I view my job at Yankee Stadium as having several major, interrelated components. First and most importantly, I try to see what I can see when I'm there and gather material for a possible column.

Next in my priorities is using social media to rapidly pass along information to fans and offer any snap impressions or opinions I might have. I often share glimpses of my personal experiences covering a baseball game to peel away the curtain separating fan and reporter.

I also like to take the pulse of fans on the Web as a game develops, find out what they’re feeling and wondering about, and provide a useful service by researching and answering people’s most common questions. In the press box I have colleagues with knowledge of different facets of the game whose brains I can pick

It was an afternoon in late July, and Mariano Rivera had stopped near the batting cage to speak with a reporter from a Latin sports outlet. The Yankee batters were beginning their practice and Rivera was headed toward the outfield with some of the other pitchers to catch fly balls. For Rivera, that has always been a pleasure; he has said that he would like someday to play center field, if only for an inning.

The reporter is a proper looking man of some years, thin, grey haired, with a neatly trimmed mustache.  Even in the midsummer heat, his attire is semiformal -- collared dress shirts and suspenders, when the younger members of the sports media will often wear golf shirts and khakis. He carries a leather shoulder bag that always looks slightly overstuffed.

I do not know his name.

"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,

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

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,

The news cycle no longer really being a cycle, but a continuous multimedia immersion, you’ve all probably read or seen Ivan Nova’s  postgame comments at his locker after last night’s Angels-Yankees game in the Bronx. They speak for themselves.

Scanning my Twitter timeline on the way home from the Stadium, I’d noticed these reactions:

“Such a sweet interview... Nova is fun to watch. He’s genuine, confident and humble,” wrote @Yankeebeatcheck in two separate updates.

“He is joyful to be there. No jadedness, no spin. Honesty and pure joy at where life has taken him,” added @dp57.

This is just a quick note to say that I shared those feelings while inside the clubhouse and that the unvarnished joy Nova exuded

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,

Grampa Godino says he doesn’t have a first name anymore. It used to be Charles, technically still is, he contends. Charles Godino, professor of mathematics, Brooklyn College. But to Megan Ajello and her younger sister Erin he’s Grampa, and that’s how he introduces himself. 

“Hi, nice to meet you I’m Megan’s Grampa.”

This is a hot, sunny July afternoon on a nice tree-lined Staten Island street, a half mile or so from the Prince’s Bay railroad station.  Quiet, middle class suburban neighborhood here. Single family homes, two-car garages, basketball hoops, neat front lawns here. Hedges and flower gardens and bicycles leaning on kickstands here. And today all these Yankee baseball players, famous models, reporters and television cameras