A slightly tongue-in-cheek look from the Washington Post’s David Segal:
This is a wretched year to be a Yankees fan. The team with the fattest payroll in baseball is nine games out of first place and widely considered a long shot for even a wild-card berth in the playoffs. On the field and off, everyone has a diagnosis — the team is old, the pitching stinks, the players don’t care. There is consensus only about the misery.
If it were any other squad, the rest of baseball would simply snicker. But this is the Yankees, whose historical success and strutting have made them arguably the most reviled team in American sports, and these are Yankees fans, undoubtedly the most loathed in the country. A snicker won’t do. This calls for belly laughs. This calls for tankards and fiddles and torch-lit dancing. This calls for bunting and floats. We must savor this experience. We must pile on now, while the piling is good, because if history is any guide, the Yankees will rise again — and when they do, their fans will be insufferable.
Which is why I still wear this t-shirt proudly 
In the meantime, the Yankees won last night thanks to some help from a surprising source:
Andy Phillips homered in his first major league at-bat, in 2004, and it sometimes seems as if it has been all downhill since. He has had an emotional Yankees career, learning hard the lesson that timing is everything. Now, at last, it may be his time.
Phillips is batting .375 this month, with the trading deadline two weeks away. Last July, as he helped his wife recover from cancer and a lost pregnancy, he played regularly and batted .165. The Yankees traded for a veteran first baseman, Craig Wilson, and Phillips became an afterthought.
In the winter, the Yankees tried again to replace Phillips, adding Josh Phelps and giving him Phillips’s job in spring training. Phelps outperformed Phillips, who lost time as he helped his mother learn to walk again after a serious car accident. Phillips cleared waivers and reported to the minors.
Manager Joe Torre pledged to play Phillips regularly after his promotion in June, but Phillips started once and Torre benched him for a week. Phillips has started in 14 of 16 games since, and his play may have convinced the Yankees that he finally warrants a long look.
So it would seem.
