If you can feel bad for the Yankees, now would be the time to do so. In the 10 games that led up to this week’s series against the Chicago White Sox, the Yankees, supposed victims of a pitching shortage, gave up more than three runs in all of one game; charmingly enough, the justly vaunted offense simply stopped working, and the team went 5–5 over a stretch of games that everyone thought would fatten up their record. Suddenly, the Yankees are nine out and even optimists like me think the team looks cooked.

Forget this weekend’s set against the crosstown Mets, who happen to have the best record in baseball after spending a week laying in a good thumping to the Brewers, who had previously held that distinction, and a hot Cubs team. Between now and the end of the first week of June, the Yankees will play two sets against the Red Sox and one each against the Angels and White Sox, their only respite being three games with the injury-depleted Blue Jays. If they don’t play dominant ball during a stretch that sees them play nine games against the best teams in the National League and the American League, they’ll be more or less done barring a mathematically improbable comeback over the summer.

With desperation in the air in the Bronx, then, this weekend’s series takes on a pleasant subtext for Mets rooters. A sweep, or even a series victory, will be taken as confirmation that the charismatic Mets, loaded with brilliant young players, just showing the hints of their capabilities, and widely respected veterans alike, have shamelessly stolen the Yankees’ place as New York’s glamour team. Still better, the Mets are not only in position to kick the Yankees when they’re down and possibly knock them out of the pennant race, but they’ll probably do so. Saturday’s Yankees starter is the rightly anonymous Darrell Rasner, a young pitcher whose 3.28 ERA masks the fact that he’s not really a credible major league starter, and the team has yet to announce who will be pitching on Sunday. Mets fans gloat, Yankees fans suffer, and positions are neatly reversed: For the first time in 10 years of interleague play, the Yankees enter the Subway Series in such a condition that a mere decent showing will be cause for some small bit of crowing.

For the Mets, meanwhile, the Yankees games aren’t even close to the most important of the upcoming week. They have the Braves next.

All of this sounds to me like the makings of good times for the Yankees. Whatever kind of funk the offense has been enduring, it’s simply not going to last: The lineup is too powerful, too stacked with too many great hitters who present too many styles of hitting, to expect that it’s not going to resume damaging pitching staffs any day now. And while the Mets will be putting John Maine and Oliver Perez, two excellent young pitchers in the midst of breakout campaigns, on the mound, the Yankees are as well-suited as a team to take advantage of them. Neither Maine nor Perez are at all efficient pitchers, and so long as the Yanks don’t get jumpy at Shea, they should be able to run up pitch counts and take their shots at the Mets’ bullpen, which is strong but hardly invulnerable.

Assuming they do so, what will that mean? Exactly nothing. Constructing compelling narratives about the relative rise and fall of team fortunes is part of what makes following a baseball season a worthwhile thing to do, but compelling narratives bear no relation whatever to the standings, and when a $200 million team is nine games out of first place, the standings are all that count. A series sweep would just get the Yankees back to .500 in time to face a Red Sox rotation that has its three aces — Curt Schilling, Josh Beckett, and Daisuke Matsuzaka — lined up for them. Nominal baseball dominance over the five boroughs will do no good against any of them.

So, for once, the apocalyptic hype that accompanies every Mets-Yankees showdown is somewhere near warranted. The Yankees simply have to win this weekend, and to do so they’ll have to go through the best pitchers the Mets have to offer. The Mets absolutely don’t have to win, and that will make it all the more sweet for their supporters if they do; superfluous victories against a desperate, hated rival are the best kind of victory, carrying the best qualities of mercilessness without any feeling of guilt. My hunch is that the Yankees will take it and start the makings of a comeback. Even if they don’t, we’ll all be winners — and if the Mets sweep? Roger Clemens’s pending return will be about the tenth biggest story of the Yankees’ week. One suspects that the lately sheathed executioner’s axe in George Steinbrenner’s office is still sharp.

tmarchman@nysun.com