“The trick is to grow up without growing old.”
- Casey Stengel

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The Yankees are 12-8 in the their last 20 games, a .600 winning percentage. For most teams, even for the Yankees, that would usually be considered a very successful record. Why, then, does it seem like they have been slacking? First, the Yankees have mostly played better than .600 this year. In every April, June and July, they were winning more often. Only in May did they slip, and just slightly, to .552. Last month, they went 19-7. If you go 19-7 often enough, folks will start comparing you to the 1927 or 1998 Yankees. In contrast to July’s dominance, in their last ten games, the Yankees are 4-6, which is not just winning less often, it’s also not winning. They haven’t won more than two games in a row since the third week of July. But for two games in Toronto (starts

BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING
Here is the first thing you have to know: from the beginning of 2009 to this point in 2010, Jose Guillen has hit .198/.281/.305 against left-handed pitching.

Now we can start.

Over in the New York Post, the impressively grizzled reporter George King writes that the Yankees are “eyeing” Jose Guillen, designated for assignment yesterday by the rebuilding Royals. King writes:

With switch-hitting Berkman struggling against lefties it's likely he will DH against right-handed pitchers. That leaves Marcus Thames and Kearns from the right side and the question the Yankees have to ask themselves is Guillen better than either one of them because the hamstring problem has turned him into a DH.

If Guillen isn’t going to play the field, then the question for the

THIS IS WHY I WORRY
Two small matters to discuss regarding Monday night’s game, and let’s not make too big a deal of this because the game was lost in the seven-run fifth, not because of anything Joe Girardi did later.

Coffee Joe made an unfortunate appearance yesterday. Those who have been reading since last year know that Coffee Joe, Joe Girardi’s over-managing alter ego, first manifested during last year’s playoffs, when Joe started making MOVES! BIG moves, running pitchers in and out of the game like he had a 43-man staff. Since then, Coffee Joe has largely been quiet, but every once in awhile he creeps out. It wasn’t when he yanked Curtis Granderson for Marcus Thames. That was a measured decision, even if it did distort the defense. No, the caffeinated action

Wednesday’s speculation on Roy Oswalt proved to be the merest Hail Mary into the night after the stadium’s lights were turned out, as the Astros and Phillies have now come to terms on a deal; Oswalt has apparently given his blessing to the deal. The sad aspect of this whole business is that if Phillies GM Ruben Amaro, Jr. had merely hung on to Cliff Lee instead of dealing him to the Mariners for what he claimed was a prospect reload, they never would have had to trade for Oswalt in the first place.

I expect that someday we will find out that ownership ordered Amaro to trade Lee and he has been forced to grin through a deal that was 99 percent likely to backfire. Roy Halladay and Lee was always going to be better than Halladay or Lee, particularly when the Phils had such a thin

IT’S THAT EASY!
You’ve heard this from me before, but I’ve been trying to lose weight. I’ve been successful this time around and am down a nice handful of pounds, though I have gotten so zeppelin-like that it’s difficult to tell—though I was accosted by a professional sushi vendor the other day and told that I could bring $250 a pound at auction in Tokyo. He was so disappointed when I convinced him I wasn’t a carp.

Yesterday, as I made my usual rounds of doctor’s offices, I spent the time listening to Sirius/XM’s MLB Radio, a channel I quite enjoy and have been fortunate enough to occasionally appear as a guest. The commercials, though, were hard on a man who hasn’t eaten, or eaten as much as he might like to, in about six weeks.

599 EH
Craig Calcaterra has a fine post up about the lack of excitement regarding Alex Rodriguez’s imminent home run No. 600. Now, when you write a post talking about the general lack of excitement about something, you run the risk that you are projecting your lack of excitement on the rest of the populace. Since I share said lack of excitement, I have no problem with presuming universal home run fatigue, A-Rod fatigue, or fatigue in general. In this case, I don’t think it’s Rodriguez, though his frequently observed anti-charisma probably has something to do with it. No, it’s that in modern baseball, home runs have become so cheap that it feels as if all of the 500 and up guys of recent years—Gary Sheffield, Manny Ramirez, Rafael Palmeiro, Jim Thome, A-Rod,

It has been a depressing month if you’re a Yankees fan. A lot of history has left us, with Ralph Houk being the latest. Rather than write a full-on obituary profile of the player, manager, and general manager, which you can find elsewhere, I would just relate a few vignettes that seem characteristic or revealing.

Houk was best known as a Yankees manager and general manager, and subsequently for managing the Tigers and Red Sox, but I tend to think of him for an event that took place late in the heated pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox in 1949. Houk was a permanent third catcher, and you can count the number of starts he received from September, 1949 (when he moved into the role) until 1954 on your fingers without getting too far onto the second hand. He was the “break

On Sunday, David Phelps, 23, threw six innings for Scranton, allowing seven hits, one run, and no walks while striking out 10. In Trenton, D.J. Mitchell took the loss as Reading shut out the Thunder, but he allowed only three runs in seven innings. Somewhere around the same time, Andy Pettitte was leaving the mound at Yankee Stadium with a strained groin, gone for perhaps a month or more.

In the short term, Pettitte’s spot will be taken by journeyman Sergio Mitre. In the long term, who knows? By “long term” I mean two things simultaneously: the next half-dozen starts and the next half-dozen years. Pettitte is 38 years old, playing year to year. For the Yankees, that’s an advantage—no extended commitment to a pitcher who might suffer a permanent loss of effectiveness