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

Of all the active pitchers in the league, Beckett is the absolute last one I'd want to face in any kind of significant situation. The Yanks make idiots out of aces like Santana or Halladay, are sometimes made idiots by no names like Tazawa, but always made useless against the jackass that is Josh Beckett.

BOMBS OVER BOSTON!!!



Robinson Cano launched a missile into right center, which doesn't come close to erasing the fact he been auditing the Mets' class on Defensive Fundamentals. Seriously, he went from looking like one of the sharpest tools in the 2B shed, to having the defensive prowess of Roger Rabbit.



His dropped popup is just one in a series of fielding blunders from Robbie, and the scariest part is that I feel like everyone on the roster has been going through spurts of disgusting defense. It doesn't last long, fortunately, but it's usually costly. And I'm terrified that eventually Tex is going to catch this hazardous virus that's so far plagued:

• Robinson Cano


• Nick Swisher


• Johnny Damon


• Jorge Posada

Speaking of sickening, I forgot how abhorrent Joe Morgan et al are. I've come to accept the fact that they're never going to give me anything that comes close to game analysis. I'm lucky if they even refer to the game at all, Hell, at this point, I just hope that ESPN minimizes their split-screen views (split= 1/4 of screen showing game, 3/4 showing Tiger Woods breathing or some other pivotal sports nuance), and shots of the broadcast booth to non-critical moments of game.

But I suspect the jerks at ESPN make a concerted effort to do the opposite. I bet they're NYU film school graduates who hate sports, and especially hate the Yankees and Red Sox, and as such try to their best to torture us home viewers. It sucks being at the mercy of someone else.

Say what you will about McCarver and Buck, but they worst they really put out there is stuff like, "And what you gotta realize about this game is that if you don't put runs up, you're not gonna score." On the other hand, we have the hat trick of idiots in the ESPN booth: Phillips, Morgan, and Miller. (WHY can't they just start a law firm instead? With last names like that, it's almost criminal not to.)

When Varitek hit the game-tying RBI double, I thought Miller was going to go into cardiac arrest. Conversely, when Tex hit his go-ahead RBI single, they acted like he just reached on a weak infield grounder. I get you're biased, but COME ON!!! Michael Kay is obviously a bleeding heart Yank fan, but he still gives the requisite "SEE YA!" when an opponent goes yard. A little parity would be nice here, guys.

The 4th player to take Beckett deep was...!!!!!....A-Rod. And holy shit did he knock it out. It wasn't one of the Giambi specials that sail into the next zip code. But it was a rocket that shot into the Green Monster so fast, the booth didn't even have time to react to it.

(I wish I had been listening to the radio at that point, just to hear what Sterling does when he can't waffle around on the high, far, gone bit. It'd have to have been at MicroMachine man speed to rattle that off in the time it took for this ball to peace out.)

Other notes on the day:

• CC is such a freaking badass. 8Ks, 0 walks, 5th straight win. And despite this, I'm STILL hearing Boston fans and NY haters weakly maintaining that "Yeah, great, who cares, he still SUCKS in the postseason." Beckett is awesome in the postseason, but that doesn't mean a whole lot if you can't even get there, dumbasses.

• Did he lose some weight?

• CC now has the best record in the majors.

• The Yanks are 7.5 games ahead of the Sox, with the Sox barely hanging on to a 1 game lead over Texas in the Wild Card standings.

• 2 Es for the Yanks?? Ouch. And they couldn't have been throwing errors or something, they had to be the Ultimate, Straight Out of Type Casting ilk of errors--the converging of 3 players on one 1 bloop pop-up. Painful, painful to watch.

• What a phenomenal sequence of pitchers: CC, Hughes, Rivera. I wish we could just play them every day.

• Off day tomorrow (for the Yankees AND me!) and then the boys are back in town! Rangers Tuesday through Thursday, ChiSox over the weekend. Speaking of off days, it should be noted that on Saturday I slept til 3pm. And Sunday I slept til 7pm. I'm not kidding. And between Friday and Saturday night I probably drank a combined 4 beers tops. So I'm 100% chalking this up to the past week of f'n 10pm starts. The thing I don't understand is that during football season, a 1PM EST game starts at 10am in California. So...why not baseball starting at 4?

• The Yanks are now 6-9 against the Sox.