There’s magic in the Bronx

You know who nobody wants to play in the first round of the playoffs? The Yankees, with or without Sonny Gray. This year’s Yankees now have as much bullpen as the Indians did when they made it all the way to Game 7 of the World Series last year, and you may have noticed they have more stick. A lot more stick. This is about more than just passing the Red Sox, something the Yankees were going to do even before David Price went back to the disabled list. This is about the noise they can make in the tournament.

It seems these Yankees are hardly ever out of a game. By now it’s clear there is some magic to them, especially when they’re down, even when they go more than a month of baseball without winning a single series.

The Yankees come from behind. A lot. The Yankees tie games in the ninth inning or later or win them. They get down 9-1 to the Orioles in April and come back and ring up 14 runs of their own and win the game. They are down to the Cubs at Wrigley in the 9th and Brett Gardner hits a home run and they come back again and beat the Cubs this time. They are down to the Red Sox at Fenway after Chris Sale has pitched like as much of an ace as there is in baseball, but then Matt Holliday hits one off Craig Kimbrel in the 9th and the Yankees finally win in 16.

Clint Frazier hits a walk-off home run to win a game against the Brewers three weeks ago. The Yankees are down 5-3 to the Rays on Thursday night at Yankee Stadium and get it to 5-4 in the bottom of the 8th and then Gary Sanchez sneaks a ball through a shift and they tie it with two outs in the bottom of the 9th and then Gardner goes deep again and they win again.

Of course it surprised nobody when Gardner did it again on Saturday afternoon against the Rays, more 9th inning magic, this time with a single. And the Yankees won again, 5-4. They have become baseball’s “Late Show.”

We talk all the time about starting pitching. Guess what? After Sale, you tell me which starting pitcher scares you for the Boston Red Sox? Rick Porcello? Take a look at his record. He’s 4-14 and has pitched like a scrub this season. And the Yankee bullpen, after a long, bad stretch, is so much better than Boston’s now that the Yankees have David Robertson ahead of Chapman and Betances, and have Chad Green pitching this way, there is nothing to discuss.

Do the Yankees need another starter? You bet. So do the Astros, who have been the class of the league through the first 100 games and change of the American League season. Coming into the season I thought the Indians were a better bet to make it back to the World Series than the Cubs were. Coming out of Friday’s games, and even as the Indians have started to make noise of their own lately, the Indians were one game better than the Yankees in the standings.

The Indians have an ace, absolutely, in Corey Kluber when he is healthy. The Red Sox have Sale, who has been the Clayton Kershaw of the American League season. Absolutely. These are ways of saying that the Yankees have become a lot more attraction than just Aaron Judge. All the way back in spring training, neither Brian Cashman – who has had some 12 months since the last Trade Deadline – nor Joe Girardi would make any concessions about the present, with all the talk about a bright Yankee future. They turned out to be right. Now the Yankees make their run.

After 21-9 they went 2736, you bet. Here they are, anyway, having added Robertson, having added Todd Frazier, whom the Red Sox needed as much – maybe more – than the Yankees did. After wandering around the wilderness for nearly six weeks, they have responded by winning three out of four against the Mariners on the road and coming home to win the first five games of a homestand.

Luis Severino isn’t Sale. But he is the Yankee ace. If the Yankees do win the East, he would be Game 1 of the division series. Lately he has been what the Yankees hoped he would be.

This may not be the Yankees’ year in the end. But it has been some year, more interesting and more exciting than the last three or four years combined. It is not just the kids, Judge and Frazier and Sanchez. Look at what Didi Gregorius is doing, even having started late after an injury in the World Baseball Classic. Through 78 games, he has 16 homers and 49 RBI and a .307 batting average. Go ahead and project out what the home run total would be if he had played a full season.

The Yankees aren’t just a team to watch again. They are a team to watch all the way to the end. It reminds you a little bit of the old days, at the old Stadium, when the bottom of the 9th was the roughest neighborhood in baseball. Six times this season the Yankees have won after trailing in the 9th inning or later. The only other team that has done that well is the Dodgers.

“This is a team that brings its lunch pail to work every single day,” Cashman was saying Friday. “And when they do get behind, from the seventh inning on, they just seem to dig a little deeper.”

When he was asked about the 27-36 stretch, Cashman said, “When we were playing that way, the rest of the division kept us in it.”

Then we were talking about the character Cashman’s team has shown this season and he was talking about the guy who had won the game the night before with his 18th home run of the season: Gardner.

“An old-time, throwback baseball player,” the general manager of the Yankees said of Gardner, who would hit No. 19 in the bottom of the first on Friday night. “The character that we’ve been talking about today? That’s his character.”

The Red Sox might end up in third place in the division. The Yankees were set up to win this division before the Red Sox announced that Price was hurt again. Judge hit another Friday night. So did Frazier. We have really known since April not to go to sleep on them. No matter how late it is.

The rest of the division had six weeks to put them away. Didn’t. Or couldn’t. Look out for the Yankees the rest of the way.