As I have said before: I am a Taoist Yankee fan.  And it is in Taoism that I find solace for the current Yankee losing streak.  How about this passage from Chuang Tzu:

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, poverty and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise,  hunger and thirst, hot and cold – such are the transformations of this world, the movements of its inevitable nature.  They keep vanishing into one another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we’ll never calibrate what drives them.  So how can they steal our serenity, how can they plunder the spirit’s treasure-house?  If you let them move together, at ease and serene, you’ll never lose your joy.  And if you do this without pause, day in and day out, you’ll invest all things with spring…(75)

      To put it another way: we can only know winning by losing.  How much more significant the 26 world championships appear from the perspective of losing.  There is nothing automatic about winning, even winning so many times over so many years.  We will have our time of loss (and Red Sox fans will rush in to take advantage of our slump), but let’s hope it does not run for as long as it did in the 1980s…

      So, if we look to the big picture, the vastness of Way, the unpredictability of its movements, than we will not lose our joy and we will invest all things with spring (remember how good everything looked at spring training?). 

     Tonight, after all, could be the start of a ten game winning streak.  Who knows?

      Jeter, by the way, takes a Taoist turn at the end of the story linked above:

“We need to get wins,” Derek Jeter said. “I’ve run out of things to say.”

    He’s right, of course.  There is nothing to say.  All that is left is to let go of expectations and anxieties, live in the moment, see the ball and hit it…

UPDATE:  OK… so last night was not the beginning of a ten game winning streak.  Quite to the contrary, the Yanks lost in a most humiliating manner: an opponent stole home on them to tie the game….But Way is vast…it could shift at any momnet (tonight, please!)