Thursday, August 5th 2010, 10:48 AM  Jorge Posada, a great Yankee, maybe even a Hall of Fame Yankee someday, is in front of his locker before the Yankees go out and get a game they need off the Blue Jays on Wednesday. Posada's team is in second place at this particular moment but will be back in a first-place tie about 12 hours later, when the Twins get a run in the 13th off the Rays in St. Petersburg.  There is still more than an hour before the game, almost an hour-and-a-half before Alex Rodriguez will hit No. 600, 600 with a bullet, meaning an asterisk, because of the drugs he admits he took. But Posada is already in uniform, finishing off a can of Red Bull, ready to play.  He is asked about the Rays, who took two of three off the Yankees last weekend and won't go away.  "They play great defense," Posada said, "they're fast, they're young, they're not afraid, they hit in the clutch."  Posada didn't say the Rays aren't afraid of the Yankees. But he didn't have to, just because the Rays don't seem to be much afraid of anybody these days. Neither do the Texas Rangers, by the way, but the Rangers are a storyline for the postseason, not the August-September season that starts now for the Yankees.  And the storyline for the Yankees today, with the Red Sox coming into town for four games starting on Friday night, is this:  We find out over the remaining 55 games if they are still are the best team in the American League East, the best team in baseball, as good as they were last November when they finally made a couple of billion bucks spent over the last decade pay off with their first World Series since 2000.  The Yankees have to play the rest of the way.  The Yankees have to show that they are worth adding the payroll they added last week with Lance Berkman, Austin Kearns, Kerry Wood that Brian Cashman said he couldn't add in the offseason, that's why he couldn't sign Johnny Damon, why he certainly couldn't keep both Damon and Hideki Matsui.  So Cashman brought in other guys. New guys. Who weren't guys like Damon and Matsui (World Series MVP, don't you know) who did so much to put Cashman's fancy store-bought team over the top in the postseason of 2009. And when the new guys didn't work out, he did what the Yankees always do, and buried mistakes.  And brought in more new guys!  This may all work out great, and the Yankees will win back-to-back World Series again. We will see the rest of the way, the season that starts on Friday night when the Yankees have a chance to put the Red Sox away once and for all.  It is a good thing, by the way, that the Red Sox have had half their team go down this season with big injuries, that they will come into this weekend without Kevin Youkilis and still without Dustin Pedroia. Or the Yankees would be in the real three-way race we thought we would have in the AL East this season.
The Yankees have to take three of four or maybe all four off the wounded Red Sox this weekend, knock them right out of the conversation, and go to Texas and Kansas City and get hot there and take control of the division back from the Rays.