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On May 4, 2009, the normally unflappable Derek Jeter and his manager Joe Girardi were ejected from a game at Yankee Stadium for arguing strikes and balls with home plate umpire Jerry Meals. In that 6-4 loss to the Boston Red Sox, Meals had drawn the ire of the Yankee dugout by calling—as confirmed by video replay—a wildly inconsistent strike zone to pitcher Phil Hughes and Yankee batters. The controversy came on a wet, raw night when people in the stands had sat through a rain delay that lasted over 2 ½ hours to see the first-ever game between the Yanks and Red Sox in the new Yankee Stadium.

Asked to comment on the incident after the game, Jeter said this: “You’re in a no-win situation. I mean, you can’t really talk about the umpires. I really can’t give you anything more than that, because I’m sure it’s not going to be the last time he’s umpiring.”

In Monday night’s Yankees-Blue Jays game, Meals, a 13-year veteran with a reputation among players and managers alike as one of the worst umpires in Major League Baseball, was at it again. In the bottom of the fifth inning, Meals ejected Blue Jays shortstop Yunel Escobar and manager Cito Gaston for arguing a strike call. Escobar’s at-bat had ended with a flyball out to left fielder Brett Gardner to complete the frame. Following the call, replays indicated Escobar had a brief, discreet exchange with Meals before leaving the batter’s box to take his position on the infield grass. Meals waited until Escobar was back on the field to toss him. Gaston was quickly thrown out of the game after he approached Meals to argue on behalf of his surprised player.

Meals’ floating strike zone had grated on players of both teams all night, starting out tight to the plate and then expanding as the game progressed. But he saved his poorest umpiring for the sixth when he inserted himself into the action by largely instigating what almost became a bench-clearing brawl.

At the bottom of the inning, with Toronto slugger Jose Bautista leading off at the plate, Yankees rookie starter Ivan Nova threw a second-pitch fastball to Bautista that, while clearly intended as a brushback pitch, sailed out of his hand to come in high but not very tight— “a ball right down the middle to the backstop,” as Mark Teixeira described it.

Bautista, who had hit a two-run homer off Nova in the third inning after a controversial call at first base, went down in the dirt and reacted angrily as he gathered himself. At the same moment, Meals chose to step away from the plate and issue demonstrative warnings to Nova and both benches rather than take control of the situation as tempers flared. The video shows an irate Bautista gesture toward Nova and then step toward the pitcher’s mound behind the umpire, who was apparently unaware of the developing situation.

Though the benches would clear and the bullpens empty no blows were exchanged in the squabble. But Meals’ warning was as unfortunate as it was egregious since the wild pitch came nowhere close to Bautista, who would later acknowledge, “I was just trying to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from {Nova}” when he stepped toward the mound.

Meals, again, is often at the center of on-field controversy. Here are some examples I gave last season following the Yankees-Red Sox game in which he ousted Jeter and Girardi:

In September 2007, {Meals} booted San Francisco Giants manager Bruce Bochy and Giants’ relief pitcher Brian Wilson from a game versus Colorado at Coors Field with one out in the eighth inning. Wilson had walked pinch hitter Joe Koshansky and then hit the next batter, Yorvit Torrealba, on the first pitch he threw him.

Meals ejected Wilson without a warning, and Bochy was also tossed after arguing the call.

San Francisco Chronicle sports reporter John Shea would write:

“Plate umpire Jerry Meals, who thumbed both Wilson and manager Bruce Bochy, might have been the only person at Coors Field to believe it {the hit-by-pitch} was on purpose. It came with the Giants leading 5-4, one out and a runner on first base in the eighth, and it would seem unlikely that Wilson's intention was to put the potential tying run in scoring position.”

The Giants would fall 6-5 that night.

Said the Giants’ then-closer Brad Hennessey, “Bad judgment call by {Meals}, and it ended up costing us the game. It’s unfortunate there are no repercussions for their {umpires’}” actions. You have to live with it.”

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In a tight August 2008 game against the LA Angels at Tropicana Field, the Tampa Bay Rays also had to live with a hotly debated Meals call—though they were fortunate enough to come up with an eventual win.

Meals was the first-base umpire that night. With the Angels leading 2-0, Tampa Bay outfielder B.J. Upton had legged out an infield RBI single to score a run, but was called out when Meals ruled he’d turned toward second base and was tagged by the Angels' Howie Kendrick. Rays' manager Joe Maddon furiously stormed from the dugout claiming Upton had made no move to extend his hit to a double. He was tossed from the game.

As replays confirmed, Upton had neither stepped nor even leaned toward second base.

According to St. Petersburg Times sports columnist John Romano, “A reporter from Yahoo! Sports called it a ‘phantom’ turn. The Los Angeles Times characterized it as an ‘apparently missed’ call. Rays broadcaster Dewayne Staats deemed it the second-worst call he had seen in more than 30 years in the booth, and ESPN’s Baseball Tonight analysts agreed it was a blown call.” Maddon himself had this to say after the game: "It's unconscionable. It can’t happen. There's no room for that. That call can’t happen. It was a fabricated call. It’s in a crucial part of the game in a pennant hunt.”

Almost exactly two years later, in a 2010 baseball season when poor umpiring has spoiled a perfect game and become a hot topic of conversation, Jerry Meals continues to make no one in baseball happy with his erratic calls and bad judgment. His inflammatory actions Monday night could have resulted in a brawl but didn’t, and that’s a good thing. But Meals’ unfortunate track record is illustrative of an absence of accountability among officiators that baseball commissioner Bud Selig seems disinclined to address. And that isn’t good at all.

After all the negative publicity professional sports has received in recent years, it seems almost absurd for Major League Baseball to need yet another reminder that it must do everything in its power to ensure its games maintain their integrity. And at a time when fans are straining their budgets to attend those games—or buy expensive cable packages to view them out of market—holding umpires accountable for their performances really doesn’t seem too much to ask.

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When Mohamed Kamara was born in 1992 the civil war in his native Sierra Leone was into its second bloody year. Bordered on the north and east by Guinea and on the south by Liberia, the country is at the westernmost edge of Africa and despite its small size is among its most geographically, mineralogically and agriculturally diverse locales. Its capital city of Freetown perches on the Atlantic coast and has the largest harbor on the continent. Its inland regions are a lush green quilt of timber forests and fertile, cultivated fields that produce coffee beans and kola nuts and palm kernels for the making of palm oil. But mostly we hear about the diamonds because of the brutality men inflicted to get hold of them and exchange them for guns during the war.

The diamonds for which Sierra Leone has become well-known—infamous is  the more accurate term—are in the Kono district in the southeastern portion of the country. They are found in alluvial deposits, loose sedimentary soil and mud and gravel near the surface of the earth, and extracted by miners who do their digging with trowels and sieves and often their bare, calloused fingers.

In Mohamed Kamara's first year of life the revolution that had spilled into his country from Liberia began overtaking its southern towns and districts. The armed men who came over the border formed alliances with local rebels and Sierra Leone’s government forces responded with counterstrikes. And to ordinary people like Mohamed’s family who were caught in the middle of that explosive conflict, the diamonds that should have been a blessing became something terribly different because of greed and politics.

“I was there when he was born ... everything was fine. I’d watch him crawling, wearing his clothes, all the good things ... he was a wonderful kid,” remembered his cousin Mabinty at Yankee Stadium, a world away from Sierra Leone both in miles and circumstances.

This was Wednesday during the Yankees’ annual HOPE Week, when people from the organization’s broad community are honored for having persevered through hardships that could have given them a plethora of reasons to fail—and who have, moreover, taken their experiences and used them as fuel for forward motion, impetus help others in need.

“Sierra Leone, in the eighties, was a wonderful country ... but when the civil war came in, Mohamed was back there,” Mabinty said. “He experienced a little bit and fortunately he escaped the war. We lost some family members . . . it’s very heartbreaking at the moment.”

Mabinty and her parents had preceded Mohamed seeking asylum in the United States, and six years ago when the war in Sierra Lone attained a peace that might at best be considered nominal—continued disputes between warlords and their factions means that for countless innocents the fighting and hardship has been uninterrupted—the eleven-year-old Mohamed, who was by then mature beyond his age after having become his family’s main provider, made the wrenching decision to join them, bringing his sister to the new land with him.

The choice wasn’t motivated by self-interest but its distant and distinct opposite. Mabinty and Mohamed’s families had lived in the same compound, which in rural Africa is an area within a town where members of the extended familial unit share the tasks of bringing home an income and raising children. What is good for one relative uplifts and benefits all, what hurts one wounds the community. It is an ethos of close-knit interdependence and support, of brotherhood and sisterhood—in short, of people generally caring for one another as a matter of daily life—that Mohamed brought with him to his adopted country, where he hoped to find opportunities that would ultimately allow him to help his family back in his homeland.

