MUCH ADO ABOUT SOMETHING: THE CULT OF THE VETERAN
Here’s a trivia question for you: Who was the Yankees’ opening day designated hitter in 1977? Here are some hints: It wasn’t Reggie Jackson; he played right field. It wasn’t Roy White; he played left. It wasn’t Lou Piniella; he didn’t play. Ready? It was Jimmy Wynn -- the Toy Cannon. He went 2-for-3 with a home run, too, the only run the Yankees would need in a 3-0 win over the Brewers.

Jimmy Wynn was 35 then. He was a heck of a player, though it’s sometimes hard to see that because he played in the 1960s and 70s, a time when offense was at a low ebb. In 1969, he hit .269/.436/.507 with 33 home runs and 148 walks. That’s roughly equivalent to hitting .305 with 40 home runs last year. He was

WHADDYA EXPECT?
Sure, Justin Verlander is an excellent pitcher, but as CC Sabathia showed today, excellent pitchers can be beaten. It helps if you face that pitcher with a real lineup, but the Yankees were about a third short of one today with Juan Miranda, Randy Winn, and Greg Golson at the bottom of the order. This trio of light hitters stranded nine baserunners today, contributing to a 1-3 finish for the Yankees in their long series at Detroit.

At the risk of repeating yesterday’s entry, it’s quite confusing as to why the Yankees are prepared to tolerate their current roster when they have alternatives beyond Golson, a pinch-runner/defensive substitute, Winn, a player who needs to hit .300 to be productive and won’t, and the ageless Miranda, who just might -- maybe

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SOCIETY OF LEFT-HANDED GENTLEMEN
The Yankees were to face yet another left-hander tonight, Dontrelle Willis, but he was scratched. Somehow, the Tigers were able to pull another lefty out of thin air, the journeyman Brad Thomas. There’s just no escaping the southpaws for the Yankees this year. That makes 13 southpaw starters in 31 games, or 42 percent of the schedule. More troublingly, they are now only 7-6 in games started by left-handed opponents.

Going into Monday’s game, the team as a whole was hitting left-handed pitchers quite well, batting .301/.379/.518 against them. The only Yankees not doing at least a little of substance against portsiders are Nick Johnson and Curtis Granderson, neither of whom is active at the present time. If you want to be

WELCOME TO LEFTY MANSION
Tonight, the Yankees face Orioles southpaw Brian Matusz. If Matusz seems like the 98th lefty the Yankees have faced this year, you’re not far off. The Yankees have been running into portsiders at a crazy-high rate. Through Monday, the Yankees have played in 10 games started by a left-hander, compared to 15 started by a right-hander. That equates to two out of five games, or 40 percent, have been started by southpaws. Last year, opposing teams started lefties in 54 games, or one-third.

I have no idea if this lefty-centric trend will keep up -- it seems unlikely given that only 31 percent of games have been started by left-handers league-wide -- but if it does, the Yankees will face close to 70 lefties this year. Suddenly, a player like Marcus Thames goes from

WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEARTS OF MEN?
I grew up listening to old radio shows, the entertainment precursor to television. No, I’m not so old that I heard the Jack Benny show, “Gangbusters,” or “Lights Out!” when they first aired, but recordings have always been available on record or cassette (and now MP3). One of my favorites was the Shadow, the story of a vigilante with the “power to cloud men’s minds” so as to be invisible, a handy talent for driving the guilty nuts (or just shooting them, as he was more apt to do in his pulp adventures). At the beginning of each show, the Shadow’s grim laugh (sometimes voiced by Orson Welles) would rise up from swirling organ music and he would intone, “Who knows ... what EVIL ... lurks

Joe Girardi says all the right things. You don’t want players to take their jobs for granted. Thus, the organization may know who it wants to win the Joba Chamberlain/Phil Hughes battle, it may know if it wants Brett Gardner or Randy Winn in left field, but Girardi isn’t going to say so. Nothing too deep to say here, except that this kind of talk can be a bit frightening even when you recognize it for exactly what it is. You can make a reasonable argument about who the fifth starter should be, but left field… If Carl Crawford is going to be the left fielder next year, if Charlie Keller is going to be the left fielder next year, the Yankees still need a viable asset in left field, not just for the 2010 championship, but for 2011—for leverage, for depth, for trade

RE DAMON: GET OVER IT
Yesterday, the New York Post’s George King wrote a piece headlined, Yankees Outfield Not Doomed without Damon. Maybe I haven’t been listening to enough sports talk radio lately, but I totally missed the signs of panic in the streets over the departure of the ex-caveman. “You listen to the negative noise about the Yankees’ outfield without Johnny Damon and you wonder if Bubba Crosby, Karim Garcia and Raul Mondesi have slipped back into pinstripes,” King wrote.

The issue isn’t really who has slipped into pinstripes but who has slipped out of them and hasn’t necessarily been adequately replaced. Still, the difference between what Damon gave the Yankees and what they might get this season is not that large. Damon generated about

Sometimes, a team just can’t fill a position for more than a few years. For the White Sox and Mets, that position famously was third base. The former team had little of lasting value at the hot corner between Willie Kamm and Robin Ventura, a span of decades. The Mets couldn’t keep a player on third from 1962 until Howard Johnson emerged as a regular in 1987, although Wayne Garrett was a better hitter than he was given credit for being at the time. For the Yankees, that position is left field. Regardless of the ultimate allocation of playing time for the position in 2010, with Johnny Damon moving on, the team will be continuing a tradition that has lasted over 30 years. Now, this isn’t an excuse for violin-playing, because unlike the White Sox and Mets -- who had to live