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"Before setting out on their current road trip, the Yankees honored the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with a special pregame ceremony in the Bronx. In remembrance today, I thought I’d run a piece to commemorate the attacks that I’d written a couple of years ago in my earlier column for YESNetwork.com, DEEP IN THE RED. It’s been revised and expanded from the original.

 -- JP

On September 10, 2001 my wife Suzanne and I were at Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees play the Red Sox and, we hoped, see a 39-year-old Roger Clemens attain the 20th win of his career against his former team. But it was a gray, wet day and the rain kept pouring down and down through a lengthy game delay.

We had very good seats behind the Yankees dugout. I remember,

Daniel Trush and his friends from Daniel's Music Foundation composed a song and video in appreciation for the New York Yankees' HOPE Week event honoring Daniel's perseverance and work helping others. His dad, Ken, sent it to me last night and I thought you'd enjoy it. You can learn more about the foundation at www.danielsmusic.org

It’s several hours before gametime and I’m at this brunch buffet maybe ten blocks from Yankee Stadium, talking to Cousin Brewski, who says it’s the best deal in town. He’s with a small group of buddies he meets there regularly on weekends, people he came to know at the ballpark while doing his job, a couple of whom are mutual friends of ours.

Cousin Brewski, or the Cuz, is really Rick Goldfarb. Or maybe I should say Rick Goldfarb is really the Cuz. It gets to be like that with legends, hard to separate the public from the private personas, and this man is a legend of his own kind at Yankee Stadium.

Next season will be his 40th as a beer vendor there. Four decades, his first day at work having been Bat Day 1972. To put that in perspective, you had Ron Blomberg,

There is a moment in the home team dugout at Yankee Stadium when John Lahutsky’s voice falls into silence. This is no small thing. John enjoys communication—it is an innate ability for him, and perhaps his saving grace.

“He would talk,” his friend Andrei Sullivan had told me during batting practice, speaking of their time together in Russia. We’d been on the warning track outside the dugout, near the batter’s cage. A digital recorder in my hand, Andrei standing with the aid of the lightweight metal Lofstrand crutches commonly used by people with disabilities, his forearms balanced in their cuffs. “He was loud, very loud . . . like, one of the most talkative kids there,” he’d said.

Andrei was referring to Baby House 10,

The father stared at the machines around his son’s hospital bed and listened to the beeping. The boy, Daniel, 12, was in a medically induced coma. They’d done a tracheotomy to ventilate him, push air into his lungs. He had sixteen lines in him, two drains in his head. More lines running into him from the IV stands and equipment than years behind him.

Ken Trush sat there, watching. Just wanting to be there with Daniel. One day, two, five, ten, twenty. Watching on his ’round the clock vigil. At one point the pressure in Daniel’s skull bumped to 30 points above the level doctors said would induce brain death. Then it went down. And then up again.

Brain death.

It wasn’t supposed to be. It’s never supposed to be with children.

Daniel was a lively kid. Gregarious,

This column was supposed to be the second part of my attempt at identifying the problems of the Yankee lineup -- and offering suggestions on how to improve its efficiency. The first part appeared yesterday, and the reason I’d chosen to break it up in two was because I wanted to separately discuss Jorge Posada’s struggles and the conundrum of how the team’s manager and general manager might address them. Given Posada’s unique status, it seemed a tough, exceedingly delicate problem, and I felt the subject warranted a thousand words or so to itself.

Well, when you least expect it, you’re elected, to cop a line from the old Candid Camera theme song. How could I have had a clue that just a few hours after planning out the column, I’d be live-tweeting

It’s May. Roughly the middle of the month, about six weeks into a 2011 baseball season that runs until late September, and then some for a handful of teams.

A May series. Yankees-Red Sox in the Bronx, only the second of many between the two divisional rivals.

Before the end of the season, it is quite possible the rosters of one or both teams will be significantly different than they are now.  Injuries, trades, player promotions and demotions to and from each organization’s Minor League system . . . these will greatly impact their eventual and final makeup.

Depending on one’s inclinations, it is tempting to dismiss or overstate their positive attributes and deficiencies, their positions in the standings, their respective outlooks in terms of overall success.

It was difficult not to wonder what makes Freddy Garcia tick, watching him shut out the Texas Rangers for six innings on the way to a 5-2 win for his new team Saturday afternoon. Two hits, a walk, that was all the batters got off him in the wind, rain and cold at Yankee Stadium.

In the old days, with the Mariners, Garcia had thrown hard and was occasionally a little wild with his pitches. You can picture him, sweaty, thick black hair dripping wet and plastered to his face, that wildness occasionally getting him in trouble if his emotions were maybe running too high. This was back in 1999 and 2000, when he was twenty-five or thereabouts. A big guy in his mid-twenties throwing a fastball in the mid-nineties, struggling to harness the velocity charging through his right arm to his fingers. 

With Friday night’s pregame announcement that starting pitcher Phil Hughes had been disabled due to what’s being termed a dead or “fatigued” arm by Yankee manager Joe Girardi, a roster move was made to bring righty reliever Lance Pendleton up from the Yankees’ AAA affiliate, the Scranton-Wilkes Barre Yankees. Pendleton, 26, was a 2005 Yankees draft pick who been taken by his hometown Houston Astros in the 2011 Rule 5 draft and been returned to the Yankees at the conclusion of  Grapefruit League.

In two games with Scranton-Wilkes-Barre this season, Pendleton was 1-1 with a 1.59 ERA, allowing three hits and striking out five in 5 innings pitched.

Friday night, he entered the game in the seventh inning and threw three scoreless innings, striking out two