Opening Day is synonymous with hope. Before the season’s first pitches are fired toward home plate and the 162 games start slowly slipping away, hope is what sustains fans in need of their first baseball fix in nearly half a year.

Maybe the Cubs will break their ignominious championship drought. Maybe the Phillies, not the Mets, will trot out the best young rotation in baseball. Maybe the Braves won’t be as bad as their roster might have indicated in spring training. (Or, in that last case, maybe not.)

Hope springs eternal, as the saying goes, and that hope carries through March and into the first weeks of the season.

And then, sometimes, it crashes, headlong into the dirt alongside an accompanying plummet in the standings, amid a flurry of batting failures with runners in scoring position. Nothing—save an ACL tear or Tommy John scare for a top young player—can ruin spring hope quicker than a slump induced by a series of un-clutch at-bats.

Such is the case with this season’s New York Yankees, who boast an excellent bullpen and decent starting pitching depth but have been felled in the early going by RISP (runners in scoring position) woes. In the last week of play, spanning a rough stretch of eight games, New York hasn’t been able to turn runners into runs, and the issues have extended into the team’s won-lost record.

At 5-8 before Thursday night’s game, the Yankees sat in last place in the American League East, and they had scored three or fewer runs in each of their losses. Not since 2008 had the Yankees been in last place this far into the season, and they hadn’t won a series since their season-opening series against Houston.

And the RISP numbers were mostly to blame. It had been more than a week since the Yankees had multiple hits with runners in scoring position in the same game; on Tuesday alone, 11 teams accomplished the feat in the same inning.

Yankee batters had collected 83 plate appearances with RISP in their last eight games—and besides accruing 13 walks in those attempts, the results weren’t pretty. New York had just five hits—only one for extra bases—and seven runs batted in in those at-bats; instead of driving in runners, pinstriped batters had struck out 17 times, flied or popped out 16, lined out three times, and grounded out a whopping 27.

That comes to a measly .074 batting average, .217 on-base percentage, and .088 slugging average. Put in another context, Yankees batters with runners in scoring position over the last week had hit worse than pitchers had fared at the plate against Clayton Kershaw in the Cy Young winner’s career.

When I told a friend about the numbers I was investigating, he asked if Alex Rodriguez was the main culprit. And while the Yankees’ controversial designated hitter hadn’t done well in RISP situations (1-10 with one run batted in), he hadn’t wielded the only feeble bat in the lineup.

Starlin Castro was 0-7 with only an RBI groundout to his name. Carlos Beltran was 0-7 with just a sacrifice fly. Didi Gregorius was 0-5 and hadn’t scored a runner. Corner infielders Mark Teixeira and Chase Headley were a combined 0-10, though with nine combined walks with first base open. Brian McCann owned just an infield single in his six at-bats. Outfielders Jacoby Ellsbury and Brett Gardner were a combined 2-15 at the top of the lineup. The team’s four reserves were a combined 1-8 with just an infield single from backup catcher Austin Romine preventing a backup 0-fer.

It’s a problem up and down the lineup, from the batter’s box to the on-deck circle to the rest of the Yankee Stadium home bench.

Having detailed all of that futility, I think New York’s offense will—or at least, should—be fine; a week’s worth of untimely groundouts and harmless pop flies is by no means a death knell for the team’s remaining games. And buried beyond the basic run totals, New York shows a set of promising offensive statistics.

Through Tuesday’s games, the Yankees had the best walk rate and second best strikeout rate in the American League. They ranked third in on-base percentage, and they were even tied at the top of the league in stolen bases after finishing third from the bottom last season.

But for at least a week, those front-end performances hadn’t translated into necessary runs, and all those walks and stolen bases had amounted to nothing in the team’s record. Save a 16-run outburst against Houston in the second game of the season, the Yankees’ offense has lain dormant so far in 2016—take out that one game, and the team has the fewest runs of any team in the majors.

The Yankees have been somewhat unlucky in those higher-leverage situations, too. New York had only a .222 batting average on balls in play with runners in scoring position but a .262 mark with no men on base. League-wide, though, BABIP (batting average on balls in play) numbers in the two situations are indistinguishable, so it’s probable that the Yankees’ disparity will diminish as the season continues.

After all, it takes offensive skills to put men in scoring position in the first place, and the Yankees have managed that first step ably. It’s no small feat to amass 83 plate appearances with runners in scoring position in just eight games.

And it will only take a few Castro doubles or Beltran homers to come with men on base to turn those numbers around. Just last year, the Yankees—with almost the same starting nine that made the aforementioned litany of feeble bats—ranked as a top-three team in a variety of RISP categories. The current sickness isn’t an endemic plague so much as it is a quick, club-wide flu.

And sorry, Derek Jeter fans—there isn’t much evidence to suggest that clutch hitting actually exists, especially on a team-wide level. A few years ago, the Cardinals set records for their batting success with runners in scoring position; last year, with many of the same players, St. Louis was one of the worst-hitting teams in the league with runners on second and third.

Rather than exist as some sort of gene independent of regular hitting ability, “clutch” hitting comes most often from teams and players that hit best in all situations.

Last year, the Blue Jays were the league’s best-hitting team with runners in scoring position, and Toronto was also one of the best-hitting teams with no runners in scoring position. Conversely, the Cincinnati Reds were the worst-hitting squad with RISP, and it’s not like they were an offensive powerhouse the rest of the time.

So it’s not all bad news for the Yankees. The hits will begin to fall and allow runners to score from second and third, and the team might pad the scoreboard with crooked numbers instead of the binary 0s and 1s they’ve managed over the last week. And with the AL East expected to last the duration of the season in a muddle, one through five, odds are the Yankees won’t fall too far behind any one team at the top of the division before those results regress to expectations.

But for now, at least, the Yankees are third from the bottom in a parity-filled American League. The Bronx Bombers have bombed with runners on base, and it’s made the early-season schedule a hopeless slog.