I hate to break it to you, but the American League races are pretty much over. With roughly 20 games left (less for the Yankees and Twins), the closest race remains the Wild Card, where the Red Sox hold a four-game lead over the Rangers. The Yankees lead the Angels by five games for home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. The Tigers lead the Twins by 5.5 in the Central. The Angels lead the Rangers by six in the West, and the Yankees’ lead over Boston in the East is a comfortable seven games.

Unless something wild happens (and I’m not saying it won’t), the Yankees will host the Tigers in the ALDS, and the Angels will host the Red Sox. If the Yankees advance, they’ll then have homefield advantage over their ALCS opponent, which given the recent playoff history between the two teams (the Angels have won just one game in three ALDS series against Boston since 2004), is more likely to be the Red Sox than the Angels. It’s thus very possible that tonight’s make-up game, and the three games the Yankees will play in Anaheim next week, are in fact a preview of nothing, and could have no significance for the postseason at all as the Yankees would automatically have home field advantage against the Wild Card Red Sox.

Still, an ALCS matchup with the Angels remains a distinct possibility, and the Angels team that arrives in the Bronx tonight is a much better one than the one that swept the Yankees in the final series before the All-Star break. In that last series, Vlad Guerrero and Torii Hunter were on the DL and Scott Kazmir was a Tampa Bay Ray. All three of those players are on the Angels active roster now, and while the Yankees will face Jered Weaver, not Kazmir tonight, they make the Angels a far more dangerous team. The Angels have been winning at a .661 clip since the break, just four-games behind the Yankees’ remarkable pace.

The Yankees would do well to remember that they took two of three from the Angels in the Bronx in May, and that they’ve had some modest success against Weaver this year, scoring eight runs against him in 12 innings and connecting for three home runs (by Jorge Posada, Alex Rodriguez, and Eric Hinske).

Joba Chamberlain takes the hill for the Yankees tonight. After a rough beginning to his last outing, Chamberlain settled down and retired the last eight men he faced in order. He’ll move up to four innings tonight, hoping to build off that performance.

Yankees added journeyman minor league utility man Freddy Guzman to the 40-man roster. Guzman is on his fourth organization this year and will serve as a pinch-runner, defensive replacement, then vanish back into the ether from whence he came. Standard lineup tonight against the Halos.

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A few days ago, the New York Times ran an article that claimed the Yankees bypassed several golden opportunities to sign a young Willie Mays in the months before he officially became a member of the New York Giants’ organization. Like the Red Sox and numerous other franchises that populated the Jim Crow landscape in 1950, the Yankees gave Mays less than lukewarm attention because they felt little motivation to fully integrate their organization. On their way to a 98-win season and a World Series sweep over the Phillies, the Yankees were content to leave Mays in the Negro Leagues—or let him sign with some other major league team, one that was needier and perhaps even a bit desperate.

So let’s speculate a bit how much Yankee history would have changed if they had taken a more aggressive approach with regard to the young Mays. Even without Mays, the Yankees did their fair share of winning throughout the 1950s and the early years of the 1960s. But could they have won more? Though never particularly outstanding in postseason play, Mays could have made a difference in the outcomes of the 1955, ’57, ’60, and ’64 World Series, when the Yankees fell short to the Brooklyn Dodgers, Milwaukee Braves, Pittsburgh Pirates, and St. Louis Cardinals, respectively. The Yankees lost all four of those Series in the maximum seven games; perhaps Mays’ presence would have been sufficient to turn World Series defeat into the alternate reality of a world championship. Who knows?

Putting aside the harsh realities of the bottom line of world championships, I am certain that Mays would have made a huge difference in terms of baseball aesthetics. With Mays on board patrolling the monuments at the original Yankee Stadium, the Bombers, at least by 1960, would have been capable of boasting the greatest outfield in the history of the game. Let’s imagine the wonders of an outfield featuring Mays in center, flanked by the phenomenal Mickey Mantle in left field and the meteoric Roger Maris in right field, with all three men in the prime of their mid-to-late twenties. I mean, what more could you have wanted from three major league outfielders? High on base percentages, check. Gold Glove defensive ability, double check. Speed, check. And upper deck power, triple check.

