Dear Yankees:

That's it? That's how you want us to think about this team until Friday, when you go play the Red Sox in Boston?

There are times I almost wish you HADN'T overachieved the first couple of months this season. We had no expectations going into April. We expected you to do badly--everybody was hurt, even the people filling in for the hurt people were hurt, and then as time went on more people got hurt. It got to the point that it seemed dangerous just to watch the game on TV.

And then Lyle Overbay started getting clutch hits. Vernon Wells came out of the gate looking like the guy we hated to see when he was playing in Toronto. Travis Hafner hit a home run against his old team on Opening Day.

But don't forget the pitching! Andy Pettitte began April by forgetting it wasn't 1998. He made opposing hitters look foolish. Yeah, we were a little concerned about Sabathia's loss of velocity, but hey, the Yankees were in first place--that's right, pundits, the team you picked for last was at the top of the division.

So this past stretch of games, really all through June and much of July, has been a cruel joke. Seriously: if you were going to play like this, raising our expectations was just plain mean.

Let's see how things went during HOPE Week, shall we?

The moment fans had waited breathlessly (certainly not patiently) for all these months arrived, a day early. Yes, Derek Jeter was coming back, and even if he couldn't single handedly lift the team out of its hideous offensive doldrums, he could certainly provide a glimpse of what real Yankee teams are supposed to look like.

That lasted three at-bats, a total of maybe two-and-a-half hours. Then Jeter couldn't leg out his last grounder, was pinch hit for in the eighth inning, and--most ominously of all---didn't rise out of the dugout when the game was won to congratulate his teammates. Something, surely, was wrong.

And it was. Like Granderson and Teixeira before him, Jeter had returned merely to injure himself again. It's considered a "mild" strain, but you can hear in the choice of words that nobody expects the captain to play in Boston. Who knows how long after that, and even when he does come back, can he stay healthy?

Then there are the continuing adventures of Mr. Rod, who went to see the MLB officials about his little misunderstanding in Florida, reportedly left stunned and shaken by the meeting, and then immediately didn't go to the minor league game in which he was scheduled to rehab whichever hip it is that's bothering him these days. The game was rained out anyway, but the brass was (understandably) pissed off.

Talk is Mr. Rod is being offered a plea bargain by the officials at Major League Baseball, which amounts to: Don't play until 2015. At all. And maybe we'll talk reinstatement then. Baseball journalists who are trustworthy report he's considering it.

To end the "first half" of the season on a high note, the Yankees played without question their sloppiest, wobbliest, most inept game of this and maybe a few other years today. Errors, both official ones and those we spectators could see, came by the cartload. Sabathia couldn't figure out what those men with the sticks in front of that white dish were doing there, so he assumed he was supposed to throw the object in his hand to a spot where they could hit it as hard as possible. By the time he was trying to catch a popup that landed just past his outstretched glove, the game had taken on the quality of farce.

Bad farce.

This is, finally, the team we had expected before the season began. And in all likelihood, it is at least fundamentally the team we will see for the rest of the year. Brian Cashman will make phone calls, but a real game-changing deal seems extremely unlikely. The best we might expect is that Jeter will get himself healthy in the next couple of weeks and come back to provide some normalcy, but not much. We can watch him be Jeter, watch Mo go out in the classiest style in history (because he can do so no other way) on those rare occasions when he'll be able to close a game, and perhaps if we're really really good, Francisco Cervelli will come back and hit .240.

It just would have been so much easier to take if there hadn't been that hopeful stretch at the beginning of the season.