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Updated Wednesday, October 10, 2007 0:00 am TWN, By Shaun Powell, Newsday

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Falling behind was nothing new for these Yankees

NEW YORK -- The dugout was filled with bitten fingernails and churned stomachs. The seats at Yankee Stadium were loaded with overturned caps, the baseball symbol of desperation. With the scoreboard in their disfavor and the season slipping away, the mood all around the Bronx on Monday night was laced with angst as Yankeeville battled an annoying suspicion that it had seen this before.

Oh, yes. It was April, intruding on October.

In April, the New York Yankees stumbled right from the start, couldn’t find any decent pitching and were forced to spend the rest of the summer hustling to salvage their season.

Monday night, the Yankees stumbled against the Cleveland Indians in Game 4 of an American League Division Series and once again in these playoffs found themselves hustling to salvage their postseason lives.

But there is only so much a team can do, only so many rallies to muster, only so many times a team can bury itself and somehow reach the surface. That’s what the 2007 Yankees discovered Monday night, when their season ended with a loss to the Indians. They had nothing left. After seven months of comeback baseball, exhaustion finally set in, and now the only comeback left is with Manager Joe Torre regarding his job.

While they await word from owner George Steinbrenner on that issue, the Yankees must deal with the manner in which their season and postseason evolved and how it forced them to run a treadmill nearly non-stop. What began in April, a nightmarish month that ultimately sent the Yankees’ record to 21-29 and 14 1/2 games behind in the American League East, resurfaced again in the playoffs when the Yankees played catch-up baseball, this time in vain.

They lost the first two games against the Indians before winning the third.

Then Monday night, with their ace pitcher on short rest, they trailed after the third pitch of the game, then were down 4-0, then 6-1.

Then reality set in: There was no coming back from this.

The Indians took the series three games to one by winning the clincher, 6-4, in a game that was essentially decided after two innings. It was a depressingly quick and painful finish for Wang Chien-ming and the Yankees, and also a fitting one, because it was much of the same.

It’s true that Torre had a decision to make regarding Monday night’s starting pitcher, and it’s also true that Torre really didn’t have a choice. Wang on short rest made a lot more sense than Mike Mussina on long rest, based on what Mussina did in the second half of the season. Torre also figured his ace wouldn’t crumble as he did in Game 1, but that proved to be an incorrect assumption.

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