The addition of Mays to the Yankee stable would have provided another lasting benefit to fans of the franchise, especially those who regularly attended games at the old Stadium. For fans of baseball in the 1960s, in particular, one of the most lasting images involved the sight of Mays rounding the bases. We can make all sorts of arguments about Mays being the greatest all-around player of all-time—I’m tempted to make that call, but know it will be met with rounds of debate and skepticism—but there should be little doubt that Mays was the most memorable baserunner of the television era. (And he just might have been the greatest baserunner of any era, with apologies to Ty Cobb.)

By the time this author began following baseball in the early 1970s, Mays was no longer in his overall prime, but remained a vibrant and dangerous baserunner. When Topps decided to include a series of “action” cards in its massive 1972 set, the company wisely chose to include a card depicting Mays in the act of completing one of his memorably dynamic and frantic runs around the bases. Specifically, his 1972 Topps card shows the “Say Hey Kid” sliding into home plate, his right arm extended, piling a cloud of dust onto the helpless catcher with his unseen but nonetheless powerful legs. And then there’s the Mays trademark on the basepaths—the cap. By the early 1970s, most major league baserunners wore helmets on the bases, but not Mays. He had always run the bases while wearing only his cap on his head, and he saw no reason to change in an era when player safety became more prevalent. There was just something right about Mays wearing that cap, which often flew out from underneath him because of the sheer force and torque with which he ran the basepaths. By the time that Mays reached home, his lonely cap was often sitting between third and home, or resting between second and third, waiting to be retrieved by a diligent coach or a batboy. I can see that picture on my old black-and-white Sony as if it were the day before yesterday.

As much as baseball statistics shed light on the quality of its players, they do little to convey the aesthetic landscape of the game, including the simple beauty of a runner making his way from first base to home plate. Thankfully, with its 1972 action card, Topps captured a small sample of what it was like to watch the artistic and comforting image of Willie Mays running the bases. And for those who love the visual dynamics of the game, there was nothing quite like it.

Bruce Markusen writes “Cooperstown Confidential” for The Hardball Times.

This is more than nifty:

I generally try not to make assumptions about a team’s mental state, because who knows what players are actually thinking during any given game? But I couldn’t help wondering this weekend, with a playoff spot all but sewn up and the Jeter hype finally over, if the Yankees hadn’t lost focus a bit. It would certainly be understandable.

The fourth inning of today’s game, when Johnny Damon forgot how many outs there were and nearly threw a live ball into the stands, allowing a run to score, did nothing to undermine this theory. But after that little wake-up call – and after Alex Rodriguez and Joe Girardi were both ejected for arguing balls and strikes – the Yankees got their act together, and they went on to win 13-3.  Correlation is not causation but hey, the human mind loves to impose a narrative.

CC Sabathia started off a little shaky this afternoon, and he couldn’t hold the 1-0 lead provided by Alex Rodriguez’s first inning double. But after allowing three runs in the first four innings, he settled in and kept the O’s off the board through seven. In the bottom of the fourth, Melky Cabrera’s two-run single (he whacked a slider into center with a neat little piece of 0-2 hitting) tied the game at three. The promising inning ended when Alex Rodriguez struck out looking on a pitch that, while close, was pretty clearly a bit outside on the replay. And once A-Rod got the chance to duck into the video room and confirm his suspicions, just before the bottom of the fifth, he started hectoring home plate ump Marty Foster about it from the dugout. So Foster tossed him. And then Joe Girardi hulked out.

At first I thought Girardi was just trying to get tossed to “fire up” the team, which we’ve seen him do before; sometimes it seems like he’s just going through the argumentative motions, waiting to get run. But today he looked genuinely furious – he was yelling just inches from Foster’s face, and I think it’s pretty hard to fake that scary bulging-vein thing. He was thrown out, of course, so Tony Pena and Eric Hinske took over in the dugout and at third, respectively.

The Yankees loaded the bases in the bottom of the sixth, took the lead when Jeter and Damon scored on a Hideki Matsui single, and that was it for O’s starter Jeremy Guthrie. Ex-Yank Sean Henn – who per Tyler Kepner’s nice Bats post, has no idea how he even ended up on the Orioles – got Baltimore out of the inning, but subsequent relievers did not fare as well. After Phil Hughes did his thing in the eighth, the Yankee offense unloaded: Damon walked, Teixeira singled, Matsui homered – nice day for him – and things went on in that vein until New York led 13-3. This was not enough of a lead for Brian Bruney to refrain from walking two batters in the ninth, but it was enough for that not to matter.