Joe King noticed that about Mohamed very early on in a relationship you’d describe as very close to father-son. A strongly built guy, Joe might’ve easily been mistaken for one of the Stadium security guards hanging around before Wednesday’s ceremonies. But he in fact teaches at Bronx Leadership Academy High School in one of the city’s most underprivileged neighborhoods. Mohamed was a shy ninth grader when he became his student.

“After class he would hang out with me and just talk—about life, not school or results,” Joe said. “And when I got to know him, I saw he was really mature and responsible. And he felt this responsibility to help his family back home.”

Impressed with the young man, Joe decided to try and get him summer employment when the school year ended. He knew someone who worked at a New Jersey golf course, and recommended Mohamed for a caddying job, putting his personal reputation—his name—on the line in the process. Mohamed did not disappoint him.

“He would get up every morning at four-thirty and take two buses—he went every day,” Joe says. That’s significant because a new caddy doesn’t always get out on the course with a member of the club, which means he doesn’t always wind up getting paid for being there. And Mohamed would often sit in the heat for as long as 10 hours without earning anything for his trouble. But he hung in. “When he started, he was probably sixtieth on the caddy chart. Now he’s fifth. Every summer, every weekend in the fall, for four years, he’s worked. And every penny ... he sent back home to Sierra Leone. As a caddy, you make a lot of money for a young man, but it all went.”
 
The longer Joe knew Mohamed, and the closer they grew, the more the teen gradually came to reveal about his struggles amid the horrors of war.

“When the rebels came in {his family} had to flee into the woods,” Joe said. “He was on his own for two weeks at one point—he’d lost his parents when he was out searching for food, went after them, kept looking, and finally caught up with them. He was eight, nine years old ... nothing,” Joe adds, with an emphatic downward push of his hand to emphasize how small he would have been. “He used to go get mangoes and other fruit from the trees and bring it home for the family.”

As a young boy Mohamed saw people getting killed, their hands getting cut off right in front of his face. He saw pregnant women having their stomachs sliced out. He had to step over dead bodies in the street.

The army would eventually attempt to recruit Mohamed as a child soldier, something he strongly considered as a way to improve the situation of his mother and siblings. Being a soldier offered regular pay and a measure of protection for his family but his mother dissuaded him from signing up, explaining that it would hurt him in the longterm, and that the better way to help would be to come to the United States and make his future there.

That is what Mohamed did. Helping his family and others is what motivates him and is at the root of his value system. What is good for one benefits and uplifts all.
 
When Mohamed started school he didn’t speak a word of English. When he graduated Bronx Leadership he was in the upper percentile of his class. In between he mentored other African kids at school, understanding from hard experience the immense challenges they faced integrating into their new environment. And he organized church fundraisers to help kids back in Sierra Leone get educations.
 
A petite woman in her twenties with skin the color of deep mahogany and large, dark brown eyes that are captivating windows into a quiet depth of personality, Mohamed’s sister Fatmata works at a supermarket on Manhattan’s eastside and sometimes her modest weekly pay falls shorts of her expenses. He has always been there when she needs a hand. “My brother’s a hardworking kid. He always helps me when I need him ...  he paid for my hairdo yesterday!” she said with an abrupt smile.

 Although Fatmata is several years his senior, she speaks of Mohamed as someone awed by his maturity. “If I only had a chance, I would write a book about him ... he’s a great man,” she said. And then, pausing, added, “We grew up together ...we’ve been through the war.”

The war. The War. Fatmata and Mabinty speak the phrase as if it is always to be capitalized, and listening you get the sense that to them it something great and dark beyond reckoning. But while both seemed hesitant to elaborate on a civil war that became a decade-long nightmare parade of massacres and mutilations and slave labor and unending starvation, words weren't necessary to convey their profound intimacy with its  terrors; the shadows that crossed their faces when they recalled it spoke volumes.

Amid the commotion at Yankee Stadium, Fatmata was overwhelmed by the surprises Wednesday’s HOPE Week events brought to her brother. An early morning trip to the New York Stock Exchange. A session at City Hall with New York’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and several Yankee stars, including Derek Jeter, CC Sabathia, Marcus Thames, Curtis Granderson and Yanks legend Reggie Jackson. Later he would be introduced to His Excellency Mr. Shekou M. Touray, the permanent Sierra Leonan ambassador to the United Nations. That would be a very important meeting for Mohamed, who intends to major in business when he enters college, and hopes he can someday forge business and political relationships to ease the struggles in his native land.
 
Joe King will tell you of Mohamed’s generosity and belief in karmic returns for him and those he loves. “When he sees someone that’s homeless on the street, he gives them a few dollars or buys them a burger or something ...and it really has come back to him.” Joe paused, looked around, groping for words. “Like today ...he’s a boy from Sierra Leone ...four years ago he wouldn’t smile ....”

With his handsome sculpted features, intense gaze, and athletic build, Mohammed himself projects a sort of balanced strength and solidity while downplaying his achievements.  When asked near the end of a long and eventful day how he had maintained his composure in the media spotlight, he would only comment,  “I’ve been through so much there is nothing to fear. The bad, the ugly and the good. I’m still young, eighteen, but I had to ...help my people during the war, which helped me grow up fast.”

If you consider his age, and where he’s been in that relatively short span of years, and where he stands now in a week when hope has been the operative word . . . if you think about these things it's hard to place limits on what Mohamed can attain in the future.

A future that, imagined in its sweeping breadth of possibility, would seem to be nothing less than hope’s very definition.

At Yankee Stadium, one of the few places in the world Jane Lang says she really feels at home, she runs her hand from the neatly trimmed green grass over to the area behind home plate that is painted white with the Yankees’ famous interlocking “NY” logo.

Jane, who has been sightless since birth, and came to love baseball listening to Red Sox games on the radio with her father as a young girl in Massachusetts, had wanted to see the letters with her fingers—the way she’d wanted to see, through touching, the rubber on the mound and the faces of Yankee greats on the plaques in Monument Park.

So now she crouches down, feels the stiffness of the grass where it’s painted, asks a few questions about it from someone nearby, and sees the letters she has never seen the way people with eyesight do. Watching her you can tell she’s overwhelmed, which is how she’s seemed throughout most of the day. In that place between smiling and crying where the emotions are welling up in with such force you can barely keep them from coming out in a torrent.

It’s four-thirty, five o’clock in the afternoon in the hot sun during the Yankees’ team batting practice, hours after Jane was surprised at her door in Morris Plains, N.J., by a team contingent led by manager Joe Girardi, and players and former players that included Tino Martinez, Joba Chamberlain, David Robertson and Chad Gaudin. This is the second annual HOPE Week in Yankeeland—the acronym standing for Helping Others Persevere & Excel—five days during a mid-August homestand when the entire organization, those in casual business clothes and pinstripes alike, will go whole hog to honor folks who have dealt with some of life’s toughest situations in ways that make us all want to be a little better as human beings, for ourselves and maybe the person next to us too.

Girardi was carrying a bouquet of flowers for Jane when she answered the door Tuesday morning and realized that a bunch of Yankees had materialized seemingly out of the blue in her front yard in sleepy, suburban Jersey. Jane was dressed in the duds she wears to a game—the Yankees pins and earrings and sneakers—because she thought that she was going to see the Yanks play Detroit that night after a family trip to the museum. Jane attends about 30 games a year along with her guide dog Clipper, a golden retriever she trusts with her life.

Jane believes things happen for a reason. She says, for instance, that if she hadn’t been blind, she would never have gotten Clipper from Seeing Eye—or met her husband of 45 years, who was a trainer with the organization. And if she hadn’t had Clipper, she believes, she might never have learned to fully trust another living being to the extent that she has. That’s Jane in a nutshell. She runs on this positive charge that she will tell you came from her mother, who instilled the conviction that she could do anything in life she chose if she just applied herself.

When Jane and Clipper go to a game, they will first walk to the New Jersey Transit station in the middle of town at the juncture of Speedwell Avenue and Route 53, and across the street from the Morris Plains Pharmacy, Morris Plains Nails and Arthur’s Tavern. Then they hop on the railroad, and take the hour’s ride into the commuter crunch at Penn Station under Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. Finally they walk up to the street and crosstown to the 34th Street D train subway and head back underground to pack themselves aboard an MTA train heading up to the Stadium. Jane keeps eight pieces of candy in her pocket, one for each stop to 161st Street. Whenever the train pulls into a station, she takes one piece and puts it in her opposite pocket, so she doesn’t miss her stop outside the ballpark.

“If I had my way, I’d be there every day yelling my head off,” she says.

Jane likes it that she knows the people who help her to her seat and the people who sit near her at games. She likes it that they know her, too. Likes feeling she’s part of the action around her.

