The other military analogy is that winning the battle means nothing if you don’t win the war…. It looks as though we won the battle of the trading deadline, but it only matters what happens on the field between now and late September/October.

How we pitch will have more to do with whether we make the playoffs or don’t (and advance in the playoffs or don’t) than an offense which will still be below average…. Maybe Ludwick and/or Tejada will catch fire and carry the team for a week+ (to several wins), which could make a huge difference….

Maybe the rather injury-prone Ludwick goes down for the 2nd time this year; if so, we have plenty of other outfielders (assuming too many of them haven’t gotten too rusty from not being used), and since we gave up no one in these deals who would have been pitching for us this year, it’s worth a shot.

Ludwick’s stats with RISP give me hope he’ll be the significant upgrade everybody thinks he’ll be, but he has been playing in the weakest division (by far) of all of baseball, so we’ll see…. He’s 8 for his last 31 with (just) 2 doubles, but 7 for his last 20 since coming off the DL (with one of those doubles).

We still have 21 games left against the NL Central (just over one-third of our remaining games), including 3 at home against the Reds and 4 in St. Louis with that team which has had our number, the Cardinals themselves. Thank goodness two-thirds of those games are against the Pirates, Brewers, and (mostly) Cubs (strangely, two 4-game series, so 8 of them).

After the last game against Florida, we only have 3 more against the N.L. East, which is a home series against the Phillies; and that means we have 35 games against the N.L. West, including 10 each against the Giants and Dodgers, 9 against the weak D-backs, and 6 against the up-and-down Rockies.

Even though the Rockies and Dodgers are 5 and a half behind the Giants and 7 in back of us, neither is dead yet by any means…. I’d still rather have the best record in the League at this point than be anyone else, but there’s a long way to go, and despite added veterans, this is a relatively young team (certainly in terms of pennant race experience), and we don’t know how they will respond.

Yankee veterans know how to deal with new arrivals at this point in the year, because it happens every year, and every year they’re contending; it’s impossible to know how the new additions and the mounting pressure will affect this team.