After the game both Joe Girardi and Alex Rodriguez explained their outbursts by talking about how important this game was, which… it wasn’t, really. But there are still two weeks of baseball left to be played, and a 2007-Mets-style death spiral is not yet technically impossible, so I guess you would have to keep telling yourself that.

I. PROLOGUE

Derek Jeter’s Yankeeography was among the first of the series to air on YES after the network launched in 2002. It seems like the crew at MLB Productions has to scrap something and update it every year for future re-broadcasts. The next addition: he will stand alone as the Yankees’ all-time hits leader and the video to support the feat will be logged and included.

It is an honor that deserves all the respect we as Yankee fans and baseball fans can provide, especially considering the man he’s passing: Henry Louis Gehrig. A question needs to be asked regarding the coverage and the build-up, though: Did someone think to pull the plug on this, or at least trickle the information piecemeal? The fact that there was little else to discuss because the Yankees have practically locked up the AL East is no excuse.

Did anyone else think it was too much? Were you offended or insulted by the fact that there wasn’t anything new to add to the subject, that there was little we didn’t already know just continuously being regurgitated? It was like being force-fed the same meal every day at the same time, with no other alternative food choices.

To wit: Did the same video footage and nearly the same commentary — verbatim — need to be replayed and repeated night after night, day after day, from the beginning of the Toronto series last Friday? By the time Sunday’s finale came around, it was absurd.

The video from May 30, 1995, his first hit, a groundball through the left side of the infield at the Kingdome, off Tim Belcher, was shown countless times, with Michael Kay’s commentary, “and Derek Jeter standing on first base next to his future teammate and good friend, Tino Martinez.” We got it after the fourth viewing. At that point, I was mouthing Kay’s description of the clip. Then there was the praise for his upbringing with the cutaways to his parents and how anyone associated with the Yankees who scouted him or saw him play in high school “was not surprised at what he’s accomplished.” That fed the discussion of his legend, starting with the first game in Cleveland in 1996 when he homered and made a great over-the-shoulder catch in shallow left field, a play that along with the jump throw from deep in the hole became “Jeterian” (by the way, this is a B.S. adjective that sounds incorrect compared to “Jeteresque.” Can we get a decision on that?), continuing to the Jeffrey Maier home run, the flip play, the Mr. November home run, the dive into the stands against the Red Sox five years ago, and the list goes on.

I know I sound like the guy on the front porch yelling at kids to get off my lawn, which could lead you to the conclusion that I’m a Jeter hater. While I’m not averse to reprimanding people for encroaching my property, nothing could be further from the truth on the Jeter hating. I gained a great appreciation for him while covering him from 2002-06. You have to see how he handles himself amid all the potential distractions on a daily basis to understand how difficult it is to do what he does. He’s a great player, but there was just nothing there beyond his being a baseball player — at least not that he displayed to the people holding pens, pads, recorders and cameras. Jeter was trained well. He doesn’t give too much away, speaks the company line and controls his emotions. Would we as beat writers and reporters try to bait him to give more and show some personality? Sure, but he would never comply. He was too smart. At least he was not phony about it.

The biggest question, based on the personality test above, was, “Would he enjoy the moment?” There was legitimate concern over this in the local media. The best answer came from Jeter himself. He tipped his helmet to the fans, but knew the Yankees were trailing 2-0 and he didn’t want to “disrespect Tampa,” as he told Kim Jones. Only when the Rays all moved to the top step of their bench clapped for Jeter’s achievement did he take a little extra time to bask in the moment. Class act all the way. He does not act bigger than the game, either on the micro or the macro level.

That’s the essence of Derek Jeter. If he doesn’t enjoy the moment himself, we’ll certainly enjoy it for him.

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According to Tyler Kepner, David Robertson went for his second M.R.I. today and he won’t be pitching for ten days to two weeks. Perhaps he will be ready for the playoffs but I’m not so sure we should count on it.

My thought at the start of the season still holds…the key to the Yankees playoff hopes is AJ Burnett. Todd Drew’s boy. The guy Rich Lederer sold me on. AJ Burnett: an uneven pitcher with a golden arm.

The Yanks are cruising to October now, so naturally, I’m starting to get worried, cause that’s how neurotics roll. Are they using up all of their mojo? Can this last? You know the line of thinking. But really, I think it all comes down to Burnett. If he pitches like an ace, the Yankees will be awfully tough to handle. But if he’s a bust, well then, nothing is certain.

The man, and this team, still have something to prove.

