Look out, world: Bronx Bombers have returned

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Jason Vargas is 6-feet tall, he weighs 215 pounds, and he throws lefthanded. Those are just about the same dimensions as Sandy Koufax, if you add five more pounds and subtract two inches. And that, generally, is the last paragraph Jason Vargas and Sandy Koufax should ever share.

Except: Vargas had started this season with an extraordinary rush, one of the few bright spots for the Kansas City Royals in an otherwise dreary first two months.

(It is no coincidence the Royals and Mets — combatants in the 2015 World Series — have the exact same 16-23 records after Wednesday’s games. They have had strikingly identical, and similarly soul-crushing, seasons to date.)

Heading into Wednesday’s game with the Yankees, the 34-year-old Vargas (who had a two-game cup of coffee with the Mets 10 seasons ago) had thrown 44 2/3 innings on the season and he had allowed five earned runs, That’s a 1.01 ERA in any league. He’d struck out 39, walked eight, allowed one home run, generally been as unhittable as any pitcher in baseball. He was 5-1.

He was on as good a roll as he has been on his whole career.

“He’s throwing the ball as well as anyone I’ve seen so far,” Tampa Bay manager Kevin Cash had said last Thursday, when Vargas spun seven scoreless, three-hit innings in shutting down the Rays. “He’s tough and he’s smart.”

And the Yankees proceeded to turn him into a tomato can Wednesday night. Remember those numbers, five runs and one homer, that he’d brought into the game? Yeah. The Yankees reached him for six runs in four innings, including a bomb off the bat of Aaron Hicks. They battered the rest of the pitchers the Royals threw at them, too, finally settling for a 11-7 win.

“These guys work hard, play hard, run the bases well, hit for power,” Yankee manager Joe Girardi said, rattling off all the things that make his job just a little easier night to night. “We made [Vargas] work tonight.”

And it is the work they turned in against Vargas — more than doubling his season ERA, to 2.03 — that ought to raise the eyes of an awful lot of teams across the league. Because this was merely the latest proof that the Yankees are close to having, right now, what they’ve always coveted:

A circular lineup, one without any dead spots in it, one with strikingly few flaws in it. They’ve done this before, of course. You’ll recall the signature team of the Dynasty Boys, 1998, featured a ninth-place hitter in Scott Brosius who hit .300 and knocked in 98 runs.

If you’d like to delve into your history books you can take a peek at the 1936 Yankees, who scored 1,065 runs in 155 games. Of the eight regulars on that team, the lowest on-base percentage belonged to a rookie named DiMaggio at .352, but even he chipped in 29 homers and 125 RBIs. And the pitchers didn’t offer a breather either: Red Ruffing hit five homers; Johnny Murphy hit .361.

Now, those teams did what they did across whole seasons, and these Yankees have done what they’ve done for only 37 highly entertaining games. But they already have scored double-digit runs eight times after doing it only nine times all of last year. They are on pace to score 958 runs, which would be the most since 2007 (968) and the second-most since 1939.

Also: we said they’re close. There is still the matter of first base, where Chris Carter’s had an RBI single to raise his average to .233 (which is still only .173 when you combine his numbers and Greg Bird’s). Chase Headley has lose a hundred points off his average the last month; he’s prone to slumps. So, no, the lineup isn’t quite there yet. But it’s close. “It’s been fun to watch,” Girardi said.

Vargas might disagree with that. So might a slew of pitchers who have acquired whiplash across the season’s first seven weeks watching 1-iron blasts ricochet all across the ballpark, off a dozen different bats.

But after spending the past few years prone to periodic brownouts with their bats, it’s no longer ironic to refer to this team as the Bombers any more. They bomb. They rake. And they put hurtings on everybody, even southpaws who’d been doing their best to channel Sandy Koufax and instead looked like Sandy Ullrich. (It’s OK. You can go look him up.)