Yankees, Clemens, Pig, Lipstick

With future Hall of Fame right-hander Roger Clemens expected to start for the Yankees on Monday in Chicago, only one question remains: Will it matter?

To the current records…

Red Sox: 36-15
Tigers (WC): 30-21
Yankees: 21-29

Boston leads the American League East, while Detroit is the front-runner in the wild card race. (I know, it’s crazy to talk about the wild card in May, but bear with me.)

If the Red Sox play .500 ball (eh, .495 ball) the rest of the way, they’ll win 91 games. The Yankees would need to win 71 of their final 112 games (.634 winning percentage) to overtake Boston. I’m not sure which scenario is less likely, but I certainly don’t see both of them happening. The Yankees won’t win the division.

How about the wild card? This is at least possible. Again, assuming Detroit goes 55-56 from here on out, the Tigers will finish with 85 wins. The Yankees would need to play “just” .580 ball (65 wins) to make that happen. And they’d need cooperation from the teams ahead of them in the wild-card race, which is everyone except Tampa Bay, Kansas City, and Texas.

Even with the addition of Clemens, the Yankees pitching staff is a train wreck. I don’t care how good a team’s offense is, a rotation of Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, Chien-Ming Wang, and Triple-A pitcher du jour just isn’t enough to dig them out of this deep a hole.

If I’m wrong, and the Yankees do make the playoffs, Joe Torre gets my vote for Manager of the Year. Because right now, there is nothing about this team that suggests more than 85 wins is possible.