As much as I was pining for baseball by the end of my honeymoon — having gone the better part of three weeks without catching more than a few innings here and there — I’ve had a tough time sinking my teeth into the action since returning home. That’s as much a product of putting the various non-wedding-related strands of my life back together as it is of the current woes of my two teams, the Dodgers and Yankees. But either way, I’m still a bit disoriented, so, with my new double-wide iMac in place today, I’ve been strolling through the stats to see where these teams are. Today I’ll hit the Yanks, with the Dodgers coming in the near future.

When I departed for Milwaukee, the Yankees held a 15-19 record, having won four straight games at a time when many analysts, myself included, were calling for a priest to administer last rites to the dynasty. The streak reached ten wins, just in time for the team to cross the .500 threshold by the season’s quarter mark and preserve a few necks, particularly that of pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre. The big bat during that stretch was Tino Martinez, who reeled off eight homers in an eight-game span, creating a morality play in which the golden child’s Bronx virtues of wholesome clutch goodness were hailed as trumping the mercenary black arts of the disgraced (and nearly demoted) Jason Giambi. During the streak, the New York Times‘ Murray Chass credited George Steinbrenner’s intervention, which is fine if you believe in the kind of General Patton/Knute Rockne bullshit that the Boss sells and perhaps no more outrageous than all of the Chicken Little pronouncements that this was a team on its way to 100 losses and a new dark age.

Jotting down some notes during my brief return to New York, I noted that the most important part of the Yanks’ season might come while I was in Italy, when the Yankees’ own honeymoon from the streak wore off and they needed to maintain some kind of day-in-day-out consistency. Two weeks later, that consistency is nowhere to be found. After dropping two out of three to the Red Sox, the Yanks have just been swept by the worst team in baseball, the Kansas City Royals — a team Joe Sheehan called a contraction candidate just a few days ago (fellow BPer John Erhardt’s take on the Royals was hilarious).

While Alex Rodriguez had a hot enough May to be named the AL Player of the Month and the offense as a whole has rolled to a 5.31 runs per game clip — tied for third in the majors — the team is still fighting several drags on the offense. Giambi (.234/.379/.355) is hitting like a man who left his bat speed in the Gold’s Gym “pharmacy”. Hideki Matsui (.262/.319/.398) has borne more resemblance to the hitter who struggled in his first year in America than last year’s slugging superstar, though with fewer groundballs. Robinson Cano (.247/.266/.393) has shown a little pop and exactly no control of the strike zone, walking a mere three times in 95 plate appearances. All the speed in the world can’t make Tony Womack (.265/.310/.298) a productive hitter, particularly at an offense-first postion; his OPS is nearly 150 points worse than the average AL leftfielder. And even a seven-hit burst over a four-day span hasn’t returned Bernie Williams (.252/.329/.371) to being the fearsome hitter of yesteryear.

As bad as those hitters have been, A-Rod (.313/.422/.626) and Gary Sheffield (.325/.415/.540) have been propping up the offense. They’ve had considerable help from Derek Jeter (.386 OBP as the entrenched leadoff man), Jorge Posada (coming off a scorching .325/.398/.588 May that has quieted the doubters), and Martinez has provided some of the pop Giambi apparently can’t, though at .245/.341/.532, it appears he’s crested as well.

But make no mistake: pitching and defense are still the main culprits of this team’s woes. At .660, their Defensive Efficiency Ratio is 28 points worse than any other AL team, 38 points below league average, awful at a record-threatening pace, and one point lower than it stood on May 10, a week after the big shakeup that sent Womack to left and Wiliams to the bench. The team’s 4.57 ERA is the ninth-worst in the majors, and the 6.08 strikeout rate is lower than it was when I bitched about Stottlemyre. Mike Mussina (3.92 ERA) appears to have gotten rolling, but Randy Johnson (3.92) has hardly been the dominant force from the catalog, Carl Pavano (4.50, with a team-high 13 homers allowed) has gopher trouble, and despite reeling off four straight wins while I was gone, Kevin Brown (5.14) still looked like the staff ace of the Suck City Sucky-Sucks the other night against KC. Rookie Chien-Ming Wang, however, has been a pleasant surprise, posting a 4.06 ERA despite a very low K rate (3.35 per 9 innings); his secret is keeping the ball on the ground (a 2.70 G/F ratio, which is Derek Lowe territory) and he’s yet to allow a homer. It’s too early to start fretting about where he’ll wind up if and when Jaret Wright returns; on a staff this fragile and uneven, he’s certain to have a role.

The front end of the bullpen has sorted itself out, with Mariano Rivera and Tom Gordon blessedly returning to form, while Tanyon Sturtze has maintained the gains he showed last fall. But the back end looks like a trainwreck at which Felix Heredia and Jay Witasick would be welcomed; Paul Quantrill (6.53), Buddy Groom (6.59) and Mike Stanton (7.36) have obviously taken a few paddlings. The depth they had at the outset of the season is gone. First, the numbers game caught Steve Karsay off base — he was released after being designated for assignment (Bronx Banter’s Cliff Corcoran weighed in with a fine, lengthy piece about Joe Torre’s penchant for burning through relievers and Karsay’s place in that history). Almost on cue, Felix Rodriguez went down with a knee injury just as they watched Karsay depart. It’s like that.

At 27-26, just one game from the one-third mark of the season, the Yanks have ridden their current five-game losing streak into fourth place in the AL East. They’re five games out of first and 4.5 out of the Wild Card spot; get used to hearing about the latter as much as the former, as this team will likely have to scrap for its October invitation. The 100-win season typically pencilled in for the Torre Yanks would require a 73-36 record (that’s a .669 winning percentage, not quite ’98 territory but not far off) to attain. Ninety wins (63-46, or .578 from here on out) will put them in the thick of the Wild Card but guarantee nothing other than frayed fingernails. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of excitement, of course, but that shouldn’t distract anyone from the harsh lessons the season has brought so far. This is not a team of miracle-makers, this is every bit the Homer Simpson-designed kludgemobile I envisioned in March. The ride over the next two-thirds of the season doesn’t promise to be any smoother.