“I love doing it. It’s my way of being free and living in the world the way it is,” she says. “You have to do that every day . . . this world isn’t equal for anybody. Everybody has different ways of doing things, different abilities, different disabilities. You just have to make the most of what you have and live the best life you can . . . that’s it.”

Typically she gets to the Stadium early for batting practice and keeps the radio off so she isn’t distracted while she listens to the sounds of balls cracking off wood and popping into supple, well-worked leather. Once the game starts she turns the radio on, breaks out her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and water for Clipper, and maybe an ice tea for herself, and stays till the final inning is over.

Jane takes everything in, fully and completely, just in a different way from fans with eyesight. “You don’t have to see it with your eyes. There’s a whole lot of stuff you can go by. You can go by how the fans are acting . . . If you would close your eyes and concentrate, you’d be surprised,” she says.

Jane can tell off the bat if a home run’s been hit and can usually tell if it’s a foul ball. If a pitch is thrown really high she can sometimes tell when it hits the glove whether it’s a ball. She smiles a lot when she talks to you about this or tells one of her funny stories. She’ll remind you that it’s important to have a sense of humor about things, including when she doesn’t like an ump’s call and shouts out an offer to let him borrow her guide dog.

“I don’t say that unless somebody {in the crowd} says something first,” she tells you. “‘Cause let’s face it, I haven’t got a foot to stand on!”

When Jane heads to the ballpark, she’s going there with the intention of having fun. And she always does. Someday, says her son Dan, she’s going to get herself kicked out of the Stadium with her antics. But he’s kidding, of course. He knows she won’t. Especially not now after this HOPE Week jamboree. She’s been on the big screen with the manager, and exchanged hugs and kisses with Tino and Paul O’Neill, another former Yankee who took part in the event once Jane got to the Stadium on her big day. This was long after the flowers Girardi handed her promptly went missing in action because she was too excited to even know where she put them. After Jane, her brood, and all those Yankees—and Clipper of course—took the walk from her home to the downtown area, crossed to the railroad platform, and went chugging across the river into New York City for what she now realized would be more than just an ordinary game.

So surprise there again, the Warrior himself was touring Monument Park with Jane. That’s how it works. If you’re an honoree, you’re going to get bamboozled. Hoodwinked. By the Yankees and the people who love you the most. In good ways, naturally. Ways Jane says she’ll never forget.

Jane’s family was in on the whole setup. Her husband Pete, and her daughter Sharon, and Dan and her other son Bill, both of whom had come motoring up from Atlanta. Bunch of fibbers, they’d cooked up that yarn about the excursion to some museum exhibit in the city, and then that Yankee game so she could give props to Johnny Damon on his return to the Bronx. For three weeks Pete had kept the secret while starting to pull everybody together rand making a slew of preparations. And here he has such an innocent face.

Now, as Pete stands holding Clipper’s leash, and Jane relishes seeing the Yankee letters on the grass with her fingers, that blameless puss is full of love for his wife. For the woman she is, what she’s accomplished, how her presence affects others.

You can understand how he feels. There is a purity and simplicity in Jane’s outlook that makes you appreciate the moments you are living and imparts an awareness of how special those moments truly are.

“I’ve been lucky . . . and I’m the richest person,” she says. “I say so many times, I got the three things I wished for. I wanted to live in a house with a roof that didn’t leak, I wanted to have somebody that loved me, and I wanted to have kids. So I got all three things.”

Jane Lang is as humble as they come. She tells you she’s just plugging away like anyone else. She minimizes the idea that she’s the least bit special and speaks of all the good things she has in her life.

But then in an offhand moment, she says, “It’s not how much you can gather. It’s how much you give.”

You don’t tell her you know that’s what she’s really about. She’d probably be a little embarrassed. Instead you go along for the ride, soaking in her vibes, and thinking how a woman who has never been able to see with her eyes can, by example, open yours to so much.

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The New York Yankees have the best record in baseball and sit atop the American League East by half a game, but the inconsistent baseball they’ve been playing lately is troublesome. As losers of five out of their last seven games, the Yanks have lost ground to their chief division rivals. Just a few weeks ago, the Tampa Bay Rays were trailing them by three games, the injury-riddled Red Sox by eight in the loss column. Tampa is now just a half-game back, and the Sox six in the loss column.

The Yanks’ current four-game series versus the Red Sox is a big one for both teams. For the Sox, it is a chance to make themselves relevant; sweeping the Yankees in the Bronx would bring them to within two games of their archrivals in the overall standings, three in the loss column.  Conversely, and even after losing the first game of the series on Friday night, the Yanks effectively have a chance to put Boston to sleep by winning three of four.

If that series opener was any indication of what’s to come, however, the Yankees will be fortunate to come away with a split. Against a hobbled Red Sox team, on their own field, New York looked lethargic, sloppy and defensive.

There’s no single reason for the 6-3 loss—and that could be what’s most disturbing about it. The Yanks have lost games in a variety of ways lately. They have given away too much in too many areas, and opposing teams have been willing takers. And the generosity toward opponents has started with their manager.

Joe Girardi frequently talks about the big picture. He is almost compulsive about resting his players. It served him well in 2009, but the deeper he gets into 2010, the more it’s looking as if he’s taken it to a detrimental extreme that must be reevaluated.

Last Sunday in St. Petersburg, with a chance to pull off a series win against a Rays team hot on their heels for the division lead, he rested Brett Gardner and Alex Rodriguez. He put non-waiver trade acquisitions Lance Berkman and Austin Kearns at first base and in left field, respectively, using Mark Teixeira as designated hitter so he could have the proverbial half-day of rest. And while Girardi was opening sleepaway cots and laying out road grey footie pajamas in his dugout, Rays manager Joe Maddon fielded his best squad behind one of his best pitchers, going fulltilt for the win. And he got it, score 3-0. On the mound for the Yanks, enduring Berkman's misplays at first base that led to two of Tampa’s three runs, CC Sabathia must have wondered what he’d done to warrant having the B-team at his back.

The Yanks returned home to face Toronto as losers of two out of three with AJ Burnett on the mound—the equivalent of plugging a hole with a hand grenade that’s had its firing pin yanked. One Burnett blowup later, they'd lost two in a row, turning Tuesday into the rubber game of the series with pitcher Dustin Moseley, a sub, cast as stopper. Far from ideal, and again they came out on the bottom. The Yanks would eventually salvage the last game of the set, but losing two of three to Toronto clearly wasn’t what they’d envisioned.

Afterward, it was easy to wonder if Girardi regretted laying out the jammies in Florida, easy to see how Sunday’s loss had made Monday and Tuesday’s look and feel worse than they otherwise might have. Leaving St. Pete up on the Rays by three obviously would have been much better than leaving ahead by one. The Yanks didn’t take their best crack at it. The Rays did, and they reduced their opponents’ division lead to the point where it was right there for the taking. A day later they were tied for first place, and the following day it was in their sole possession. And though they’ve dropped a half game back as of this writing, the distance between the two teams in the standings is really negligible

But getting back to Friday and the Red Sox, Javier Vazquez versus Clay Buchholz.

An hour or two before first pitch, with the Yanks' starting lineup posted to show catcher Francisco Cervelli paired with Vazquez and Berkman slotted in as DH, word circulated in the clubhouse that Jorge Posada might be available at his locker to answer questions about his sitting out. Because this was the game after an off day when Posada had presumably rested, and because Cervelli had caught Vazquez on his most recent starts, there was considerable interest in what Posada had to say about being left on the bench. But the pregame Q&A never materialized, leaving his absence a void surrounded by question marks.

With the Yanks leading 2-1 at the bottom of the second inning, that void opened wide between home plate and first base. With one out and Red Sox third baseman Adrian Beltre on second base, Cervelli dropped a popup off Mike Lowell’s bat. Vazquez said he should’ve had it himself, and Cervelli said it was his ball, and the fact is that it was because he called for it. His ball, his error. And what’s worse, he seemed to forget there were men on base, allowing Beltre to cruise to third.

After that things rapidly fell apart. Vazquez did manage to get the next man, but walked the next two—including the number nine hitter—which resulted in  Beltre strolling on home. Then Marco Scutaro doubled and the inning got uglier. Before it ended, the Sox were leading 4-2, with all three runs they scored having been unearned.

Clay Buchholz has been among the best pitchers in the Majors this season and came into the Bronx owning an 11-5 record and a 2.59 ERA. In his previous start he’d taken a two-hit shutout into the ninth inning, though he eventually wound up with a no-decision because of a blown save. If you expect to win against a pitcher of his caliber, you don’t hand him a lead and then add to it in the sixth, when Vazquez surrendered a two-run homer to outfielder Ryan Kalish, who’d had all of seven Major League games under his belt. 

