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

Once again, the Twinks avoid a sweep at the hands of their nemeses. I only saw bits and pieces of this game on account of my softball game and my going away party. The softball game was markedly better than the Yanks game, as we won our first legitimate game (we're somehow in 2nd place in the league, despite the fact this was the only game we won by scoring more runs, as opposed to the other team forfeiting.)

AND we won by the mercy rule! As always, my dad somehow managed to fix my swing in 5 minutes, and after spending the first half of the season popping up at every at-bat, he takes me to the batting cages, makes one small change, and I was lining them into the outfield. I don't know how he does it. He knows everything.

Maybe he could do some consulting work for Kevin Long, seeing as the Yanks' offense has left much to be desired lately. They've averaging only a little over 2 runs a game in the last week, and the only reason it's that HIGH is because of the work of the bottom half of our order.

In the same stretch of games, they've recorded 54 hits.

54 hits to get only 15 runs. Something's not right there.

Last night Javy sort of acted like Javy again, and I'm going to give the guy a LITTLE latitude since he may or may not have broken his finger or something. I'm a bit confused about the whole Javy situation. Last Friday, the first word on the street was that he had a broken digit and was going to be out at least 6 weeks. Then the MRI was negative. (Michael Scott: "Well apparently in the medicine community, negative means GOOD.")

And then all of a sudden Javy's making his scheduled next start?? Seems like a pretty big turnaround. I don't know, if at any point it seemed like it could potentially be bad enough to keep him out for 6 weeks, that would be reason enough for me to indicate he needs a little R&R. Even if his finger wasn't actually broken. Kind of like trying to figure out if the guy you like is gay or something. Even if he's not, then the fact you had to wonder about it should indicate that maybe it's not going to work out.

Jason Kubel went yard 2x last night, which pretty much killed us. I'm sure my boy Ollie was thrilled about this since he has some kind of weird crush on the guy.

Kubel hit a solo homer in the sixth, a three-run shot in the seventh and had an RBI double for the Twins, who had gone eight games and 349 plate appearances without a home run before the lefty broke the skid.

But in things like this, I can't really blame the pitcher for letting up these shots, because even if he hadn't, the Yanks still would have lost. You can't win a lot of games when you only score 2 runs. My little league coach used to actually demand we score 10 runs every day. It was rarely a contest to outscore the opponent, but rather, a team effort to just put 10 runs on the board, never really discerning the opposing offense as any kind of issue.

Cano brought in both of our runs, with an RBI single scoring GGBG in the 4th and a double plating Tex in the 6th.

It's reallly weird that we were only able to scrape up 2 runs in this game. I can't figure out what the problem is with the order, but when you look at the hit distribution of the game, you'll see that everyone except for Miranda and Russo got hits. Jeter, Tex, and Cano were all 2 for 4, and there were only 3 strikeouts the whole game.

How did that amount to only 2 runs? It's very odd. They stranded 6 which isn't really an inordinate amount, and went 2-for-7 with RISP, which-again-isn't that traumatic.

Chan Ho Park managed to do the inverse of this, by giving up 2 runs in 14 pitches. When it comes to the Yanks defense, there's all this rejection of basic physics, the law of thermodynamics. Runs cannot be created or destroyed. However, Park manages to create runs out of nothing, and the Yanks manage to destroy runs out of a lot. Very weird. Also, very inconvenient and unfortunate.

Tonight we start the Memorial Day weekend against the Tribe. It's theoretically an "easy" week coming up. But is that ever the case? I mean, think about it, last year the only teams we had losing records against were the Marlins and Nats. The Sox just lost to the Royals last night after just sweeping the Rays.

It's never easy. And when we're hitting like this, it's that's much harder.