Or as Cole Porter wrote, it was just one of those things. Normally, Wallace Matthews of ESPN.com would have a very good point: why would Joe Girardi rest his regulars against their top division rival?

No Alex Rodriguez? No Brett Gardner? Berkman at first in place of Mark Teixeira? Kearns starting in left? If it wasn't for the name "Jeter" appearing where it is just about every day, at the top of the list, it would have been difficult to determine at first glance that this was a Yankees lineup card at all.

Thus did the Yankees go down quietly in the rubber game of a key series. The problem with getting exercised about this is that it really wasn’t all that key. Sure, the Yankees are now at greater risk of swapping places in the standings with the Rays, but they are also still 6.5

I continue to spend much of my time at the local hospital, where my father is greatly improved but not yet out of the woods. As an older fellow with myriad health problems, my father is subject to a game of health dominoes: you take a severe blow to one system and all the others start breaking down. It’s like pulling at the bottom of a house of cards.

I’m there to keep him company, not watch baseball, but he’s sensitive to my work and my enthusiasms, and so he keeps offering. Unfortunately, the television in his room gets about 12 channels, none of them YES or the MLB network. He does get ESPN, but their attention to the only sport that matters has been intermittent as they’ve been dealing with the NFL draft, badminton, and other apparently pressing matters. Because