I looked up from my book this morning to see where we were. The subway is crowded again, kids are back to school. In the row across from me, almost everyone was reading–the newspaper, a magazine, a novel, a textbook, their blackberries. Sometimes people ask me if I mind commuting on the subway. I look at them like they are crazy. When else would I have time to read?

There was an engaging piece last week in the Times by Alexis Mainland about reading on the subway. Dig:

The middle-aged woman with the black cardigan around her shoulders had assumed a meticulously calibrated posture: feet shoulder-width apart, arms slightly bent, fists loosely clenched, muscles relaxed yet alert.

She was not preparing for a tae kwon do bout, but performing her personal version of the underground battle engaged in daily by millions of New Yorkers: reading, intently, on a sardine-can D train heading swiftly toward Brooklyn in the evening rush. Without holding on.

“I am a New Yorker,” the woman, Robin Kornhaber, 54, told me as if those five crisp words explained everything. “I can do anything on the subway.”

Joba’s on the hill tonight as the Yanks look to sweep the Rays.

The kid needs a good outing. Here’s hoping he comes through this evening.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

Todd Drew’s seats from Yankee Stadium II. Now resting comfortably on Marsha Drew’s deck down south.

I am honored to announce that Todd Drew’s Lasting Yankee Stadium Memory has been selected by Leigh Montville to be in The Best American Sports Writing 2009 (due out next month). This is only the second blog entry that has ever been included in the series (Derek Zumsted’s piece on Bugs Bunny was the first).

We have enjoyed many fine moments here at Bronx Banter since the blog began in late 2002, but no single moment has made me prouder. It is a moment laced with sadness because Todd is no longer with us. However, I’m certain that he would not want us to dwell on that. I’m not sure that it would be easy for him to be the center of attention either, but I do know that he worked hard on his writing and cared deeply about good writing. To be included in this series–one that he adored to no end–would have knocked him on his ass.

I like to think of him as bursting with pride right about now.

Quick story about this piece. Todd’s first draft was written in the second person. When I first read it, I intended to end the series with it because it was so strong (for various reasons, having nothing to do with the article, that didn’t happen). But there is something about the second person that generally rubs me the wrong way. So I asked Todd if he would be willing to try it in the first person. He was more than happy to oblige, as Todd was always looking to improve his work, try something new. A few days later, he sent me the article, now in the first person.

And he had it right the first time. It was meant to be in the second person. Which is the version that appeared on the blog and will now be in the company of the other great work in The Best American Sports Writing 2009.

So join me in a toast, to Todd Drew.

This is a great moment for us all, the entire Banter community. I’m thrilled to share it with you.

Should Joba Chamberlain go back to the pen for the playoffs?

Rob Neyer tackles this loaded question over at ESPN.

I say, yeah, put the big fella back in the pen for now. Why not have Hughes and Chamberlain in the bullpen?

Nope, it doesn’t get old. The Yanks are gorging themselves on the Rays and just about everyone else they face. And it sure feels good.

*

David Price pitched a wonderful game for the Rays, allowing a solo home run to Nick Swisher and an RBI single to Alex Rodriguez. Chad Gaudin was more efficient, allowing just one run (homer to Evan Longoria). Phil Hughes coughed up the 2-1 lead by giving up a solo shot to Jason Bartlett in the eighth but Mariano Rivera pitched a scoreless ninth and then Swisher planted a line drive into the first row of the right field bleachers in the bottom of the inning. Cue Sinatra, AJ and his pie, with the hugging and mugging and jumping at home plate. It was Swisher’s 26th dinger of the season, just his fifth at home.

Final Score: Yanks 3, Rays 2.

Derek Jeter struck out three times and went 0-4 but got plenty of cheers regardless.

That makes 90 wins for the Yanks, and for the moment, life is good in the Bronx.

* Here’s where Steely Dan got the intro bit…

Just got in the door from Vermont, lugging bags up from the car, schvitzin’, hungry, cranky.

But just in time to put up a game thread, relax and watch the Yanks.

Heard something about a visit to Dr. J. Andrews for David Robertson which is not a good sign.

Otherwise, life is good and Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

There was one kid who stood out among all the others. The one a coach is always hoping he’ll see: the kid who went after ground balls with a kind of liquid grace, whose hands were sure, who listened. Ernies Alemais was the coach doing the talking. First he talked to the kid and found out he had played four years of Little League but now, at 11, had no team to call his own and said he didn’t have the time to look for one. And then, when the fielding, throwing and hitting drills were done and a six-on-six Whiffle Ball game was, too, Ernies talked to the kid’s grandmother about a better tomorrow.

