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

Best laid plans, etc...

So the Sox won and Yanks lost. It's a good day to put things in perspective. I'm quite certain they'll take the next 3. Hey, remember when Ortiz got named in steroid scandal? And Gammons et al asserted the 2004/2007 titles are hence tainted? Yeah, that was fun.

Anyways, here's what I got on the game. I apologize for the brevity. Once I make it out of this day, I'll be happier than a kid whose mother lets him pour the pennies in a CoinStar machine.

My preview of last night's game: (I like to put the preview up after the fact. What, I think it's interesting to see my blind optimism. Retrospect is great!)

Game 102: Pitchers duel over who can waste less of an outing

Andy Pettitte (8-6, 4.67) and Gavin Floyd (8-6, 4.64) both enter the game with weirdly identical stats and little to no momentum to speak of, though not for lack of raw performance. Pettitte pitched 6 scoreless innings in the beginning of last Saturday's loss before Aceves took a match to the frail 1-1 game. Against the Cubs, Floyd's third straight 7K-start was moot when the southsiders fell in the 10th.

Pettitte's ability to a win has been tucked away in Manhattan Mini-Storage for the past month, and Floyd's 17-win season in 2008 is bunking with Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" in the One-Hit-Wonder cabin. While his numbers may look more than satisfactory, they belie Floyd's real caliber, because he pitches for a team who "moved a season best 5 games over .500" with Mark Buehrle's perfecto.

But for some reason, Pettitte struggles against this defensive nightmare of a squad. Last week CC faced his demons and put a stop to the As' pattern of just owning him. Pettitte looks to follow suit tonight, and grab his first W in nearly a month against the 3rd place AL Central team against which Pettitte boasts a healthy 8.55 ERA, and in a stadium in which Pettitte has not won in over a decade.

Yankee fortitude no match for Wise's penchant for heroics, in 3-2 loss

That said, I wasn't the only one who had to weather this denouement principle last night, as New York's characteristic late-inning valor was bested by the DeWayne Wise's nonpareil timed heroics. In their first game of the season against the White Sox, Rain Delay #9,027 perhaps set the tone for this dampening game, and after we finally got underway a little over an hour after the scheduled start, the Yankees looked like a claymation film. Stilted, awkward, devoid of agility, and essentially warped versions of their spirits.

It's hard to say how this game was won. Or lost. On the surface, neither team was outplaying the other, and an early RBI from Gordon Beckham in the third put the only run on the board until Johnny Damon tied it in the sixth with a laser to right that brought in Jose Molina.

Andy Pettitte and Gavin Floyd went pound for pound on this one, and once again, both pitchers handed in outstanding performances that were ultimately eclipsed. For Andy, his 8K game was wasted, as his games are want to do, and for Gavin, his 10K-er was just the opening act for someone else's day in the sun.

For about 20 minutes, Nick Swisher usurped this status. His 2-out 9th inning solo off Matt Thornton tied the game, and it looked as though Floyd's day would be the one exiled to irrelevancy, especially with Chicago's lineup having to fare in the bottom of the 9th against the invincible Phil Hughes.

It seemed like everything was strictly adhering to the requisite game elements for both teams. Rain delay, check. Yankee procrastination homerun to make things exciting, check. White Sox post-perfecto struggles, check. Hughes reliably slicing through the inning...

Didn't happen. Instead, New York fans were abruptly yanked out of their confident delirium when Wise wrecked Hughes' 16 game scoreless streak, with a single to center that brought in Scott Podsednik.

Didn't see that one coming. It was like seeing a ridiculous home-run robbing catch that almost guaranteed a momentum upswing in your favor, and then seeing your most trusted reliable go-to guy fail to get it done when the inning turned. (Cough...2007 NLCS...cough.)

As broached in the game thread, the seeming inevitability of a wasted outing from these pitchers came into the picture last night, when Andy once again couldn't taste a W. And yet despite its predictability, the Yanks never saw it coming. Sloppy fielding errors from Pettitte and Robinson Cano slowed things down a bit, but the game really can be encapsulated in Floyd's most potent weapon against the order:

A late-breaking curve ball.