There is no joy in New York today, at least not for Yankees fans after they watched their team get swept by the Red Sox this weekend.

What was expected to be a close pennant race now has the Yankees trailing the Red Sox by 9½-games, and the reaction in New York has been to hit the panic button.

The days of trying to catch the Red Sox are over, writes New York Post columnist Joel Sherman, who believes the Yankees should focus on holding off the Oakland A’s and Seattle Mariners for the top wild-card spot.

There was no shortage of words for Post columnist Mike Vaccaro to sum up the weekend for the Yankees, particularly Sunday night’s loss when they blew a 4-1 lead in the ninth.


“This was brutal, torturous, agonizing, atrocious,’’ wrote Vaccaro. “It was mind-numbing and gut-wrenching. It made an already miserable weekend positively wretched, woeful, dismal glum.’’ Perhaps that was the inspiration for the Post’s back page headline.

The back page: Aroldis Chapman picked a bad time for a bad outing as Yankees lose more ground to Red Sox https://t.co/OozjuE1J5J pic.twitter.com/XDf7R67hGE — New York Post Sports (@nypostsports) August 6, 2018

Kristie Ackert of the Daily News also writes that the Yankees should focus on the wild card as they head to Chicago to play the White Sox.

“This weekend capped a shaky stretch where the Yankees are just 18-20 over their last 38 games with question marks all over the field,’’ writes Ackert.

The headline for the Daily News was “The Walking Dead’’, with a picture of Aroldis Chapman hunched over, with his hands on his knees, presumably after blowing the save.

While Chapman is wearing the goat horns today, Anthony Reiber of Newsday writes that Miguel Andujar and Greg Bird are also to blame for their failure to record the final out on Xander Bogaerts’s ground ball to third base.

Newsday used a similar photo of Chapman with the headline “Are you 4 real?!’’