On the patch of Bronx real estate where he runs the Uptown Sports Complex between a funeral home and an OTB parlor, Ernies told her of the talent he had seen in her boy and how that talent could keep him in school and maybe someday take him to college. The kid’s grandmother smiled as if she had just been thrown a life preserver. Then she dipped into her purse and offered Ernies a tip.

He smiled and put his hand on hers. “I don’t want a tip,” he said. “I want your boy to come back.”

The words were the kind Ernies Alemais lives to speak, and the kind he never heard when he was a kid himself. To look at him now at 35—well-scrubbed, meticulously casual in sandals, jeans and T-shirt, a Dominican Matthew McConaughey—it is hard to believe he never heard someone preach the gospel he lives by. But he was that rare Dominican kid who grew up without baseball.

There were no places like the Uptown Sports Complex when Ernies was growing up. His father wasn’t around either, though he gave him the first name with the odd spelling after seeing it on a bodega. But there was no time to teach Ernies baseball.

“I asked my dad a few years ago why he didn’t teach the game to me,” said Ernies recently, standing next to one of the hitting cages in the Complex. “He had no words for me. No words. He was sorry.”

That was enough for Ernies, an achiever who was the captain of the football team and class president at John F Kennedy in the Bronx during his senior year when it won the city championship. He was too small to play D-1 football, so six months after he graduated, Ernies got a job in building maintenance where he would remain for the next sixteen years. His aversion to school was in no small part because of his lifelong struggles with dyslexia.

“I got left back in third grade and they wanted to put me in Special Ed but my mother wouldn’t have it,” he said. “In junior high, I had Resource, which was between regular school and Special Ed.”

Ernies has always been bothered by his dyslexia, something he likes to keep private. But when he realized his dyslexia was going to come out in this post, he told me, “Well, if it’ll help one person who has dyslexia realize they can achieve things despite this handicap then go ahead and put it in. I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve compensated for my lack of book smarts with charisma,” he says.

“He isn’t cocky,” says longtime friend Jesse Garcia (also known around these parts as “Dimelo”), who was a year behind Ernies at JFK. “If he doesn’t know something he’ll ask. He doesn’t have a problem saying ‘I don’t know.’ I was reading about Derek Jeter the other day and the article said he feels that he’ll never fail. That’s like Ernie. He might fail but he always acts like there will be a successful outcome.”

Ernies is a featured player in a long essay I’ve got on summer sports in New York City over at SI.com:

It’s not that sports matter more to New Yorkers than they do to Philadelphians or Angelinos. What distinguishes sports here is New York’s quintessential diversity. In any given area of town, you will find any number of games being played by any number of nationalities, side-by-side.

Take Van Cortlandt. On this Sunday afternoon, I saw over a dozen soccer games, three cricket matches and six softball games being played at once in the open field on the west side of the park. A group of proud, hard-looking black and Spanish women trudged across the great field after a softball game just as a collection of dapper-looking West Indian and Pakistani teenagers convened for a cricket match.

Next to the field is the oldest public golf course in the country; and next to that are the riding stables. Below both are public pools, a cross-country track, tennis and basketball courts and more baseball fields. A couple of blocks away, tucked off 240th Street, is Gaelic Park, a treasure shared by Manhattan College and the Gaelic Athletic Association.

In the summer, off-the-boat Irish boys, strong, pink necked and pale legged, play terrific games of such primordial Viking sports as Gaelic football and hurling (think of field hockey, lacrosse, and baseball mashed together). Young women play football too, and then pound beers over by the picnic table. The field comes equipped with a bar. When I visited, a few hundred people sat in the bleachers. Across the field in the small press box, an old-timer fixed himself a cup of Barry’s tea and spread butter on a thick slice of Irish Soda Bread. “They ran out of scones today,” he said. A thin man in front of him packed up his laptop, having just finished an article on the women’s football match, and changed into shorts and spikes as he prepared to referee the hurling match.

“We multi-task,” he said.

I also saw a bunch of street basketball, at 145 and Lenox, at the Rucker and at Dyckman. And I got to meet Ruth Payne, a fascinating woman and double dutch coach who helped double dutch become an official varsity sport in the New York City school system. The fifteenth of eighteen kids, Payne never married and doesn’t have any children of her own. But early in her life she became the designated family babysitter and subsequently has been a mentor to dozens of children from her neighborhood of Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Like Alemais, she is one of the good ones.

