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Why the Yankees have one less team to worry about in East

As visiting teams prepare to play at Yankee Stadium, they are subjected to a barrage of YES Network programming, all of which naturally celebrates the franchise’s history.

“You’ve got to go through the Yankee waterboarding here,” quipped Buck Showalter, himself an underrated contributor to Yankees history, on Tuesday.

The Orioles have inflicted their share of discomfort on the Yankees since 2012, following a 14-year sentence as a punching bag for the American League East’s higher powers. In this most unlikely of successful Yankees campaigns, it’s Showalter’s group that appears to be the greatest threat.

Yet the O’s might struggle to mount the sort of second-half charge that drove them to last year’s AL Championship Series, and they took another hit in this series opener as the Yankees prevailed, 3-2, to reach a new 2015 high-water mark at 51-41 and send Baltimore back to .