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

So, Arod seems to like the DH, huh.

In total today, the Yankees hit 2,168 feet of homerun.

1,311 of those feet were off the bat of Arod.

"How big is this stadium?" I texted my buddy.

"Pretty big, I guess."

In the words of the YES booth, "Arod must feel like it's the size of a phone booth."

Ha! I love comments like that, the ones that are just like, "Can you believe this guy is a real person?"

I mean, when you think about it, he's the Ted Williams of our time, except that Ted Williams didn't have a steroid controversy around him. Which is not to say this automatically makes Williams in a different stratosphere. It's no secret that hitters today face MUCH more challenges than hitters of then. So when I say he's the Williams of our time, I don't mean to directly compare him to the great Teddy skill-wise, but rather, draw a parallel between the separation between Teddy and The Rest of Baseball...and Arod and The Rest of Baseball.

Anyways, the game started out a little slow. 1-0, Betemit singled to score Butler.

Ok, I'm not kidding, it feels like ever since I picked up a betta fish for my coworker to compensate for taking off early one day (what, that's normal office protocol, right?), and he named it WILSON...well, since then Betemit has been f'n ridiculous.

HE IS BATTING .348.

Like, OVERALL. THAT IS HIS ACTUAL BATTING AVERAGE FOR THE WHOLE 2010 SEASON. Not like, "Against pitchers who played in the NL for 2 seasons, on Saturday night games." But as in "Against pitchers period."

This is so strange.

Jeter ties the game by grounding into a double play. Proving that even when he's bad, he's still awesome. (He's also gone 51 games without an error.)

Arod breaks the tie with bomb #1.

Posada goes yard.

Grandy goes yard.

Somewhere Sterling's head was exploding.

(Small favors...got to see this game on tv...with the amount of warning track flyouts, I'm pretty sure I would have suffered some kind of permanent psychological damage if I had had to sit through Sterling's game narration.)

Hughes was okay, he got the win and all, but nothing really super dazzling. 9 hits. 3 runs. 0 Ks. I mean, KC is actually a pretty good hitting team, and from where I was sitting, his pitches were looking somewhere between good and great. One of the things I love most about Hughes is that he never nibbles. Even when he's less than brilliant, he still pushes through and works different pitches and attacks the batter. It's a real sign of maturity, actually.

And then there's our bullpen. Justin, Logan, D-Rob, Mitre. 3 innings. Only 1 hit. AND JUSTIN CHAMBERLAIN'S PITCHES WERE HITTING 97 MPH. That's so fantastic!

So I think a lot what's going on here stems from the coaching. You know, it's easy to say, "Oh, like the Yankees really need help. They just make the coaches look good, if you can't win with a team like that, you're doing something wrong."

But...not exactly.

And I think that's what happening here. I think the Girardi era really brought on a focus on more granular issues, which is sometimes evidenced in his bullpen micromanaging, but also evidenced in his fine attention to even the smallest hitting mechanics that can change everything.

Can enough really be said about Kevin Long? How many times this year have we seen a slumping player snap out of it with flying colors? I can't imagine ever being that knowledgeable about something that I could make a juggernaut IMPROVE. It'd be like David Ogilvy coming to me for copywriting help, and me being like, "Well, I think if you just tweaked your segmentation a little, you'd produce more compelling copy."

How do you touch a King of his trade? I'd be like, "um thank you for even deigning to talk to me. I think everything you do is already perfect."

So, cheers, Kevin Long. You should be the poster child/man for those Impact of Good Teacher campaigns. Seriously.

Let's take the 4th tomorrow, Yanks. I can see things are really picking up now...