Coming out of the All-Star break, the New York Yankees were on the ropes, tied for third and a full eight games behind the Red Sox in the American League East.
Then, it got worse.
Thursday brought a COVID outbreak which sent six players to the IL, including a few (Aaron Judge, Gio Urshela and Jonathan Loisiaga) critical to their success.
The Red Sox took the opener of the shortened series, and things looked really bleak for the home team.
But 48 hours later, the Yankees are still kicking. In taking the final two games of the series, the Yankees actually managed to gain ground in the division. It's not like seven games out constitutes great progress, but for the Yanks, it sure beat the alternative.
Only a few days ago, they seemed ripe to be rolled and put out of their misery. A three-game sweep would have dropped the Yankees 11 games back with a little more than two months remaining, and while that wouldn't have been entirely insurmountable, it surely would have pushed the Yanks to the brink.
The Red Sox had such a sweep in their grasp, too. They led the Yankees 1-0 heading into the bottom of the fifth Saturday when things started to unravel. A pair of two-out hits produced the tying run, and the following inning, the Yankees struck against Hirokazu Sawamura.
Thanks to the sheets of rain falling and the small lagoons forming across the Yankee Stadium infield and outfield, the Sox didn't know it, but they were six outs away from punting the Yankees double-digits out in the loss column.
Then the Yankees got up and evened the series. On Sunday, sufficiently energized, they took the rubber game, too, even as their manpower issues continued to resurface. They lost yet another outfielder to injury and by the middle innings, their alignment looked like something you'd see from an independent league team.
Still, it was good enough to top the Sox, who looked feckless at the plate again. The second-highest scoring team in the American League coming out of the break, the Sox managed a grand total of six runs in three games. That kind of "production'' isn't going to cut it.
The offensive drought didn't begin when the Sox arrived in the Bronx Thursday. It merely continued.
"We haven't hit since we went to the West Coast,'' acknowledged Alex Cora following his team's 9-1 drubbing. "We've been chasing pitches and we're in one of those stretches like when we played Houston. We love to swing the bats, we do. But we've been chasing pitches out of the zone for a while. We've been chasing more pitches with men in scoring position. I think we're hitting .220 as a group since (the start of the West Coast trip).
"Offensively, we're not near the team that we are. We know that.''
The timing couldn't be worse. The Red Sox are struggling just as they kick off a stretch that has them playing the three teams closes to them in the division standings. The Blue Jays are torrid, having just swept a series against Texas, outscoring the Rangers 25-2 in the process. Next is a four-game rematch with the Yankees starting Thursday at Fenway.
Still, as the Sox moved on from the Bronx, there was the unsettling feeling that they had left unfinished.
It's not as if a sweep by Boston would have necessarily delivered a knockout punch to the Yankees. There's still a long way to go -- in the season, and in the jockeying in the American League East.
But at the very least, a sweep would have left the Yankees reeling, facing another week without the players lost to COVID, and growing whatever self-doubts they harbored as the second half of the season began.
Even before the outbreak hit them, the Yanks were a flawed, poorly constructed bunch. They lack much punch from the left side of the plate. Their starting rotation is perilously thin. And there are questions about the team's makeup, best typified by the almost indifferent play from Giancarlo Stanton, one of the game's highest-paid and most underperforming stars.
The Sox could have slammed the door on a team that seemed there for the taking as recently as Friday. Instead, thanks to their inability to score, they have cracked the door open and allowed the Yankees to wedge themselves into the entrance.
How much farther they get is unclear for now. But thanks to the Red Sox, we now know that they're not yet ready to go away.