Rant #1,470: I'm a Believer

No, I am not going to talk about the Monkees' song today, but I am going to talk about believing in something that I never thought possible:

The Yankees are in first place in their division, and who woulda thunk it when the season began?

No, not me.

I thought the Yankees had an old, washed up team.

I thought they had more question marks than plusses.

I thought that they might not even be a .500 team, and maybe even have the worst team in their division.

What is even worse, I thought that they might have a worse team than their crosstown rivals, the Mets.

Well, I was wrong, and I admit to it.

The Yankees are in first place as the All-Star break is here, and I am as enthused as I can be about this team.

Look, the American League East this year is not anything to write home about. There are nothing but flawed teams in the division--the Orioles, the Blue Jays, the Rays and certainly the Red Sox.

And yes, the Yankees are flawed, too.

Their starting pitching is tied together by a thread, and you never know if you are going to get a strong start from these guys, or the pitching is going to suffer a real blowout.

The defense is suspect, and you have a second baseman who is hitting .170 or so.

But you also have a couple of players having bounce-back seasons, including Brian McCann, Mark Teixeira, and the PED poster child, Alex Rodriguez.

And you also have a core of younger players who know how to play the game, including Dellin Betances, Brett Gardner, and now, their newest callup, Rob Refsnyder, who I have been touting to people as their next great second baseman. He was finally called up this weekend, and already has a couple of hits, including a homer, under his belt.

You have a real long bullpen, and you have a manager, Joe Girardi, who seems to know what he is doing.

But what the Yankees have done this year is pretty much do something no other team has ever done.

They have extended their team to not on the basic 25 players, but really, up to about 30 or 31.

They call players up with reckless abandon to replace other players, sometimes for just a game or two, and then they send them down to make room for other callups.

So what it amounts to is a 25 man team and a taxi squad of interchangeable players that can fill short-term needs.

Yes, you use up the players' options by doing this, but they cannot worry about such things now, and the yo yo continues.

It injects fresh blood into the team, and it has sparked the Yankees, because all of these call-ups seem to have filled the role that they have needed them to fill.

As I said, the Yankees are still very flawed, and with the division that they are in, there really isn't that much difference between them and the Red Sox, the last place team there, beyond the games behind predicament that the Bosox find themselves in.

It should all go down to the wire, but baseball appears to be exciting in the Bronx once again.

And once the All-Star stuff is over, Friday begins the second half, and Yankees fans like myself are anxious to see what the second half brings.

It is also funny how things work out. If you have been keeping up with my "Classic Rants," many of the recent re-posts have to do with the 2009 Yankees, their last championship World Series team.

Six years is a long time, and maybe the Yankees are ready for another championship? (And yes, Cubs fans, I know that six years is nothing compared to the eternity you guys have waited.)

So, as I conclude today's Rant, I have one more thing to say:

Let's go Yankees!