Mike Celizic

Yankee haters enjoyed a great first week of baseball. The pinstripes, starting their season on the West Coast, won a game, lost four straight to the A’s and Angels, then won one before limping back East in last place in the AL East.

All I can say is, enjoy it while you can. Tuesday's home opener proved as much.

This edition of the Yankees isn’t going to stagger through the first couple months of the season like last year’s team did. You can see that already, not in the two big wins in which they scored 25 runs, but in the four losses that leave them in last place.

Except for their second loss, a 9-4 drubbing by the A’s, the Yankees have dropped two games by one run each, 4-3 and 3-2, and one by three runs, 4-1.

Last year, they didn’t just lose early in the season, they frequently lost ugly, the victims of starting pitching that just wasn’t up to either its paychecks or the task at hand.

This year, the fault hasn’t been pitching; the team’s staff ERA is 3.04, second in the American League only to Detroit’s 2.89 and nearly a full run better than division-leading Boston’s 3.91. It’s been the lack of clutch hitting in close games.

Give credit to the other teams’ pitching for that. Perhaps more likely is an early choke for the Yankees, who probably started the year too overanxious to crush the opposition. The problem wasn’t a lack of effort, but too much of it.

Scoring 15 runs in their first game probably didn’t help, serving to make the hitters try for even bigger totals instead of just going with the flow; giving them a false sense of their own omnipotence. Add to that the pressure of George Steinbrenner sending them off into the season by stating flatly that the 2006 Yankees would win the World Series this year, and you have all the ingredients for a couple of lost series.

The good news for the Yankees is that it’s easy to choke a short series, but impossible to choke a full season. Sooner or later, when you play six days a week for six months, you just say, “screw it” — or words to that effect — and go out and play the game.

And this is a team that feels pretty good about the lineup it puts on the field every day. Sooner rather than later, they’re going to relax and put up the kind of eye-popping offensive totals that everybody expects of them.

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With Kansas City in town for the first home series, you can count on it being sooner. In fact, the Yankees bounced back in their home opener Tuesday when Derek Jeter's three-run home run capped a five-run rally in the eighth inning and produced a 9-7 victory over the Royals.

Last year, the Yankees came out of the box as if they hadn’t even been to spring training. In July, they were still in fourth place in the AL East.

They turned it on then, but they needed all but one day of the season to finally wrap up the division title. When the playoffs began a couple of days later, they found they’d not only burned up every drop of fuel in their tank, there weren’t even any fumes left.

This year, the Yankees talked in spring training about not making that mistake again. They came out of camp determined to start fast, build a lead in the division and get to September with a bit of cushion so they wouldn’t utterly exhaust themselves just getting into the playoffs.

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