There are times when it seems like sports exists solely to make fools out of those who make predictions about sports.
The last three Yankee games collectively make up one of those times. All offseason, the conventional wisdom was that the Yankees offense would be taking a step backward and that was even before injuries took Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson out of the lineup.
Conventional wisdom may prove correct in the long run, but right now it is taking a pounding on par with the one the Indians pitching staff has received over the last couple of days. The Yankees slammed five homers on Tuesday night en route to a 14-1 victory over the Indians that evened their record at 4-4 on the season.
The Yankees have now scored at least seven runs in each of the last three games, something that the team didn't do at all last season. Seeing as how no one had many complaints about their ability to score last year, that would seem to be a pretty big rebuke to the notion that the Yankees can't score enough to compete with their lineup.
As you'd expect, Robinson Cano was in the middle of a lot of the scoring again on Tuesday. He hit his third homer in the last two games, posted four hits overall and drove in five runs to serve as the engine for the lineup that the Yankees need him to be whether his running mates are Jeter and Granderson or Nix and Overbay.
He now has seven hits in his last 10 at-bats, which is naturally frustrating to pitchers trying to get him out. Indians starter Carlos Carrasco followed Cano's homer by plunking Kevin Youkilis, which got Carrasco ejected and helped set up Youk's inevitable homer in his next trip to the plate.
Yes, we know it is just three games and that the Indians hardly threw Bob Feller in either of the last two games but it's still promising to see the Yankees light up the scoreboard. While the homers are nice to see, the most impressive rally of the game was the four-run spurt in the second inning that broke the game open.
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The rally came with two outs and didn't feature any of the home run balls, a nice break from the pattern that we've grown accustomed to seeing from recent Yankee teams. If the power is going to be down -- and it should be, Tuesday's effort notwithstanding -- the Yankees will need to string together rallies the way they did in the big win.
No one's going to nitpick all that much about how the Yankee runs are coming as long as they keep coming, though. And the last three days have provided plenty of reminders that the Yankees can still put them on the board.
Josh Alper is also a writer for Pro Football Talk. You can follow him on Twitter.
