E-Mail This Article to a Friend Will the real NY Yankees please stand up? BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

To paraphrase Shakespeare: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to praise the Yankees, not to bury them. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones; so let it be with the Yankees.

Still. I don’t know what to make of this $208 million team. (And let’s leave the Wrigley-bound Red Sox out of this; yes, they’re also spending a lot this season, but it’s still around $85 million less than NY — and $85 mil is more than the entire payrolls of two-thirds of MLB’s teams.)We’re more than a third of the way through the 2005 campaign, and the Yankees aren’t even at .500, much less leading the AL East. Leading? New York is fourth in the five-team division, although it’s only six games out. Yet the team is just 29-30 heading into a tough weekend series with the red-hot Cardinals in St. Louie, and the Yanks have a brutal schedule upcoming that lasts all the way through late July (save for a couple of relatively easy sets with Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Tampa Bay). But here’s the thing: there are no "relatively easy" series for the Empire Staters anymore; the Pirates (28-30) and Tigers (27-30) have nearly the same record as New York, despite their comparatively low payrolls ($38 million and $69 million, respectively). The Yankees have already shown in grand fashion that they can lose to anybody.

Proof? In the first week of May, the Yanks dropped three of four to the pathetic Devil Rays, who are all of 20-40 right now. A night after leaving St. Pete, New York’s record fell to 11-19 after an extra-frame loss to Oakland, and the vaunted Pinstripers were a last-place team.

Of course, a team this good should be able to right itself, and right itself it did, reeling off 10 straight wins — albeit against AL West lightweights Oakland and Seattle — to get the earth back on its proper axis.

Now they’ll do some damage, the team’s fans said.

Yet on Saturday, May 28, the Bronx faithful bore witness to an epic embarrassment: a 17-1 home loss by Mike Mussina & Co. to the hated Red Sox. And if that weren’t bad enough, Joe Torre’s lads then went off to Kansas City — then and now the majors’ worst team (heading into that series, KC was 14-37, 20.5 games back, and boasting an 8-17 home mark) — and dropped three straight contests to the Royals. During the course of that 5-3/3-1/5-2 series of losses, the Yankees, with their 18 former All-Stars on the payroll, were held scoreless for 15 straight innings by a Royals staff that had come into the match-up ranked last with a 5.60 ERA.

But George Steinbrenner is an honorable man. So how does he explain how his empire has gone from 27-21 on May 27 to 29-30 in a fortnight — and going 1-5 against the Royals (19-40) and Brewers (28-31)?

It’s a bit strange to see this all play out, because A-Rod is posting MVP numbers (.324, 19 HRs, 53 RBIs), and three other regulars are at .280 or above. Yet there they are, puttering along in 13th place in the big leagues in team hitting with a middling .267 average, which is 12 points less than even the $29 million Devil Rays are swatting. Fielding-wise, the Yankees are just 24th in the majors, and that is also a bit puzzling given the collection of Gold Gloves in the line-up.

But Joe Torre is an honorable man.

Decent hitting and marginal fielding, combined with utterly disappointing starting pitching (24th-best in MLB with a team ERA of 4.79), gives you a sub-.500 team. Yeah, yeah, I know that Jaret Wright has been on the shelf for the bulk of the season, but the Yankees knew that he was damaged goods even before they signed him to a whopping three-year, $21 million free-agent pact. Wright hasn’t been the problem; the other two off-season pick-ups are: Randy Johnson (5-5, 4.07 ERA) and Carl Pavano (4-5, 4.38). Both those guys commanded big contracts, and neither has been the surefire win-meister that the Boss anticipated when he shelled out the hefty greenbacks.

Johnson in particular has been stultifyingly average; can you believe that he has yet to record a double-digit-strikeout game this season? The Big Unit has given up three earned runs or more in each of his last six starts, and two other times he’s surrendered five — not to mention losing games to Milwaukee, KC, and Tampa along the way. Unfortunately, the Yanks are stuck with the lanky 41-year-old (and his big contract) for two more seasons after this, in addition to other backbreaking deals with the underachieving Kevin Brown, Jason Giambi, and others.

But Brian Cashman is an honorable man.

And it would be foolish to write off the Yankees at this point in the season, when history dictates that winning streaks can be launched in an instant, given the inherent talent embedded within.

But we’re three weeks from the halfway point in the season, and the Yankees haven’t shown us much.

I know this has turned out to be faint praise at best, but the New Yorkers had better start getting good soon, or their season will indeed be interred with their bones — and their fat wallets.

Coming Tuesday: a report from Wrigley.

"Sporting Eye" runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com