what this team does or doesn’t do in October, and then hold the Yankees to a win-or-else standard in the middle of July. 

It’s OK to try to boo Joey Gallo out of town, and to fret over Luis Severino’s latest injury, and to push for Brian Cashman to land Luis Castillo by the trade deadline. Invested fans are permitted to act as invested fans. 

But it’s not OK to act as if the 2022 Yankees are doomed because they haven’t looked quite like the 1998 Yankees for a week and a half. Even the 1998 Yankees didn’t look quite like the 1998 Yankees during one dog-days stretch that August, when they lost four in a row and six of eight. Comically or criminally — depending on your point of view — there were actually questions about Joe Torre’s job security after that 125-win juggernaut opened the season by losing four of five. 

The noise was something of a compliment. The Yankees are held to a higher standard than every other team in New York, and just about every other team in American sports. 

The Giants and Jets are free to set mediocrity as goals after a brutal decade, and after so many years of on-court and off-court dysfunction, the Knicks are free to hope that a prospective deal for Donovan Mitchell will make them the sixth-best team in the Eastern Conference. 

The Yankees are never free to pursue anything other than a World Series title. They have won 27 of them, and their paying customers have been impatiently waiting for No. 28 since the ticker-tape was cleaned up in 2009. 

“And honestly, that’s one of the things that’s cool about it,” Boone said. “People care. People are interested. It means a lot to them.” 

Boone gets it, and it seems most of his players do too. If you are not a member of the pressure-is-a-privilege club, you need to go see Mr. Cashman upstairs and ask for a first-class seat on the next flight out of town. 

Iconic franchises face 24/7 scrutiny from the offseason to the preseason to the regular season to the postseason, and sometimes a significant face from one of those iconic franchises needs to ask for a little breathing room. That’s why Aaron Rodgers once famously advised Packers fans to back off after a slow start, telling his radio audience the following: “Five letters here just for everybody out there in Packer land: R-E-L-A-X.” 

So two words here just for everybody out there in Yankees land: Lighten. Up. 

Every championship Yankees team has endured a mini-crisis or three; the season is just too damn long for anyone to get a free pass. Asked if he is taken aback or slightly amused by the attention paid a slight summertime downturn, Boone hesitated, laughed, and responded: “A little bit, yeah. I get amused by little things that a lot of people that have been in the game … that we get black and white on a series or we make declarative statements based off a week or a series or whatever we want to define things as. 

“That’s the nature of the beast. So we want to put ourselves in the best position. We want to win this division … and then go do something amazing in October.” 

Boone has said that these Yankees are “way better” than the 2021 Yankees, particularly in their mastery of minutiae. He described his players as “deadly serious on being great,” which is a critical character trait to carry into the postseason. 

“We know ultimately, certainly, this team will be judged on that October run that hopefully we have in us,” Boone said. 

So even after another loss to the Red Sox, Yankees fans don’t need to panic before the All-Star break. There will be plenty of time for that during the ALCS.