Roger Angell embraced the Yankees’ early-season struggles as a welcome surprise. In the latest Talk of the Town (peace to TFD for the link), Angell notes:

This was miserable or delightful, depending on where your loyalties lay, but most of all it was weird. It was glorious…The Yankeesí losing streak suspended all this, for a while at least, and what was refreshing about it was that the Yankees were suddenly so bad, at the plate and afield, that they seemed removed from the games, spooked or laid low not by the opposing pitcher or sluggers but by some cosmic change of terms. They were playing in a cartoon or on an asteroid landscape.

Of course, the Yankees 8-4 come-from-behind-win against the A’s last Tuesday changed the team’s fortunes (at least for the moment). They’ve won six straight, and for Angell, it’s back to business as usual, in which “Confirmation replaces expectation at these levels of sport, and fun feels prearranged.” However discouraged, Angell does a nifty job of describing how the Yankees got their groove back:

The double, by pinch-hitter Ruben Sierra, curved sharply toward foul ground in deep left field but then changed its mind and hit the line instead