Based on his track record it’s unlikely Posada would have dropped that ball in the second when the game was really lost. There’s been plenty of talk about his deteriorating abilities behind home plate, and some of it’s valid, but it's hard to recall when, if ever, he has bobbled a routine popup over the course of his long career. As hard as it is to figure why Girardi would leave his bat out of the lineup kicking off a big series against the Red Sox when he’d had a full day of rest. Despite his scrap and energy, Cervelli batted .180 in June and has hit .214 since the beginning of July with 7 errors for the season.

In the postgame press conference, somebody asked Girardi if anything was wrong with his starting catcher. He replied that there wasn’t. Somebody else followed up, questioning him about why Posada wasn’t in the lineup. Girardi said something about the Yanks having acquired a DH in Berkman, implying that if you’ve got the guy on the roster, you ought to use him. He also said he wanted to make sure the knee cyst that bothered Posada during the last road trip didn’t flare up. But then he insisted the cyst wasn’t bothering the catcher.

In the end it kind of felt like Girardi wasn’t too forthcoming with his answers. Maybe there’s a more serious health issue with Posada than he wanted to disclose. Maybe he was being overcautious again and brought out the home pajamas for Posada. Or maybe he just prefers having Cervelli catch Vazquez. Even at the expense of leaving Posada out in favor of Berkman, who entered the game hitting 2-15 since his acquisition from the Astros, and left 2-19—though in fairness, an excellent defensive play by centerfielder Jacoby Ellsbury robbed him of a hit in the eighth.

As for Girardi, all you can do is take him at his word. If he says Posada’s feeling okay, you have to believe it. And if you’re going to believe it, you also have to believe that it was a mistake keeping him out of the lineup. That in Girardi’s increasingly vocal preoccupation with the big picture, he again neglected to consider adequately that, in baseball, the picture’s a mosaic of individual wins and losses. You eventually want to wind up with more of the former than anybody else but by sitting Posada—who was feeling well enough to pinch hit in the ninth—he went a long way to adding another game toward the losses that can make the big picture a failed and unsightly yearlong effort for the New York Yankees.

Amid a tightening pennant race, chased by two teams that are determined not to go away, it might be that the best thing the Yanks’ big-thinking manager can do for his team is to start thinking small.

Follow Jerome Preisler on Twitter @YankeesInk.

There is going to be a lot of instant and excessive mythologizing of Friday night’s game at Yankee Stadium and that’s fine if Hollywood ever decides to produce an epic on the life of George Steinbrenner. But when those who write in the sports pages give in to that temptation, it detracts from our appreciation of the Yankees’ victory, steals the very human glory of the moment for fleeting uplift, and blurs the real actions of men with fanciful notions of supernatural intervention. Worst of all, it diminishes rather than illumines Steinbrenner’s legacy.

It was not ghosts or mystical forces that propelled the Yankees to their rally and ultimate win over the Tampa Bay Rays. It was solid pitching by CC Sabathia and the bullpen, the clutch hitting of Nick Swisher and others, and the relentless determination to win that George Steinbrenner instilled in those who worked and played for him.

That last reason is important because therein, and not in predictable story hooks and easy emotional triggers, lays the true Steinbrenner legacy.  

To be sure there was theater in the game-winning situation. When Jeter stepped up to the plate at the bottom of the 9th inning, stepped up with two men on in a tie game against the Yanks’ closest division rival, we were primed for a dramatic payoff.

But last night, Jeter didn’t come through. The stoic team captain and perennial Yankee hero put together a solid at-bat but, for once, as he later admitted, was perhaps overcome by the moment, tried a little too hard, wanted too much to win for a man he called a friend and mentor.

And so the job was left to Nick Swisher -- the people’s choice late addition to this year’s All-Star team, and former Ohio State University division player. A Buckeye.

George Steinbrenner loved his Buckeyes. Derek Jeter roots for the archrival University of Michigan football team and would have friendly bets with Steinbrenner over their match-ups. And with two outs, bottom ninth Friday, Swisher bangs out the game-winning single to win the game. This after he’d hit a game-tying homerun in the previous inning.

Buckeyes win the day.

There was certainly a dramatic irony in how things unfolded. But it did not enter Derek Jeter’s awareness until after the game at his locker, when drama and irony were about to be thrown into the press room Cuisinart, and the button was pushed on the revisionist process of creating a supernatural manifestation. It is all well and good to write of magic in Friday night's game-- if one uses magic as metaphor and doesn’t minimize Swisher’s accomplishment or trivialize the pride, determination and winning attitude that has funneled down from George Steinbrenner through the Yankee organization.

As with all great moments Swisher’s was replete with backstory. In 2009, the Yankees had essentially stolen him from the White Sox after the worst season of his career, thinking he might be a capable member of a right-field platoon with Xavier Nady. But when Nady was injured and he became a regular in the lineup, the holes in his game were exposed. Despite a knack for seeing a lot of pitches and taking walks, he began last season striking out too much, stumbling around bases and bumbling easy plays in the outfield.

And then last July 22, after a horrendous misplay in the outfield that had nearly cost the Yanks a  game, he seemed to have enough of it all, and followed his error with acrobatic plays and key RBI-hits that won the day, and afterward treated everyone within earshot of his locker to a line about redemption from the mid-nineties comedy film Dumb and Dumber.

“Getting the opportunity to redeem myself, to make the catch and end the inning, in the same inning, was definitely a good thing,” he told me afterward. And looking me right in the eye with an enormous smile, he added: “I couldn’t have been more happy about that one.”

Nick Swisher needed no redemption entering the batter’s box in that ninth inning Friday night -- a somber, reflective night when the PA system was silenced in honor of longtime Yankee Stadium announcer Bob Sheppard, who had passed away just days before Steinbrenner. Almost a year after he became the Redemption Kid, Swisher, member of a world championship team now, had grown into his pinstripes. He had absorbed the competitive standards of the team’s core four members, as they had absorbed them from the Boss. He honed his abilities during the offseason, transformed himself into a highly reliable right-fielder and a hitter who’d helped carry the Yanks early this season, when its star players were not producing due to injury and prolonged slumps.

Swisher had already rewarded the faith George Steinbrenner’s Yankees had placed in him, but this was doubtless his biggest moment to date.  A moment in which he desperately wanted to come through for his team, and for an owner he’d known primarily through the recollections of his manager and those who’ve played with the team the longest.

And he came through in a way that will always be remembered as a beaming highlight of a historic night.

Let him own it, then. To wax on about ghosts and heavenly forces winning the game is to suggest that victory was not in the hands of the man holding the bat. It does not fully credit Swisher’s triumphant accomplishment, and by extension subtracts from George Steinbrenner’s accomplishments.

Steinbrenner would have been immensely proud of Nick Swisher and his Yankees on Friday night. They earned a great, emotional victory of the sort he loved. But to honor him and the highest values he represented, we must resist the urge to spin movie friendly myths and recognize with clarity that the team won for the Boss and not the other way around.

With thanks to Will Weiss

Follow Jerome Preisler on Twitter @YankeesInk.

So much has been spoken and written about George Steinbrenner on this day of his passing, it’s hard for me to add anything significantly insightful. He was a colossus; dynamic, complex and contradictory in ways that can't easily be encapsulated or reconciled, yet possessed of inarguable and singular greatness. Like all forces of nature he transformed everyone and everything around him. 

And even that seems redundant as I type it. There's a temptation to add to the stream of words understandably pouring out over the loss of George Steinbrenner, but I really do believe words can sometimes clutter a moment to rob it of impact--that they can obscure rather than illuminate its meaning for us. As the anthropologist and linguistics expert William Samarin once wrote: "Silence can have meaning. Like the zero in mathematics, it is an absence with a function."

It is useful, I think, for those who didn't know Steinbrenner well to absorb the recollections and observations of those who knew him best. He was a towering figure, a kind of living Rushmore whose loom and gravity could not be denied. To fully appreciate all he was in perspective, it isn't a bad idea for some of us to take a step or two back. 

I thought, however, I'd share this photo of a tribute to George Steinbrenner that was conceived by my wife, Suzanne, and realized by the artistry of her colleague, chef chocolatier Tsering Wangmo, who spent hours molding it entirely out of chocolate and mixing its colors out of edible dyes. It represents several of his greatest passions: America, New York City, thoroughbred horses, and of course his beloved Yankees. They're going to display it in the window of Martine's Chocolates in Manhattan for the next week or so. Neat, and for me somehow uniquely New York. In this city of relentless motion it's hard to get people to stop and take notice. George Steinbrenner certainly did that in his time, leaving behind a seismic wake that will reverberate into the future. A memorial that's at once transitory and demanding of pause seems somehow just right.

.

Rest in peace, Mr. Steinbrenner, and condolences to your family. There will never be another like you.

