AL Wild Card standings are hiding an ominous truth for fading Yankees

At this moment in time, despite two straight ghastly losses against the Detroit Tigers in which the bullpen brought new meaning to the term "crushed by a steamroller," the New York Yankees are still sitting relatively comfortably in playoff position. After a weekend at Fenway Park? Things could get quite uncomfortable quite quickly.

Entering Thursday's not-quite-but-kind-of-sort-of-a-must-win finale against Detroit, the Yankees are one game in the loss column ahead of the Red Sox for the top Wild Card spot, and three losses (2.5 games, technically) ahead of Seattle in the final slot. But if your anxiety is peaking, you should look even deeper than that to get the full picture.

Teams Yankee fans probably wrote off months ago, like the Texas Rangers, Cleveland Guardians, Tampa Bay Rays, and Kansas City Royals, are all still involved. The path is difficult for KC and Tampa Bay, but Texas sits just five games back of the Yanks, while Cleveland is six out.

Here's where it gets frustrating, though, with 17 games to go in the Yankees' regular season. Nothing is favorable about the upcoming weekend at Fenway, where the Yanks will face three consecutive nemeses in Lucas Giolito, Brayan Bello, and Garrett Crochet (on Sunday night) in front of 40,000 fans with their forks, knives and napkins out. Winning any one of those games will be a monumental task. Not saying that should be the case. But it obviously will be.

Meanwhile, the Guardians will face the Chicago White Sox for three games on their home turf, and will miss All-Star right-hander Shane Smith, who touched the upper 90s against the Yankees a few weeks back in a showcase start. If Cleveland wins the finale against the Royals on Thursday, then takes care of business against Chicago, this could tighten in a blink.

And while the Yankees are lucky to hold the tiebreaker over Texas after taking the season series (their current five-game lead is really more like six), they split six with Cleveland, and the Guardians hold a far better record against the AL Central than the Yankees do against the East (24-13 vs. the Yankees' 19-23). It's still a difficult path. But there's a chance that it looks much smoother when Monday comes.

There's still time for (waves hand around, depressed) whatever this is to not be a collapse. But ... this is certainly what collapses look like.

Yankees' position in AL Wild Card standings does not tell full story amid their collapse vs. Tigers

A six-game lead on a playoff spot with 17 games to play would be an historically significant choke, but it would not be unprecedented; the 2007 Mets, of course, blew a seven-game edge with the same number of games left on the schedule.

The main difference there was that those Mets had three of those 17 games head-to-head with the team chasing them in the Philadelphia Phillies. In fact, they were the first three of the stretch, and Philly swept by a combined score of 18-11. The Yankees do not play Texas again. They do not play Cleveland. They have to take care of their business in their own personal silo, while hoping the rest of the league comes to their aid.

The final series of the regular season, by the way, somehow pits Cleveland against Texas. Someone's got to lose. But someone's also got to win. The Yankees would be very wise to make sure that they don't have to pay one iota of attention to the action there.