You know what it’s like there because you know what it would be like here. You know what the Yankees will be walking into in Boston, because there have been years when the Yankees broke out of the gate stumbling like Shooter from “Hoosiers” — one year when they were 11-19 in May, one year when they were 21-29 at the start of June.
The Yankees made the playoffs both years, of course.
And the Red Sox have yet to be eliminated from the playoffs. But they are 0-6 now after getting swept by the defending-champions Rangers then — inexplicably, inexcusably — by the Indians. And in a season when the Sox themselves openly were speculating about winning 100 games, when they had been all but handed a bye into the postseason by so many pundits and prognosticators, losing six straight at any time is trying, and troubling.
Staring at that 0-6 that’s looking back at them in the morning newspapers?
“We’re frustrated as hell right now,” Kevin Youkilis told the Boston media yesterday, after the Sox lost 1-0 on — and you can’t make this up — an eighth-inning suicide squeeze, a game that ended with pinch runner Darnell McDonald slipping while rounding second base on a weak ground ball. “We never thought we’d be here. But we are here. So we’ve got to deal with it.”
The local citizenry in Boston certainly will have to deal with it, deal with the fact that the Yankees arrive at 4-2, with a couple of series wins already under their belts, with an opportunity to throw a little more dirt on the Red Sox. The Yankees are smart enough to understand that it still is too ridiculously early in the season to start talking about burying the Sox. But it isn’t every day you get a chance to step on their necks a little.
“It doesn’t take much for a team to turn it around, especially when you’re as talented as they are,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said yesterday. “We know that. It’s not improbable that teams are going to lose [six] games in a row during the course of a season. It’s just happened to them in the beginning of the year. We have a tremendous amount of respect for what they can do, and you’ve got to make your pitches and you’ve got to get timely hitting.”
The Sox are getting none of those things right now. Even yesterday, with Jon Lester giving them seven strong innings, they were foiled by an inability to get anything remotely resembling timely hitting. Then young fireballer Daniel Bard walked the lead-off man in the eighth, and that was that, and that was 0-6, and you can only imagine what the conversation in New England sounds like this morning.
“It can’t get any worse than this. There’s only one way to go,” Youkilis said.
“We’re not going to go 0-162. We’ll figure this out,” Dustin Pedroia said.
It’s just especially delicious that they have to figure it out with the Yankees coming to town, with the eyes of the nation (to say nothing of the Nation) descending on Fox tomorrow afternoon and on ESPN Sunday night, with a home-opening crowd that had hoped to fill the afternoon with electricity and optimism and will instead be trying to forget that only two teams have ever started 0-6 and made the postseason (1974 Pittsburgh, 1995 Cincinnati), and neither of those teams sniffed the World Series.
So the usual Opening Day carnival will be muted ever so slightly, the perennial craziness attached to a Yankees-Red Sox series shoveled to the side. The Red Sox come into this weekend a wounded team, a troubled team, a team that badly needs to find its legs and its game before the season gets away from them before the season even begins.
“I don’t want us to be trying to win to make up for this week because we can’t do that,” Sox manager Terry Francona said, and it’s a fine point. They just need to start winning, period. Hell of a pickle to be in, so early in the game.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com
