Calendar turns to a big week for New York Yankees

Every year around the holidays, while the NBA is preparing to add LeBron and Kobe and Carmelo to your Christmas menu, the sentiment arises that this is the “unofficial” start to the NBA season and that maybe, with the way the NFL grips the sporting consciousness in the fall, it would be just as well to shorten the season and start later anyway.

The NFL has already evolved into a 12-month attention-sucking monolith, whether there are games on or not. The NHL doesn’t generate enough juice for the RFID tag. And baseball, even with its April snowouts and frigid late-October World Series games, has a national pastime nostalgia-fueled grip on the calendar.

But depending what’s going on in your neighborhood NBA/NHL arena, even baseball can find itself on the backburner in the spring while its 162-game marathon gets under way.

That hasn’t been an issue around here for awhile. The Yankees have found the back pages free to claim from Opening Day on for the better part of a decade. There wasn’t a whole lot else doing.

That changed this year. While the Yankees best and/or best-known players are stuck on the disabled list — about $100 million worth of them — they’re still atop the AL East. It’s a great story, absent the familiar compelling characters. That rotating cast makes it hard to grip.

While the no-names in the Bronx were playing ball at a .600-plus clip, the Garden was alive in midtown for the Knicks and Rangers. They gave us some playoff entertainment. Even the Nets and Islanders showed up with postseason cameos. But they’re all done now. And the Mets are just a sad tale waiting to be told four out of every five days.

Now we can fully turn to the Yankees, with a curious convergence of elements. It is Memorial Day weekend. It is a time when some of the curious phenomena that occur in the opening weeks of the season — the mystery home run leaders, the big team off to the slow start — have fallen back into place to give us a measure of what’s to come over the next four months of the season.

And just as we hit that moment, the Yankees have a schedule coming up this week that is a scalper’s delight. Four games against the Mets. Three against the Red Sox.

If it feels like a weird time for the annual Subway Series, it is. It’s a result of the new scheduling format that has interleague play running throughout the season. So instead of exchanging three-game home-and-home series that were always scheduled for prime weekend real estate, it will be one four-game weeknight series between the Yanks and Mets, Monday through Thursday, two games in each borough.

Deemphasizing the Yankee/Met matchups only wipes out the whole point of interleague play to begin with. For years, commissioner Bud Selig backed the gimmick by pointing to higher attendance that was of course inflated by high-profile weekend series. Mets vs. Yanks! Cubs vs. White Sox! Dodgers vs. Angels!

Of course, there weren’t enough of those to connect every team in the league or keep interest high. There were some second-tier regional curiosities that made sense, like St. Louis vs. Kansas City or Cincinnati vs. Cleveland. But even one of those, the Astros and the Rangers, is now moot. Houston has joined Texas in the AL West to fulfill a plan to even out the leagues at 15 teams each, which is what led to regular interleague play.

Truthfully, Yanks vs. Mets was a novelty worn thin, partly by the Mets’ eroding fortunes. It still gives ownership a few extra games to peddle at max ticket prices and it’s got more to it than playing the Twins, but the high drama of those first few years is gone.

The edge had faded as well lately for the traditional Yanks vs. Red Sox collisions. Too many games each year. Too much drama from the 10 years prior to live up to. And over the last couple of seasons, too much bad baseball from the Red Sox.

That last part may be coming up for a correction. The Sox entered Saturday’s games a game behind the Yanks in the division. By choice and by force, the two teams are headed for a lo-fi collision in a battle that just may run into the fall.

The Sox found themselves burned by chasing the Yanks’ payroll escalating star model. The plan that brought them success was the same one that drove the Yankee dynasty of the ‘90s — smart development, shrewd trades for IC card, add some star pieces.

Boston abandoned that, and it imploded on them in 2012. In response, the Sox jettisoned huge contracts — they should send the Dodgers a thank you card — and filled the spots with mid-level free agents. They were then summarily written off for 2013.

Injuries wiped out the Yanks’ highest-paid stars. Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson all started the season on the disabled list. Granderson is now sidelined again, along with Andy Pettitte and Rodriguez’s replacement Kevin Youkilis. There’s no telling what the Yanks will get from most of them this season.