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Coffee please, thanks. Late night ... y’know how these Yankees/Red Sox games go. Not that anyone here’s complaining. When the games are as tough, dramatic and generally crisp as the last three have been, you need to appreciate them, and then suck it up and get your morning jolt however you can.

So on the second day of September 2011, with the fifth of six regular season series between the teams over, the Yanks took a pair of games at Fenway for their first series win over the Sox this year.

The overall head-to-head record is now 11-4, Sox over the Yanks. Not how the Bombers would want it, but as Robert DeNiro told John Cazale in The Deer Hunter once upon a time, “This is this. This ain’t something else. This is this.” Which is more less the

If you look at the odds, I shouldn’t be writing this column for YESNetwork.com. I probably shouldn’t be a writer at all, and maybe I shouldn’t have any kind of decent job, and maybe I shouldn’t even be alive right now.

When I was a little kid I started writing a novel. It was a kind of science fiction/fantasy story. I read Robert E. Howard’s Conan paperbacks, and watched old monster movies on television, and liked a televised horror-slash-soap opera called Dark Shadows. In the beginning I hand-wrote the novel. Then I typed its pages out on an old Royal manual typewriter that my parents had in the apartment. I don’t remember the act of writing it. I don’t remember teaching myself to type. It was 128 pages long, the typewritten pages single-spaced,

NEW YORK - It was during Sunday’s pregame managerial press conference that Joe Girardi formally confirmed Phil Hughes would pitch against the Red Sox that night. Before the start of the weekend series with Boston, however, he’d announced that Sunday’s pitcher would be long-reliever and spot starter Dustin Moseley. Hughes, he said, would skip his regular start in keeping with the team’s plan to limit his innings on the mound. His next start would come later in the week during the final road trip of the season.

So the pitching matchups lined up as Josh Beckett/Andy Pettitte, Jon Lester/ Ivan Nova and Daisuke Matsuzaka/Moseley. That made Pettitte’s turn tremendously important to the Yanks. If he lost the series opener, they would be looking at a pair of games