Emma Span helped out with reporting on this project and the accompanying videos were produced, shot, and edited by Collin Orcott, a talented J-school student who interned at SI this past summer. We put a ton of work into the assignment and I’m pleased with how it turned out.

Hope you enjoy.

The Yanks swept the Rays yesterday at the Stadium. First game was a close one until the Yanks pulled away in the eighth. Final score: 4-1. Then, they blew the Rays out in the second game, 11-1. The gives the Yanks 89 wins on the season and a robust nine game lead on the Red Sox.

My how life am grand.

Robbie Cano drives me crazy sometimes – you guys know the deal: he rarely walks, sometimes he doesn’t exactly bust it down to first, and once in a while he falls so in love with one of his own home runs, Manny-style, that you can practically see steam coming out of the opposing pitcher’s ears. Today he didn’t cover second base for what should have been the last out of the fifth inning. But he also homered, and doubled, and singled and even walked, and then he’s got that smile. I think it’s bigger than Marco Scutaro’s entire body. How do you stay mad?

Anyway, Andy Pettitte came back to earth a bit this afternoon, and the Yankees didn’t exactly play their tightest game in the field, but it was good enough and they beat the Blue Jays 6-4. “I thought it was a real important game for us to win,” said Girardi after the game. Sure, Joe. It was a slow lazy afternoon game on the last real weekend of summer, and it didn’t really have any effect on anything except maybe Cito Gaston’s indigestion. But winning, as a wise man once said, it’s like, you know, better than losing.

The Yankees scored first, on Melky Cabrera’s RBI single in the second and then Robinson Cano’s fourth-inning homer, but the Jays promptly tied it up in the bottom of that inning. That lasted all of two pitches, as New York got out ahead again in the fifth thanks to Mark Teixeira’s solo shot,  tacked on two more in the sixth with RBI singles from A-Rod and Posada, and added one to grow on in the ninth as Melky plated Cano. Pettitte left after six, having allowed four earned-ish runs on four hits and an unfortunate five walks, but with a slim lead, and the bullpen made it hold up. Phil Hughes continues to be an aburdist work of art in relief and retired all four batters he faced with very little muss and zero fuss.

The Yankees’ division lead is now at eight and a half, and they haven’t lost three games in a row in almost two months (that was against the Angels, of course). Enjoy the long weekend, gang – and don’t forget, Monday night is Hand Sanitizer Keychain Giveaway Day at the Stadium for the first 18,000 fans 21 and older, so be sure to get to the game early! God.

The steam-rollin’ Yanks were shut out by one of the game’s best last night, ending a seven-game winning streak. The boys are back at it again this afternoon as they aim to start a new one. I won’t be able to catch it, but Emma will and she’ll be back later on with a re-cap. And our boy Dimelo is up in Toronto with crew reppin’ NYC and the Banter.

Meanwhile, it is gorgeous up here in Vermont, so I’m a cool out with Emily’s family–it’s reunion weekend don’t ya know?–and try not to peak at the score on my blackberry too much. Helps have a seven-and-a-half game lead, don’t it?

So Roy Halladay wasn’t going to be bump forever and he turned in a beaut, a one-hit shutout as the Jays rolled 6-0. According to Jonathan Abrams, writing in for the New York Times:

Johnny Damon veered straight into the clubhouse after Friday’s game. Not in anger, but in amazement. He confirmed what his eyes had just seen but his mind could still not quite grasp.

Just as in his previous three at-bats, the ball came out of Roy Halladay’s hand in the eighth inning with the velocity of a fastball and the zigzag movement of a changeup. Damon had struck out on three pitches in his fourth and final at-bat. Now, he smiled.

“Just making sure that it wasn’t just me that thought that pitch was impossible to hit,” he said.

I’m up in Vermont with the wife’s family this weekend so I missed the game. But it doesn’t take too much to imagine how last night’s game panned-out. Fortunately, the Red Sox also lost so New York’s lead remains at seven-and-a-half. Turn the page and keep it movin’.

Slow day here at the Banter. Yanks have to deal with Roy Halladay tonight and he’s been less than his regular stellar self of late. Figure he should have a strong start. Let’s see what Joba Ranks has in store for us.

Nevermind the comfortable lead:

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!