"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

So when I played basketball in high school, there was one game that we never tried to pep ourselves up for. We were a good team, and we won a lot, but when we played Riverdale Country School, the captains' talk in the locker room went something like this:

"Ok, let's call a spade a spade. We're not gonna win this one. Let's just try to keep the damage to a respectable amount."

I'm not kidding. Have you ever heard of a decent varsity team resigning themselves like that before the game even started? And the thing was, it was completely understandable. We had zero chance of beating them, because one girl on their team could have taken the varsity boys' first string 5-1 and still massacred them single-handedly.

Niesha Butler. The Lebron James of women's basketball who we were unfortunate enough to be in the same high school league as.

And of course, that's how it is in the Major Leagues, whenever the Yanks have to bat against Fernando Nieve.

No one wants to go up against a pitcher who hasn't logged a win since the Reagen administration. It's intimidating. And that's exactly how the Yanks played yesterday. I feel your pain, boys. I didn't like taking the court with Niesha any more than you like go up against Nieve.

All in all, a lackluster game. 6-2. Meh. Only 2 hits in the whole game? In the words of Girardi, "you're not gonna win many games that way."

Petitte seems to have outings like this once every 3-3.5 weeks. Just ugly, sloppy messes. I don't understand it. But you don't have to understand it at this point, you just have to accept it and realize that 1 out of every 6ish starts is going to be a bad one for this guy, so be prepared for that.

In off the field news:

• Doctors have attributed Damon's eye problems to caffeine and have advised him to lay out the coffee. I've had that problem! I had something called uveitis and it hurt like a bitch and was apparently from caffeine. It made it EXTREMELY hard to focus my eyes, I hope the Yanks are having some kind of Starbucks intervention with Damon, because I'd hate to see him drop some more popups and go on lengthy batting slumps just because he can't keep his hands off his iced venti 4-shot caramel machiattos.


• Penny goes off on Girardi for accusing him of hitting ARod with a pitch. Please. Girardi, to his credit, said it absolutely prefectly when he counters, "It's not like I blasted Brad Penny -- I just said I thought he hit Alex Rodriguez on purpose. I wasn't 100 percent sure and only Brad Penny knows...Penny's control was pretty good, and I thought it was on purpose." Eff off, Penny. You won the game, you know it was on purpose. Just take it.
• Bruney goes off on K-Rod, saying that, regarding the Castillo-snafu, "It couldn't have happened to a better guy on the mound." I hate it when players air their gripes to the media before taking it up with the player. Because what do they think is going to happen? Nothing good. And while Bruney doesn't have much to worry about in terms of K-Rod drilling him in the head, K-Rod ain't a person I'd want to run into a dark alley. It's a toss up between him and Sheffield as scariest freaks in baseball.


• The line of the day goes to the HapyKorean, who kept my spirits up while I inhaled chicken fingers like a depressed chick going to town on a pint of Ben & Jerry's after a breakup. During a conversation he was having with my sister, where he was setting her straight about the true definition of "jumping on the grenade," he says, "No, it doesn't just mean being a wingman. It means being willing to go home with a girl who looks something you'd draw with your left hand."