Here is something that no one expected when baseball’s short season began: a four-game series between the Yankees and the Orioles with postseason implications. For both teams. The Yankees were supposed to be one of the powerhouses of the sport in 2020. The young, rebuilding Orioles? Just one year ago, they finished 49 games behind the Yankees in the American League East. The Yankees won 103 games. The Orioles won 54.

But then a funny thing -- well, not funny for the Yankees and their fans -- happened to the Yankees after an 8-1 start. Aaron Judge, who missed 60 games last season, was hurt again and Giancarlo Stanton, who played just 18 in ’19, was hurt again. They were supposed to hit home runs. Gerrit Cole, for whom the Yankees paid $324 million, started giving up more home runs than any pitcher in baseball.

After Wednesday night’s 7-2 victory over the Blue Jays, who recently passed the Yankees to move into second place in the AL East, the Yanks have gone 14-20 after that 8-1 start. They are 6-15 after their record was 16-6. They're 7-0 against the Red Sox this season, 15-21 against everybody else and are in eighth place in the AL postseason standings.

And they've lost eight of 10 games this season to the Rays. Now the short season has become just 17 games, starting with Cole against the Orioles in the first game of a doubleheader Friday. They can blame this on injuries if they choose to, but last year, Judge missed all those games and so did Stanton and they still won 103. Without Cole. If they’re going to look like the team everybody thought they would be before players started getting hurt, now would be a really good time. Against the Orioles, who head into the series with just one more loss this season than the Yankees, whom they came within a blink of sweeping four games from in Baltimore last weekend.

This kind of freefall reminded me of something we’d seen before from the Yankees, back in 2000, when Joe Torre’s Yankees were cruising to another AL East title before they lost 15 of their last 18 games and their final seven regular-season games in a row, ending up 87-74. They still won the East. Just not by nine games. By 2 1/2.

“That was different,” Paul O’Neill, who was on that 2000 Yankees team and is now a broadcaster for the YES Network, said on Wednesday. “By the time we went into that slide, we were cruising in the East [nine games up on the Red Sox in the middle of September]. We felt like we had sealed the deal and let down. But what we’ve seen over the past few weeks with them is crazy.”

I reminded O’Neill that his team did lose their last seven straight before the postseason.

“That was seven out of 162,” said O’Neill, a member of the last Yankees dynasty. “The 20 games they just played is a third of their season. It wasn’t so long ago that they were coming from five runs down ... to beat the Mets, and I thought it was going to be one of those signature wins to get them going again. But it turned out to be the beginning of more losing.”

He paused and said, “Can they turn this around? Of course they can. Are they going to be better if they get all their players back? Yeah, they are. But right now, they’re lucky they got off to that fast start, or who knows what the record would look like.”

O’Neill laughed then, though not at his former team.

“Man,” he said, “this can be a hard game sometimes.”

So much has happened to the Yankees, for sure. Judge and Stanton go down again with leg injuries. Closer Aroldis Chapman started the season late after testing positive for COVID-19, and he has really only made news for throwing a 101 mph fastball close to the head of Tampa Bay’s Mike Brosseau. Adam Ottavino, who was supposed to be one of New York’s star setup men, was a huge part of the 10-run inning the Blue Jays had on Monday night. Gary Sánchez, who was a home run kid for the Yankees before Judge was, is hitting .121. Aaron Hicks and Brett Gardner, whom the Yankees clearly thought could be two-thirds of a World Series-winning outfield, are hitting .209 and .165, respectively.

And Cole has been good, but certainly not the great difference-making pitcher the Yankees expected. Maybe more than anything, they needed 2020 Cole to pitch like 2019 Cole against the Orioles.

“It’s one of the oldest lines about baseball,” O’Neill said. “Losing is contagious, but so is winning. There’s still time for them to look like the team they were supposed to be. But that time has to start right now.”

September had been a hot mess before Gleyber Torres knocked in four and a skinny kid named Deivi García pitched like a star and the Yankees beat the Blue Jays, 20 years after the Yankees were an even worse mess in a baseball September before flipping the script in October and winning it all.

This team isn’t that team, obviously. But O’Neill’s right: Still time for the Yankees to be the Yankees. Starts with a big four-gamer against the Orioles. Lot of crazy things in baseball this season. Nothing crazier, not one baseball thing, any crazier than that.