Don’t look now, but the Red Sox are just five measly games behind your team, you squirrely bastard.

And as you hit up the Angels in Anaheim, where you’re 0-3 this season and 5-17 since 2005, we’ll be visiting the lowly Royals. No, we won’t take anything for granted in our series against Kansas City, but I do have a feeling that the upcoming weekend series at Yankee Stadium — the one most of the New York media laughed off as inconsequential just a month ago — will have greater significance than you once may have thought.

I ain’t relinquishing one ounce of this division until the math tells me so.