Follow Jerome Preisler on Twitter @YankeesInk

Following is the second and final excerpt from my 2008 interview with Bob Sheppard, in which he continues discussing his military service, early civilian career and eventual association with the New York Yankees. (Click here for Part I.)

BS: “I was in a test to become a chairman of speech in another high school. And I took that before I left [for his WW II naval service]. And I never knew the outcome. Until one day, on my ship in the Pacific, I got a note from home saying, ‘Word has come from the board of examiners that you’ve passed the chairman’s exam. And when you come home, you’ll not only be a teacher of speech, you’ll be in charge of a whole speech department.’

“Wow! That was good news. All I had to do was stay alive! Which I did. And when I came home, there was a vacancy in one of the better city high schools, called John Adams. Near my home in Queens. So I went to see the principal.

“I said, ‘I know you have a vacancy, and I know you’re looking for a chairman. I’m available.’

“He said, ‘I know about you already. You have the job.’ Wow. So I took that job and stayed there 25 years.

JP: “‘Wow’ is right.”

BS: “In the meantime—are you ready for this?—I gave evening courses at St. John’s University. I gave evening courses at the Bankers’ Institute of America. I gave courses for the Savings and Loan Association—all in public speaking. I taught part-time in a couple of Catholic High schools . . . girls’ high schools for the speech department and the speech team. I worked in public address for Adelphi College one year. I worked for the New York Titans [AFL 1962, eventually became the New York Jets] in the Polo Grounds in football. I worked for International Soccer at the Polo Grounds. I worked for the Brooklyn Dodger football team [AAFC 1946-48] at Ebbets Field. I worked for the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium in a different league, but a big league, in football [AAFC 1946-49]. And I got a . . . they went down to Texas somewhere, and played there. But the football Giants moved from the Polo Grounds to Yankee Stadium and they hired me to do football with the football Giants.

“In the meantime (laughs) the baseball Yankees were interested in me, called me and asked if I was interested in doing public address in baseball. And most of the games were at night, and I told them that sometimes I would be tied up in the classroom. And they said, ‘Can you get a good backup when you’re not there? And he will fill in for you.’

“I said, ‘Yes, I can.’

“So I got the athletic director of St. John’s, who had a flexible program, to cover for me at games at Yankee Stadium in the daytime when there was a conflict with my teaching. So I—I’ve had a busy career. Fifty years with the football Giants and then I decided to retire from them.”

JP: “That was a couple of years ago . . . .”

BS: “Two years ago, I think. And I hired a St. John’s college speech professor to fill in for me. And he still has the job. (Laughs).”

JP: “How did you come upon [Sheppard’s longtime sub at Yankee and Giants Stadium] Jim Hall?”

BS: “He was a St. John’s Prep debater when I was the speech coach. And I used to hear him debating when he was in high school. And then he became a speech teacher and a professor at St. John’s in speech. Became the chairman of the speech department at St. John’s University. But a sports fan. And one time he asked me if ever I needed an additional spotter up at Yankee Stadium, Giants Stadium and the Yale Bowl . . . he would be thrilled if I would take him on.

“So my brother, who had been doing it for me, was one of my spotters—and he dropped out. So I hired Jim Hall to come on maybe 20 years ago. And he was my spotter in football all these years along with another man.

“And when I decided to drop the football at the Giants, I recommended Jim, and they hired him without a question, and he’s still there. This year when I became ill, and could not do my baseball, I called Jim Hall, and I said, ‘Jim, I’m not able to go into the Stadium this year. Will you take over?’

“And he said, ‘It’s a pleasure (laughs good naturedly).’

“I hired him and he did a good job. And so many people said he sounds very much like me. But of course, he was a speech teacher. He sat next to me for 50 years (chuckles a little) with the Giants, and he’s been listening to me do P.A. He doesn’t imitate me, but he certainly doesn’t violate the standards that I had set. Being clear, concise, correct. The three C’s. Clear, concise, correct. And he’s still there.”

JP: [I give an anecdote about a hearing particular sports-venue PA announcer whose style seemed a complete violation of Sheppard’s famed Three Cs] “ . . . and I thought, ‘This must be what it’s like everyplace else on earth.’”

BS: (Laughs). It’s Minor League stuff. Minor League stuff. I tell you the truth, the fellow who used to do pro wrestling set up a kind of pattern for Minor League announcers. They scream, and they’re fluid, and they’re rapid, and they are melodious. But . . . it’s like a circus barker.

JP: “Exactly.”

BS: “I wrote a poem years ago about the duties of a public address announcer and one [line] of it was, ‘He’s not a circus barker, he’s not a cheerleader, he’s a public address announcer.’ Keep it clear, concise, correct.”

Our conversation would continue for several minutes beyond the time Sheppard originally granted me and touch on a variety of subjects. Toward its conclusion, I reminded him of a particular Yankee Stadium highlight video that had been frequently played on the Jumbotron prior to games. In it, Sheppard speaks on camera of Don Larsen’s perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, repeating the word “perfect” several times slowly for emphasis.

JP: “Somehow, you repeat the word ‘perfect’ so . . . perfectly.”

BS: “You’re being repetitious!”

JP& BS: (Laughter).

JP: “Anything else you’d like to say?”

BS: “You’re perfect!”

We laughed some more as we wrapped things up; perfection isn’t a tag I’ll ever wear except in jest. But it’s hard to think of a man who might be closer than Robert Leo Sheppard when it came to his craft and the level of respect he garnered from fans, players, his family, and indeed all the uncounted people whose lives he touched with his work and presence.

Thank you, Mr. Sheppard. You were, and always will be, a mountain.

With a special debt to Paul Sheppard.

Follow Jerome Preisler on Twitter @YankeesInk.

In 2008, while working on a profile of renowned New York Yankees Public Address announcer Bob Sheppard for Maple Street Press' Yankees Annual,  I was privileged to conduct what may be the final in-depth interview with him.

Though weakened by a respiratory ailment that had forced him to take a leave of absence from the post he’d held the Stadium since 1951, Sheppard was in excellent spirits when we spoke over the phone, his voice strong, energetic and often punctuated with laughter.

Unfortunately, Sheppard  would never return to the PA booth he loved, and in 2009 formally announced his retirement.  

What follows is the first of two unedited excerpts from our conversation—well, Sheppard mostly talked and I mostly listened in fascination—which began with my asking how his passions for sports and language converged to form a legendary career, and segued into Sheppard telling an alternately funny and poignant story about his enlistment in the U.S. Navy during World War Two.

Bob Sheppard: “Frankly, I think I was blessed in the beginning when I was in High School at St. John’s Prep, where I met two wonderful Vincentian priests who were my teachers, who influenced me in language. One was a Father McKellen who was so precise in his speech that every word seemed to be a diamond. And grammatically he was without flaw. He taught English at St. John’s Prep.
    
“Another priest taught religion. But he also preached on Sunday in my Parish. And he was inspirational in language. From the emotional point of view, he made words seem colorful. So between the purist, who taught the English, and the priest who taught religion, language appreciation in me grew and grew and grew. And I think it was, maybe in high school, that I dreamed of making Speech my career . . . along with sports. Because I played varsity baseball and varsity football at St. John’s Prep.
    
“Then I went to St John’s College—it’s now St. John’s University—but in my old day, St. John’s College had four hundred students. (Laughter). Four hundred students! All men, all men. In a little brown building in Brooklyn. Now it’s a huge university. “

Jerome Preisler: “Yeah, I grew up in Brooklyn.”

BS: “Well, then you know. But before your time, on the corner of Lewis and Willoughby {Avenues} was an old brown house, and that’s where St. John’s college was established. Anyway, I went to college there, and played football and baseball again, and was there on an athletic scholarship. But the courses I enjoyed most were the courses in English and speech. And one of the professors of speech was a Walter Robinson, who had a studio in what he called Car-neh-gie Hall.  Not Carnegie, but Car-neh-gie Hall (laughter). Which was the way the original Car-neh-gie pronounced his name.”

JP:  “Oh was it? I didn’t know.”

BS: “Yeah. Well, he was Scotch, and that’s what the pronunciation was there. Anyway, Walter Robinson was a character. Long white hair, very British in manner, and a stickler for phonetic pronunciation. And I fell under his spell. And he, I think, helped to bolster my dream of becoming a lifelong study of speech and perhaps teaching it.

“Well, before you know it, I got interested in looking around to see what kind of jobs were open. The New York City public school system, in the high school level, had departments of speech, and exams were being given. And when I finished my years at St. John’s College, I knew I needed even more background and enrolled in Columbia University for a Master’s degree in speech education. At the end of that year, I had a Master’s degree in speech and I took an exam to be a speech teacher in the city high schools.

