LOSING: THE VIRUS.(The Talk of the Town)(Yankee baseball)

In a wonderful 1943 novel, "I Am Thinking of My Darling," by Vincent McHugh, New York City is invaded by a previously unknown tropical virus that quickly grows to epidemic proportions and afflicts the entire population. The hero is a young city official, who works day and night to control the thing, but then he himself is infected and becomes a victim. He stops work and spends his time making love. That's the virus: all the folks in town--cops and schoolteachers, subway motormen and lawyers and delicatessen owners and dental hygienists and bail bondsmen--forget whatever they're doing and start doing it, right out in the open. Everybody is in love. A huge celebratory parade is planned--all hands hurry to Fifth Avenue, with accompanying balloons and jazz bands, but in couples, so they can keep up the pairing and partying. Then the weather shifts, in mid-parade, with a cold snap blowing in from the west. The virus dies--it's run its course--and the happy men and women look at each other with a resumed seriousness and go home. It's over.

This is pretty much what it was like up until the middle of last week, when the Yankees, who have been so single-minded about winning, were caught up in losing instead. For once, it didn't feel like their own doing, exactly, because almost nobody could hit the ball anymore or catch it much or always throw it to the right place; something had come over them. By Tuesday, the Bronx Steinbrenners had dropped four in a row and seven out of their last ten. They'd lost three out of four games to the hated and feared Red Sox, up at Fenway Park, and a few days later were swept by the Bosox in a weekend series back at Yankee Stadium, scoring only four runs in three games. The Bombers' team batting average stood at .217, the lowest in the league, and they had committed a league-worst nineteen errors. They were tied for third in their five-team division, four and a half behind the Red Sox--not a fatal handicap at this early stage of things but not at all what they or anyone else in the world had expected. This was miserable or delightful, depending on where your loyalties lay, but most of all it was weird. It was glorious.

The Yankees, as we know, have finished first in the American League East for the past six years, and have played in the post-season for the past nine, picking up four World Championships along the way. They've won thirty-nine pennants in all and twenty-six World Championships. A new Yankees promotion calls this the greatest record in all team sports, but what it also means, as every Yankee executive and coach and player and nine-year-old rooter knows, is "Win or Else." To this end, the 2004 Yankees have amassed a record hundred-and-eighty-million-dollar payroll--more than the combined salaries of the Devil Rays, the Indians, the Tigers, and the Royals--and picked up last year's A. L. Most Valuable Player, Alex Rodriguez, to play third base. (He can't play shortstop, his accustomed position, because the Yanks' captain and perennial favorite, Derek Jeter, holds prior lease on the property.) They brought in two expensive new pitchers to replace the departed Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte. They did their homework, in short, and entered the long examination period of the regular season with ...