For Real? - Yankees 8, Royals 5

Positives coming out of the weekend: Hughes was lousy, and the Sox took two of three from Seattle. That's all.

Give the Yanks credit. Coming out of the all-star break, they had a month of easy baseball to play. And with this sweep of the Royals and the Tigers' collapse, they find themselves just a half-game out of the wild card.

In the past week, the Yanks have had a team OBP of .447. Since the all-star break, the Yanks have had a team average of .330 and a team OBP of .400. This is a team, that, offensively, is firing on all cylinders right now. Robby Cano is batting .434 in the last month. I though age and the wear of catching would slow Jorge Posada in the second half, and he's batting .400 over the last month. Abreu is at .350 over the last month, Matsui at .345 with 11 dingers. All of those guys who looked old and done in the first half, have suddenly come alive. And how.

Of course, the other side of the story is that the Yanks have accomplished all this in playing most of their games against KC, Tampa Bay, and the White Sox, three teams that are at the bottom (along with Texas) in the AL ranking in team ERA. Against teams with decent ERAs like Toronto and Baltimore, the Yanks went 4-3.

Yanks now go up against Toronto, Cleveland, and Baltimore. Gonna be a lot more difficult than what they've faced. However - I've said it a million times, and I'll say it again - the mark of a good team is the ability to dominate against bad teams. And the Yanks have done that very well over the last month. But the bats have to cool off sometime, and that better happen now.