“I passed the test, and for twenty years or so, maybe less, I taught speech at one of the high schools in New York, in the borough of Queens. In a town called Ridgewood. The name of the school was Grover Cleveland High School.

“Then World War 2 broke out and being young and healthy, but married and with three children, I thought there was no danger of me being drafted. But I went to the draft board in my hometown and said, ‘Here are my credentials, here’s what I do, I’m a teacher, I’m a father, I have a wife, I have three children. Is there any danger I would be drafted as a soldier or a sailor?’

“The man in charge of the interview said, ‘Maybe. I can’t say no, I can’t say yes. It’s a problem.” (Sheppard laughs heartily). I was on the horns of a dilemma. If I were drafted at twenty dollars a month, I don’t know what my wife and three youngsters would do!

“So I looked around and found out the Navy was interviewing men—qualified men—to become naval officers, which would be a little bit more pay than a sailor. And I dropped in, in Manhattan one day, where the recruitment office was located and I said, ‘I’m here to enquire. Not to join (laughter). I’m here to enquire about the possibility of getting a Navy assignment.

“And the man said, ‘Well . . . you’re old enough. You’re healthy enough, I guess. While you’re here, without any decision on your part, why don’t you just go in the back. The doctor’s there and he’ll examine you and see if you’re fit. If you’re not fit, I’ll tell you that.’

“So I went in the back, and the doctor went over me, and he said, ‘You’re fine.’ I went in front, and I said, ‘The man said I’m fine.’  

“He said, ‘That’s step number one.’

“I said, ‘Wait a minute! Step number—I’m not here to join, I’m here to enquire!’

“And he said, ‘Well, look. You just passed the physical. There’s a simple medical thing, that’s over. Now it’s just a mental thing.’

“I said, ‘Okay, I’ll take it while I’m here. (Chuckles). So, I took it. And since most of it was vocabulary, and that was one of my strengths, I knocked it dead. And when he saw the results, he said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’

“I said, ‘What happened?’

“He said, ‘You passed. Beautifully . . . beautifully! Sign up!’

“'Sign up?'” I said, 'I’m still enquiring!'

"‘Oh, you’re perfect. We need you, you’re perfect, and you’ll be a lieutenant junior grade.’

“I said, ‘Wait a minute. I haven’t even talked to my wife about it. About coming in here.’

“So I went home that night, and I talked with my wife, and she said, ‘Well, it’s a gamble. If you wait and you’re drafted, we’re sunk. If you take this, we can survive. If you survive.’ (Laughs).

“So I went back a couple of days later and said, “I’ll take the job.'

"And I went into the Navy and . . . oh, I spent time in the Pacific, I spent time in the Caribbean. And I lived. And I enjoyed it. And I came back. Unfortunately, I missed my wife, and I missed my three children, but I had a good, good career. A good career.”

Click here for Part II.

Follow Jerome Preisler on Twitter @YankeesInk.

WORDS
Offered without comment are some of Joba Chamberlain’s answers to media questions following Friday’s 6-1 Yankee loss to the Toronto Blue Jays. Chamberlain entered the game in the 8th inning to preserve a 1-0 lead after starter A.J. Burnett had thrown 6.2 scoreless frames, but the reliever surrendered the tying run to the Blue Jays on a one-out walk to outfielder Jose Bautista, followed by singles to  Adam Lind (.205) and Aaron Hill (.192).

Asked about his approach toward Bautista, who despite a hot start to the season  is a career .237 hitter with a .179 batting average in the month of June:

“He’s a tough hitter. He’s been playing well and can beat you with one swing. So I didn’t want to give in to the at-bat and, taking the previous at-bats that I’ve faced him, I just {was} probably a little bit too fine. Probably should’ve attacked a little bit more. And it’s the price you pay for not being aggressive enough.”

“It was just that one pitch and that’s the difference between a win and a loss.”

“I’m not gonna throw a pitch without conviction. And I felt like that was the best in that situation, and he put a good at-bat together.”

Asked if he could explain why hitters are averaging .330 against him this season with runners in scoring position:

“I wouldn’t have known that unless you told me. So, no. It’s one of those things where you still have to attack. It doesn’t matter if there’s runners on first, second, whatever, nobody on. So it’s one of those things where you get the opportunity to go out there tomorrow and redeem yourself.”

Asked about his own consistency in light of manager Joe Girardi’s comments that the bullpen needed more overall:

“You know what, if you look at it, I mean, I probably had thirty-one appearances and, you know, I’ve had a handful of bad ones. But, you know, we have to be more consistent. We have to do a better job as a bullpen, as a whole. And we got the best leader. So we lean on him and understand what he does to teach us to make us better. And, you know, that’s the greatest thing about the bullpen. We get the opportunity to come back tomorrow and help us win a game.”

NUMBERS
Some of Joba Chamberlain’s key 2010 statistics:

In 33.1 innings pitched he has allowed 37 hits and 21 runs, 20 earned. His ERA following yesterday’s loss is 5.40, which breaks down as a 6.91 ERA to left-handed batters and a 4.25 ERA to right-handers. With runners on base his ERA skyrockets to  8.29, and with runners in scoring position it jumps even higher to 14.81. When there are runners in scoring position and two out -- put away situations -- it increases to 15.88.  

Over his last six innings of work Joba Chamberlain has run up a 7.50 ERA.  He has allowed 9 hits, 5 runs, all earned. Batters are hitting .346 against him.

Breaking it down team by team within the Yankees division, Chamberlain has a perfect 0.00 ERA against the Baltimore Orioles, who have the worst record in Major League baseball. Versus Toronto, however,  it is 6.00. Against Boston it is 8.31. Facing Tampa Bay hitters it is 9.00.

His ERA versus teams with winning records outside the division are 9.0 to the Minnesota Twins, 5.40 to the Los Angeles Angels and 9.0 to the Los Angeles Dodgers. In his sole appearance versus the Philadelphia Phillies he surrendered 3 earned runs on 2 hits and a walk without logging an out in 1/3 of an inning. The score was 3-1 Phillies when Chamberlain entered the game in the 9th inning. It was 7-1 when he exited.  That would be the final score.

Among other winning teams Chamberlain has pitched 2/3 of an inning of scoreless relief against the Detroit Tigers and a single inning of scoreless relief against the Texas Rangers.

Reader comments are invited.

Follow Jerome Preisler on Twitter @YankeesInk.

In Boston on Tuesday night, where the Red Sox had defeated the Tampa Bay Rays and hopped to within a game of the first-place Yankees in the American League East, all the quotes that sportswriters use as pillow stuffing were about the Sox’s scrappiness and ability to stare down adversity. Second baseman Dustin Pedroia was disabled with a broken foot. Also absent from the lineup was primary catcher Victor Martinez, who’d recently sustained a fractured thumb. Starting outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury was out with a cracked rib, and Mike Cameron, the regular center fielder, was playing through pain with an abdominal hernia and torn groin that will need surgery next offseason. And pitchers Josh Beckett, Daisuke Matsuzaka and most recently Clay Buchholz, remained on the shelf.

After the game Red Sox GM Theo Epstein talked about how much he admired his team, how he expected them to be a force to be reckoned with once they got fully healthy. Manager Terry Francona spoke of their resiliency and winning attitude.

Epstein and Francona should feel admiration and all sorts of other good things about their team. The Red Sox had the best record in the Majors in the past month despite all the breaks bumps and bruises. They are already a force to be reckoned with.

In the Bronx, meanwhile, the postgame mood was far more subdued yesterday, the clubhouse quiet. It shouldn’t necessarily have been that way. The Yankee offense had scored four runs against Cliff Lee, who they couldn’t beat in the World Series last year, two of them coming off Nick Swisher homers to left field, one of which sailed over four hundred feet into the visiting bullpen. Four runs against Lee, your offense has done some things right.

In fact, while Lee had pitched extremely well, he’d given up those two monster blasts to Swisher, one to give the Yanks an early lead in the first inning. He’d been worked for some deep counts in the second inning. And then in the ninth the Yanks had put together a few tough at-bats and scored two runs off some screaming line drives.

Lee was vulnerable, beatable. But when you have a really good pitcher in that position, you can’t let him squirm out of it. Your pitcher has to hold serve. And Phil Hughes, who came into the night with a 10-1 record, and is probably and deservedly going to the All-Star game in a couple of weeks, was awful. The light-hitting Mariners, who at 32-44 are the second-worst team in the American League, hit him hard and scored six earned runs off him, plus another unearned to make it a seven.  That’s not what you want from a 10-game winner near the midseason mark. You want him to be hitting his stride, not looking as if he’s regressed. You expect him to keep the game close.

It is hardly breaking news that Hughes had not pitched in 10 days because he’d skipped a start. The Yankees buy into research indicating that pitchers under 25 years old who exceed their previous innings high by 30 or more risk serious health issues. Because Hughes spent most of last season in the bullpen and did not build on his previous year’s innings count, his total for this year is about 170 or 180 innings, so they have jiggered with his routine.

