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

Painful. I feel like every time the Yanks lose recently, I'm seeing extremely inflated numbers in the E column...for the opposing team. Which means they're playing messes of clubs, and still not capitalizing.

Why is this?

Also, not the most pleasant game to watch because of the complete annoyance of having to sit through 2 rain delays. Which, for the record, I did not do. My boy Casey was back in town. My most reliable friend (barring the whole moving-to-Atlanta-on-my-birthday thing) was back in the city in which he's so missed and adored...so while I was reuniting with him and the guys, the Yanks and Royals were making the grounds crew earn their paychecks.

Not 1, but 2 rain delays. And there's only so many times I can check my phone to see if the game's back on, without looking like a complete rude a-hole. (My buddies actually give me a lot of latitude with this, though. If I was texting a dude or something, they'd crucify me, but I guess they consider it comes with the territory of being a crazy Yankee chick.)

"AHHH! IT'S BACK ON!"

"It is?"

"Yesss, but it's the 7th inning already, and there's no way we're gonna get the bar to put it on." (I don't understand bars that invest in multiple plasma tv's, only to use them for airing things like their logo on a loop, or random psychadelic patterns.)

"Well, there's no way we're gonna find a sports bar on 5th Avenue."

We hustled to Lexington, jumped into the first bar we saw, and watched the Yanks end the 8th without tying the game.

Ugh. It was like the staccato nature of the game had just made it impossible for the Yanks' rallying to ever really pick up the full momentum it needed. Which is aggravating since they shouldn't really need that much to begin with. It was only a 3 run deficit. Against the Royals.

The heart of the lineup was doing its job. Arod put them on the board with a run scoring single. Cano followed suit by bringing in Tex with his own single. And in the following inning, Lance Berkman, completely improbably, actually tied the game with a looooong double.

Then Billy Butler screwed us up right before rain delay #2. A tie breaking homerun. Dammit. What a pain in the ass. He leads the league in double plays yet somehow manages to avoid sucking. He's like THAT GUY at work who does nothing but create extra work for people, but virtue of either his complete laziness or complete incompetence, but then once in a while he comes up with a brilliant idea and then he's relevant and even respected and worse, lauded. There's one in every group.

The Yanks had 10 hits on the day, so that wasn't really the problem. They just weren't very well timed, I guess. Or maybe it was just one of those days where's it like, just take your lumps, take the loss, and resign yourself to the "can't win em all" mentality.

Looking on the bright side of things: the Red Sox lost despite hitting about 49 homeruns, 3 of which were in a row, and despite having a 6 run lead at one point. Wakefield is gonna get a complex, with all these pitching-to-one-batter-in-extras-to-lose-the-game incidents. I'm ok with that.

The Rays got an L, too. Soo..no harm, no foul.

Also, Tex's batting stance looks bigger to me. Like, more Johnny Damon-like. Maybe it was the tv. I was thinking this, watching him bat in the 9th. Kendall dropped a pop-up, Tex helped him out by striking out. Cano grounds out. Game over.

Looking on additional bright sides of things, the bullpen was outstanding. I don't know why everyone's so hot for this Moseley guy, but then again, I haven't been watching the Yankees too closely, I've been relying on Suzyn and John to communicate the games to me for last 3 months, so we all know how outstandingly accurate that can be.

Moseley is mediocre, as I see it. 4 runs, 8 hits, 1 K in a little over 4 innings. Gaudin, Wood, Logan, and Justin gave up none runs. 1 walk. It's kind of like when you're younger, and one sibling is being really bad, the other siblings act exceptionally good. Sort of like this subconscious capitalization on the character foil juxtaposition or something.

So the Yanks face the Royals again in about 10 minutes, and I'm thinking they take the next 2. My prediction a week or so ago was that Friday the 13th would be the day they break away from the rest and remind everyone who's the defending Major League Baseball Champion.

Let's go, NY. Time to crush some spirits!