Your game recap this morning courtesy of Mike Mussina:

“Melky got into one early and gave us a lead, and I just did the best I could to hold them down until we could scratch out some more. We got to 3-1. I felt pretty good about it, and then we busted loose and scored four runs late so that kinda just put it away from there.”

To flesh that out, Melky Cabrera hit a two-run homer of Gil Meche in the second. Mussina held the Royals scoreless through five thanks to a couple of extra ticks on his fastball and good command of his curve. The Royals bounced him with two outs in the sixth when Ross Gload doubled and Reggie Sanders singled him home to make it 2-1. Ron Villone got Alex Gordon to end that threat. The Yanks added a run in the top of the seventh. Mike Myers bailed out Scott Proctor in the bottom of that frame, and the Yanks exploded in the eighth with Alex Rodriguez hitting career homer number 499 off Gil Meche, a two-run shot to right. That bounced Meche in favor of Jimmy Gobble, who was greeted by a Matsui solo shot and then gave up a second run on a Cano single and an Andy Phillips double to put the final at 7-1.

So the Yanks win their fourth straight four-game series and, for the first time in that stretch, have a chance to sweep. Good signs: they’ve won Kei Igawa’s last three starts, are on a six-game winning streak in which they’ve scored a minimum of seven runs in every game, and are 17-6 (.739) in July.