Mike Celizic

There is no longer unrest in Yankee Nation; there is resignation.

Not that there is not even the merest sliver of hope. As long as there is life, there is always that. But the expectation that the Yankees will get better and march through the second half of the season at a .700 clip and storm into the playoffs is dead.

No matter what happened during the past 11 seasons, that expectation was always there. The Yankees didn't go to the playoffs every one of those years by simply suiting up and taking the field. There were years when it took near-heroic effort to get into October baseball. But the thing for the fans was that no matter how dreary things looked, they knew things would turn around.

It's not happening this year, not to the degree the Yankees need. They beat the Twins Monday night, but no one dared to suggest that it had changed anything about this season. It was their second win in four games, but also their second in eight and third in 12. And at the end of the day, they were still three games under .500, their bullpen was still overworked and undertalented, their line-up still featured two and sometimes three utility players — Melky Cabrero, Andy Phillips and Miguel Cairo — in starting roles, and their starting pitching was still something of a patchwork.

And they still trailed Boston by double digits in the AL East and had five teams to climb over in the wild-card race.

If they had started their Monday with coffee and The New York Post, they would have seen Alex Rodriguez's wife on the cover wearing an F-You t-shirt, giving the world's best headline writers license to plaster "F-Rod" over the picture. Then they would have turned to the sports section to find that columnist Joel Sherman saying it's time to use A-Rod the way the Cowboys once used Herschel Walker — to get a pile of prospects in trade and start building a champion again.

Sherman is not a loose cannon columnist who makes such suggestions just to generate headlines and sell newspapers. He thought this one through, concluded that the Yankees' season is finished, assumed — as many in baseball have already done — that A-Rod will opt out of his contract at the end of the year, and said what needed to be said.

I was all for trading A-Rod before the season began. My reasoning was that he was never going to thrive in New York, and the Yankees could get a lot of pitching for him.

I was wrong about his thriving — he's played as brilliantly as he ever has this year. But he does have the opt-out clause at year's end, and his agent, Scott Boras, can be counted on to use it to wring even more money out of some poor sucker of an owner, maybe out of the Yankees. He's not getting the Yankees to the postseason because no one is on the roster who can do that.

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