But here is the bit of sand in the chowder. Their research is not conclusive. It is not empirical. There are those who say there must be pitch count limitations for young pitchers, and there are those who say innings limits, and there are those who say there is no hard and fast rule to be followed. So it’s all in whose research you believe.

Although it is uncertain whether Hughes’ poor performance was an upshot of his layoff, Joe Girardi repeatedly acknowledged it as a possibility after the game. This much seems evident, however: Not all innings are the same. They don’t put equal demands on a pitcher’s arm. Depending on how an inning develops a pitcher might throw 10 pitches or he might throw 30 pitches. Presumably, then, the 30-pitch inning is more stressful than the 10-pitch inning. Common sense would seem to indicate that a strict innings count is an arbitrary, unscientific method of preventing injury. But the Yankees are counting up Hughes’ innings the way they did Joba Chamberlain’s, and as they do you can see the controversy building all over again.

The Yankees are walking a tightrope based on inconclusive findings. They simultaneously want to win and protect their player. Last year they succeeded in doing both with the Joba Rules. They won in the postseason with only three viable starters. But it isn’t the way things ought to be drawn up. In a tight late-summer pennant race, in the postseason, it would be pushing their luck to try that again. If the eye is truly on the championship prize, they cannot afford to chance taking Hughes, who has been their second or third best pitcher to this point, out of the mix.

In 2009 the Yankees survived the Joba Rules and were victorious. Now this year they’re trying to repeat with the Hughes Rules. Tuesday night, against a backdrop of not-so-distant cheers up in Boston, there were some early stirrings of doubt about whether they can pull that trick off again.

Follow Jerome Preisler on Twitter @YankeesInk.

Sunday didn’t exactly start with a bang in my corner of the Twitterverse. The Yankees’ blowout loss to the Dodgers on Saturday had left me and the tweeps sort of cranky. We’d seen enough of A.J. Burnett by the time Bryan Hoch, Yankees beat reporter for MLB.com, tweeted his official line from La La Land: 3.0 IP, 6H, 6 ER, 6BB, 5K, 1 WP.

I felt really sorry for gehriggirl. She’s been through a lot lately. Tornados, floods, broken windshields, you name it. I know she carries her cousin Lou’s genes and all, but there’s only so much a person’s stomach can take, and the lousy pitching wasn’t helping hers. Meanwhile, Ledger_Yankees (Newark Star-Ledger beat reporter Marc Carig) was twittering back and forth with somebody who’d suggested the Yankees skip A.J.’s next turn in the rotation. I’m glad it was his follower who proposed the idea and not mine, because mine never come up with dumb ideas.

Possibly being diplomatic, Ledger_Yankees wanted to know what the alternative to A.J. was. In her retweet of his question, SakuraChica asked him why he was talking to crackheads. I’ve learned the hard way that SakuraChica doesn’t suffer fools or foolishness lightly.

Meanwhile dp57 was just getting home from a graduation party and trying to find out what she’d missed. She’s a mom and she’s crazy, and she blames the latter on the former . . . although I suspect the craziness came first, as BloggingBombers (Mark Feinsand from the New York Daily News) would probably agree. Anyway, she’d left the DVR on to record the game but after seeing the lopsided score was wondering if she should erase it without watching.

I’m thinking you have a good idea there, I tweeted. It was shortly after I’d thumb-typed this post: Not sure what’s worse about this game for the Yanks. AJ’s pitching or the fact that they still had lots of chances but can’t drive in runs.

So bad AJ showed up! dp57 replied. Wonder if he’s in the locker room trashing it or if he went back to the hotel?

Very bad AJ. I tweeted back in disgust. He took the mound with a 3-0 lead, gave back 2, Yanks got him another run to make it 4-2, he gave it all back . . . ugh.

This was when AlioTheFool chimed in. Hopefully Alio, as I call him for short because we’re good Twitter chums, looks nothing like his avatar—it’s got a Medusa-Cyclops thing going with all those writhing snakes above the eye in the center of its forehead. But that’s beside the point. Alio was responding to my complaint from earlier in the game about the Yankees’ failure to bring in RISP.

Inability to drive in baserunners, atrocious pitching seems to be the story of every loss this year, he agreed sullenly. We were feeling each other’s pain but giving no comfort.

That was when I detected the first signs of friction among the tweeps. You have to understand: Chan Ho Park had entered the game and served up his requisite cookies to the boys in royal blue. Like the score itself, our disgust over the game had gotten out of control. It was a giant beak pecking wildly away at us, so to speak.

He deserves wide eyed kitten litters drawn on his arm! Puppies and unicorns on his back! tweeted dp57. This was part of a running joke we’ve got between us about punishment tats for AJ.

Howabout kittens on his forehead? I responded a bit viciously. It was clear we needed some of jenjeter’s boundless optimism. But she was nowhere to be detected.

And so it went, with IAmNikkiGal and YankeeMan1973 retweeting some of my negativity. Not that gehriggirl didn’t do her best to brighten the dismal atmosphere. Wouldn’t an inability to drive in runs be a reason for every loss for every team, every year? she asked, adding a winky smiley face to let us know she was just breaking chops.

Unfortunately AlioTheFool and I weren’t in playful moods. I think the point is that an inordinate amount of losses have been blowouts in which the Yanks simply stopped scoring, I groused.

It’s not just inability to drive in runs, it’s inability to score men *already* on base (.271 w/RISP-T 11th in MLB), Alio would later elaborate.

A better tweep than either of us, gehriggirl had kept her even disposition. I know . . . I’m just being a smart@#$, she posted. This time she used the full smiley face emoticon so there would be no confusion.

Now I felt lousier than lousy. Not only had the Yanks been embarrassed with that blowhard Lasorda in the house, I’d been a heel to a favorite tweep. Seriously, I thought, she’d spent half the previous week in a crawlspace hiding from tornadoes.

We’re just being grumpy tonight, I offered guiltily.

I’ve been grumpy all day . . . I should probably go to bed, like 2 hours ago, gehriggirl replied.

Same here, where are those time machines when you need ‘em? I thumbed.

Tomorrow shall be better, she wrote. Gehriggirl was more forgiving than Alio and I deserved, offering encouragement when we’d done nothing but vent.

And so I tweeted her goodnight as Saturday fizzled off to its very unsatisfying end.

_______________________

As I wrote at the outset, I started Sunday with a frown. But then gehriggirl tweeted to ask, Is today better? and I decided enough was enough. If she could wake up in a positive frame of mind after ducking funnel clouds and uprooted trees, no way would I let a stupid Yankee loss ruin the second half of my weekend.

A new day’s dawned! I tweeted back. The exclamation point was probably a bit too much, but I was still feeling lousy about my crabbiness the night before.

I spent the rest of the day doing research for a future book and hanging out near the air-conditioner with my cats. By game time I was kind of tired and had decided I’d stay out of the Twitterverse for a single night. With a little luck the Yankees would cruise to a win behind Andy Pettitte and there wouldn’t be much to tweet about anyway.

Until the top of the third inning came along. There was a double, a bunt a throwing error by Pettitte. A single, a bunt, another throwing error by Pettitte. Then a sac fly to complete the damage, and before you knew it the Yankees were down 3-0.

In the ESPN broadcast booth, Joe Morgan and his toadies—er co-announcers—called the inning an embarrassment to the Yankee organization. My teeth clenched as I reached for my iPhone and opened the familiar extra-dimensional portal. I couldn’t stand being alone with my frustration. The Twitterverse had pulled me back in.

And, boy, were its waters tossing and churning over the Yank misplays. I must’ve had sixty or more updates to scroll through. Whose defense is this? The Red Sox? complained the normally unflappable gehriggirl. Little league tonight? added dp57. You can’t make this &#@$ up, growled SakuraChica. Meanwhile, Bryan Hoch plugged away in his distant pressroom, doing his conscientious best to keep the tweeps informed

SakuraChica’s comment had me worried, though. I didn’t want her to take things out on me. And where, I wondered, was jenjeter, wielder of the Yankee lightsaber? The force needed some serious balancing and I wasn’t feeling up to the task.

Of course, angry as gehriggirl was at her team, she wasn’t about to let Morgan get away with dissing them on national television. The travesty we were watching was a family affair. Who was some he, some former Cincinnati Red, to butt in?

Did he just call this an EMBARRASSMENT to the Yankee organization or did I hear that wrong? she asked, jumping to the defense of the pinstripes. And in her next tweet: OMG we have 27 titles and decades of success. This is not an embarrassment to the organization, this is one bad ½ inning. I hate ESPN.

