BALTIMORE -- As they head into a one-game season against a pitcher they've hardly been able to touch this season, with an offense that has managed to score more than four runs just twice in the past 12 days and at a ballpark that has been less than hospitable to them -- 20-20 since the All-Star break -- even though they call it home, the New York Yankees now ask you to believe in them, and not in your own eyes, nose or gut.

They may look like they're at the end of their rope, having lost six of their last seven games of the regular season, but the Yankees insist they are only at the beginning of their run.

"Whether you lose seven out of 10 or you win seven out of 10, on Tuesday you're still zero-zero," Alex Rodriguez said. "You start again. We're a veteran team, you know what you have to do, you win, you move on."

"This is not the first time that we went through a bad stretch as a team," Carlos Beltran said. "In the regular season, you're going to go through stretches like that. Unfortunately for us, it happened at the end. But the regular season is over. Now it's about getting ready for what's coming, focus on the game, and trying to do our best."

"Not really how we drew it up but in the end it doesn't matter," Chase Headley said. "We've been somewhat of a streaky team all year so hopefully we can get a streak going the right way here. Obviously you like to finish out strong, but everything starts from scratch so we gotta come out and be ready to play Tuesday."

Said manager Joe Girardi: "We'll wake up tomorrow, it's a new day and we're where we want to be. We're in the playoffs."

A string of clichés? You bet. A failure of logic? Absolutely.

But clichés become clichés for a reason -- by being overused because, often, they are true and, often, logic has no place on a baseball diamond.

The Yankees looked every bit as lifeless in Sunday's season finale, a 9-4 loss to the Baltimore Orioles that completed a sweep on the last weekend of the regular season, as they had in their previous four-game series against the Boston Red Sox, and as they have pretty much since July 28, when they were 57-42 and seven games ahead of the rest of the American League East. Since, they have gone 30-33, fallen six games behind the Toronto Blue Jays and barely held on, with the help of the Arizona Diamondbacks, to the first AL wild-card spot.

There is no earthly reason to think they can win that game, not with Dallas Keuchel, a left-handed ground-ball machine who went 20-8 with a 2.48 ERA, on the mound for the Houston Astros, the league's leading home-run hitting team batting in a home run hitter's paradise of a ballpark.

Then again, Keuchel has been a different pitcher at home than on the road, 15-0 with a 1.46 ERA at Minute Maid Park as opposed to 5-8, 3.77 on the road. Thirteen of the 17 home runs he has allowed came on the road. And the Astros overall were a horrendous road team, with just 33 of their 86 victories coming in visiting ballparks for a road winning percentage of .413.

Plus, Keuchel will be going on three days' rest, something he has never done in his four big-league seasons. (He did go on two days' rest once in 2013, allowing two runs on five hits over six innings.) Keuchel is not a particularly hard thrower; he relies on a sinker to get ground-ball outs, so the short rest may not matter. But for whatever reason, Keuchel seems to be a different pitcher at home than he is on the road, and that could work to the Yankees' advantage.

At the same time, the Yankees need a big performance out of Masahiro Tanaka, who had a disastrous outing June 27 against the Astros in Houston, allowing six earned runs on seven hits, including home runs by Chris Carter, Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve, in five innings. Not only must he be effective, he's got to work deep into the game, considering how shaky the Yankees' middle relief has been lately.

And somehow the Yankees' offense, which hasn't just limped to the finish line but pretty much crawled there, has got to wake up against one of the best pitchers in baseball. Since the All-Star break, Brian McCann has batted .199, the lowest batting average of any regular in the league over that span. And McCann is not alone; over the second half of the season, Brett Gardner hit .210, Rodriguez .218, Jacoby Ellsbury .224. Beltran rebounded nicely from a terrible beginning (.283-12-37), Didi Gregorius seemed like a different player both on the field and at bat, and Greg Bird filled in nicely for injured Mark Teixeira.

But the Yankees as a whole seemed like a team in decline on the mound and at the plate. They looked tired and minus enthusiasm in their last two series of the season, even knowing that both their playoff spot and, later, their home-field advantage could be in jeopardy. At times, Girardi seemed to manage scared, at times he seemed to manage desperately and over the last weekend in Baltimore, even with some sense of resignation. Splitting the lineup into two watered-down squads for Saturday's doubleheader was a mistake that contributed to a sweep; pulling starter Michael Pineda with two outs in the fourth inning of a 3-1 game, with the No. 9 hitter, Ryan Flaherty, who was 1-for-12 lifetime against Pineda, coming up, seemed like surrender.

And truly, it was from that point on that the game got away from the Yankees. Chris Capuano, designated for assignment four times over the course of the season, came in and got rocked. So did Bryan Mitchell and Caleb Cotham, who gave up a monstrous home run to Chris Davis to complete the scoring. None of those relievers will be on the postseason roster, but honestly, with the exception of closer Andrew Miller, setup man Dellin Betances and lefty Justin Wilson, none of the relievers will have been all that much better in the second half.

Still, the Yankees ask you to set all that aside and simply believe that once Tuesday comes, everything will be OK again. It's called taking a leap of faith.

"We've done it five times this year," Headley said. "You just gotta stay positive, keep grinding, keep going. We'll take a day off and come back strong."

"Everything is erased," Girardi said. "It doesn't matter what you did the day before, two days before; it doesn't matter if you win 20-1. The bottom line is I thought we swung the bats better today and now we have a shot."

A shot in the dark, maybe, but that's what faith is all about, believing what someone tells you when your own eyes tell you the complete opposite.