Talk about bad luck....first the Yankees have their worst start in over a decade. Follow that up with getting 47,000 caps stolen. Guess what...they've been found. Want 'em? It's gonna cost you. Torre has tried shaking up the lineup, even going so far as to make goals for the team (is .500 really too much to ask for? apparently) but that doesn't seemed to have helped. In fact, Joe looks like he's about to cry in the pic I dug up.

So what's wrong? Bob Klaspisch has a theory.

Incredibly, the team that won 101 regular-season games last year is feeling threatened by ... the Devil Rays. Having already split the first two games of their battle for the cellar, the Yankees will be relying on two rookies, Sean Henn and Chien-Ming Wang, to rescue them in the next two days.

How did the Yankees go from being the greatest on-paper team of the Joe Torre era to the division's cesspool? It's been a perfect storm of injuries and age, which is precisely how the '65 Yankees ushered in an 11-year dark age in the Bronx. Club officials refuse to believe history is repeating itself, but no one expected Bernie Williams to lose his skills so rapidly, or Jason Giambi to be quite this helpless or Jorge Posada to look this exhausted just a month into the season. [full]

Injuries and age? Well, the Red Sox have had similar problems this month, and while their record is nothing to write home about, they've managed to get the train headed in the right direction. I wouldn't call Jeremi Gonzalez and John Halama long term solutions, and Foulke has definitely been struggling, but they still managed to go 5-2 on the most recent road trip, landing them in second place, while the Yanks managed to continue the free fall. There has definitely been a disturbance in the force, and the world is not right when the Orioles are leading the AL East after a month of baseball. Could it be that the Sox finally making it to the promised land has irrevocably changed the landscape of the game? Time will only tell.

The best part? There's still another 5 months til the postseason. It will be interesting to see how things shape up. A lot can happen in the span of a few months.