I couldn’t argue with anything she said. Besides, when gehriggirl gets riled up no one has a choice but to pay attention. She has the blood of the Iron Horse in her veins, don’tcha forget.

And so it went as the game wore on, with something of a letup in the sixth when A-Rod banged out his two run homer to erase the Dodgers’ shutout and make the score 5-2. Joe Morgan—man, he wouldn’t have wanted to see what the tweeps were tweeting about him. It got so I actually felt sorry for the guy. Well, no that isn’t true. But I might have felt sorry for him if he was almost anyone else on earth.

By the eighth inning, when Joba Chamberlain gave the Dodgers an added run to cushion their lead, I’d killed the sound on the tube, and my tweets had deteriorated to gripes about Sterling/Waldman and vapid garbage about the pizza I’d eaten for dinner. Grim humor reigned among the tweeps, but it had a strained, dejected, resigned quality about it in the face of an imminent loss. Even dp57 seemed out of it.

And then, whoosh, here it came—and probably in the nick of time. Jenjeter’s message, sent from whatever remote sector of the Twitterverse she’d been patrolling since Friday night: Hey Ink Kenobi, Yoda Jen says, “Rally we will”. Says embrace the force, let’s go rally squirrels, what kind of pizza r u eating?

I told her it was plain cheese. Baked in a brick oven. And that it had a great crust. It was my understated way of saying I was glad she was back.

We all know what happened at the top of the ninth inning. A-Rod’s one-out single against Jonathan Broxton of the miniscule 0.83 ERA. The Cano double, followed by epic at-bats by Posada, Granderson, and the rookies Huffman and Curtis that totally wore Broxton out.

The game was tied and the Yankee Twitterverse was . . . energized.

Me: Heyhey, Yoda, there’s some force left in the Yanks!

jenjeter: Was there ever a doubt? Told ya to embrace the force hahahaha go rally squirrels.

dp57 (with sympathy, I think): Well, just blow out Broxton’s arm!

gehriggirl: If you’re a REAL Yankee fan you should always expect a 9th inning rally.


Things really got boisterous in next frame, after Rivera’s hold, and Broxton’s eventual departure to the land of abused and armless relievers populated by Joe Torre over the years and. . . well, I’ll let my tweeps tell the tale.

BryanHoch: Here’s Robinson Cano homering in 10th inning of #Yankees comeback vs. #Dodgers

gehriggirl: My future husband {she wants to marry Cano} is so &%$% cute :)

jenjeter: This will be the first time this year we win after being down by 5 runs I love our Yankees Jedi warriors.

Me: I will never doubt YodaJen.

gehriggirl: Mariano coming in to save his own win . . . love it.

Jenjeter: YODA INK KENOBIIIIIIIIIII THE YANKEES WIN I’M DANCING DOING MY JETER DANCE JETER DANCING IN USA IN USAAAAAAAAA IN USAAAAAA

In case it isn’t clear,  jenjeter was trying to say the Yankees won 8-6. She is a fan’s fan and gets really excited. That’s why you have to love her.

And so it was off to bed and a restful, contented sleep for the tweeps even as the Yankees headed back to New York. It would be a long flight for the boys, but not to worry. In his postgame comments, Robinson Cano assured us that the miracle comeback would have them joking around on the plane.

As for me . . . I’m trying to use the off-day to get some work done. And staring at my iPhone wondering what’s going on you-know-where.

Follow Jerome Preisler on Twitter @YankeesInk.

The Yankees’ postgame interview sessions after their 4-0 Friday night loss to the Mets were so tiresome they could have been lifted from an old script, the scenes in the conference room and clubhouse like scenes from baseball seasons past.  There was a stale predictability to the questions, a kind of flat, rote tone to the answers.

On two previous nights, Jamie Moyer and Kyle Kendrick of the Phillies had shut down the Yankee offense. Then Friday it was the Mets’ Hisanori Takahashi. In some ways their styles were similar. None had great stuff, but all  used deception to keep the Yanks off balance, serving up cocktails of sliders, changeups and other off-speed pitches mixed in with just enough well placed, fastballs to keep batters guessing.

These games weren’t exactly riveting. Moyer, Kendrick and Takahashi are no thrill-a-minute threesome. They can put radar guns to sleep with their array of junk pitches -- the same way they put the Yankee bats to sleep.

There’s no great mystery to what happened. While it shouldn’t happen to an offense as good as the New York Yankees’ is supposed to be, it sometimes does. The Yanks got six runs off the prematurely legendary Roy Halladay to start the Phillies series. Then Jamie Moyer came in, pitched well, and flummoxed them long enough for the prematurely respected Joba Chamberlain to put the game out of reach. Maybe that got them pressing some because they knew this was one of those big hyped up series, and maybe that carried into the next night. And then maybe when they woke up Friday morning losers of two out of three to the Phillies, knowing the Mets were coming in for their big crosstown series, they started gripping those bats a little tighter against Takahashi. Everybody trying to be a hero, the guy who drives in the first run, hits one out, gets the Yanks on the scoreboard. As a result patience goes by the wayside and there are a lot of swings at empty air. It’s a finesse pitcher’s dream.

We’ve seen it all before. Pretty much every year. And it’s no fun. The players get frustrated. The fans get more frustrated. The writers don’t know what to write that they haven’t written before.  For them it’s utter tedium. If they could slip it by their editors, they’d probably pull old columns off their hard drives, change some names and dates, and file them all over again instead of sitting around the press room like typing zombies till one o’clock in the morning.

This is why players call the 162 games in a regular baseball season a grind. There are good games when they’re playing well enough to win and better games when they play at their highest level and win impressively. And there are the losses and struggles and times when nothing seems to go right. The best teams have more of the former than the latter. But they still have clunkers and sometimes they come in bunches. Those stretches don’t inspire a whole lot of anything in anybody who watches or writes about them.  

All this was reflected in Friday night’s postgame Q&As. In the conference room where Joe Girardi meets the media, groggy beat writers and TV sports reporter types kept asking where the thump in the Yanks’ lumber had gone. Some made limp efforts at finding new ways to present the question, as if to entertain themselves and thereby stay awake. One guy asked the same old questions in a louder voice than others. The more vapid the question, the louder he asks it, as if volume can increase its inherent worth.

As you might expect, there were no bombshells from Girardi that galvanized the room and made everybody dash upstairs to their laptop computers hoping to scoop their pals. He did not say he thought his team couldn’t hit anymore. He did not declare he’d quit on them and the rest of the Yankee season. He said the offensive malaise was a passing thing that teams have work through, and  that he wasn’t going to jump off a bridge because of three bad games.

A few minutes later, Yankee hitting coach Kevin Long essentially said the same things in the clubhouse. When he appeared there reporters swarmed him like hungry pigeons converging around a big loaf of bread. As if he was going to tell them something they hadn’t already heard.

Unsurprisingly Long had no surprises. He said had confidence in his hitters. He said he knew they would come out of their slumber, and that offensive dry spells didn’t usually have dramatic explanations. They were part of the game.

Also down in the clubhouse, Alex Rodriguez told the media he was frustrated and that the batters needed to do a better job of driving in runs. So did Jorge Posada. Both said they would start doing a better job with the next day’s game. Neither said he’d forgotten how to hit or hated his teammates or anything like that.

This isn’t to dismiss some of the ongoing problems with the Yankee lineup. Mark Teixeira’s neverending 2010 slump is hurting the team, and Alex Rodriguez isn’t himself. Posada has been injured, and Nick Johnson, the “Glass Joe” designated hitter, has been busy gathering dust on the shelf reserved for damaged goods.  Aside from Robinson Cano and Nick Swisher nobody’s wowing anybody yet.

But, as Girardi pointed out, the Yankees are  41-26 and tied for 1st place in the toughest division in baseball. Their record is better than it was at this same point in the 2009 season, when they won the World Series. Girardi would probably admit there are concerns that need to be addressed. Every year, there are always such concerns.

In the elevator heading up to the press box after all the snoozy uneventfulness downstairs, one beat writer decided to make some small talk and asked another how he was doing. The second beat writer glanced at his watch and made a resigned face. “I’ll be better in about an hour,” he said.

Meaning after he wrote and filed his piece with his newspaper.

His weariness was representative of that being displayed by his colleagues. And it was understandable. He follows the team on a daily basis and has to write about games when there is sometimes nothing new that is worth writing. But it could be worse for him. He could be a cashier at the local supermarket earning minimum wage. Or unemployed and earning nothing at all instead of watching and writing about baseball for a living.

That alone ought to be inspiration enough turn out something besides disinterested and uninteresting copy. Even when the games are dull, and his eyes are glazed, and the only thing that’s really on his mind is going home to catch a few winks before he gets up and out of bed for another long, hard day at the ballpark.

Follow Yankees Ink on Twitter all season long.