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

Everyone has their own way of dealing with grief.

So, after the headspinning sweep at the hand of the "low-budget As," Yankee fans were just kind of stupified. As coworker MVP Alex L. pointed out (maybe a little too excitedly): "That was the first time the Yankees got swept in a 4-game series, with each game decided by 1 run."

It was horrifying really. Nothing was making sense. Each game was more confusing than the last, so by time Sunday rolled around, we were fairly confident that there was no way they were gonna lose this. ESPECIALLY when they took a 4-run lead.

Suffice to say they lost. They blew it. I followed the game from Yankee Stadum, actually--as if to underscore the whole "wtf is going on here" mentality saturating baseball, I was watching a soccer game being played in Greatness' New Home. (Which was pretty f'n badass. Cheers to Alex R. for making that one happen.)

In a nutshell:

Grandy went yard in the 4th to bring the Yankees to a 4-0 lead. Then it went downhill, starting with Inge's bomb in the 5th. The Suzuki follows suit. (Suitzuki?) Inge plates Animal Phylum in the 6th. Seth Smith ties it up in the 9th. Cereal plated the go ahead run in the 12th. The A's completed a 4 game sweep with their 11th walk off.

And I think this pretty well sums it up, too:
 

And so we go to bed on Sunday trying to figure out what the hell just happened. Oddly enough, I made the comparison to someone about how it was like one of those jousting events on American Gladiators, where you use the padded rods to try and knock some weirdly named roid freak off a post. But most of the time, the average civilian gets whacked so hard and so fast that he may as well have cartoon stars floating around his head.

That's what the weekend felt like, metaphorically. Then I wake up on Monday and I physically felt like I had gotten punched in the stomach repeatedly, complete with a bruised bump on my abs. My guess is a hernia but I'm hoping the CT scan reveals it's an ulcer (do scans do that? they should) because then my official party line can be that the As' series gave me an ulcer. I know, I dream big.

So, yeah, thanks to the As, everything is terrible and the summer is ruined and there's no hope in dope and we might as well forget about the postseason.

But instead of diving head first into a vat of Bovinty Divinty, the Yankees decided to do something totally normal that everyone saw coming. Nope.

Welcome to the Bronx, Sneachiro.*

*What Lauren and I have always called that new guy on the Yankees. Because he's shady and sneaky.

Not sneaky enough to gank Bernie's number though, thankfully. He's #31 now. Welcome to the BX. Don't forget to shave.

Could it be more bizarre that they do it like 15 seconds before they start a series with Seattle? No. No, it could not.

Everyone's all fired up about this, and I think it's funny that we get someone like Ichiro who really is just to hold it down while Swisher's in recovery. The Yanks love acquiring last year's Cy Young winner/batting champ/etc...and then use their hired aces to warm the bullpen bench and bat 8th.

I gotta say though, while I was never a huge Sneachiro fan, I do think this quotes of his is pretty hilarious: "I'm going from a team having the most losses to a team with the most wins, so it's been hard to maintain my excitement."

Why not just ring a bell and wear a sandwich board that says, "Seattle who?"

Just as a further testament to how A-Rod unfair and perennial prosecution is so out-of-hand, Sneach gets a big warm ovation at Safeco when he steps up to bat. Something tells me the reaction wasn't as ambrosial when A-Rod had his first encounter with his ex-team's hometown fans.

(It should be noted here that there is one ONE Mariner's fan that I know. Thanks to him, I was a theater major. Thanks to his team, we have Ichiro.  So when something like this happens, after the whole self-involved Yankee fan thing subsides, then the natural inclination is to think, "oooh how did Ryan feel about all this?" I think mostly our only interactions are occur in the 10 days of the year where our worlds collide. Those are some great days of the year, though. Maybe we wouldn't concur on yesterday, but..well..Ichiro? THAT WAS JAY BUHNER. I'm sorry.)


Back to another Japan player: Kuroda pitches a gem, becoming the latest pitch to throw in the "How do we feel about him? Someone please tell us, because it's virtually impossible to formulate our own take on his performances" silo.

1 BB, 3 hits, 9 Ks. 4th win in a row. 7 out of the last 8. NBD. But, really, BD.

A-Rod went deep and you'd think it was a walk-off to win the game the way everyone was so fired up. Nobody more so than A-Rod, and someone needs to remind him that he's one of the best baseball players who ever lived, and he doesn't need to act like he's some rando who's throwing out the 1st pitch and gets super excited when the ball reaches the plate.

He's Alex F'n Rodriguez. You're supposed to homeruns. And you haven't been, which is why you're not a clean-up hitter anymore (shhh don't tell Girardi. Or tell him. I don't care.) But you're good. And so maybe all the negativity from, well, the free world, has made you a little insecure, but for my money, you're the best.

And more importantly, you've already proven as much.

On the other side of ex-Mariners, there's Sneach who singles and then promptly steals. Like, really promptly. As in, bullets have left guns slower. As if to say, "Oh hey, yeah, I don't know if you Yankee types know this yet about me, but I'm fast and good at swiping bags. Just giving you a heads up." Actually, in honor of Sneach being a Yank, here's an article I wrote years ago that's finally sort of apropos and not just weird.


Moving on, Sneach also catches the last out of the game, and the way Sterling was cavelling about this, you'd have thought the universe just completed it's circle of life. The cinematic symmetry! Crazy town! How WEIRD is it that the SAME DAY the Yankees get Sneach, that they PLAY SEATTLE and that SNEACH catches the final out?? You can't script stuff like this!

Ex-coworker MVP Joe: "Are you going to put up a pic of the japanese guy from major league 2? Because that will be funny."

I mean, you could, but probably the only people who would marvel at it are people like my Mom, who thinks it's ironic when she was about to call me and I end up calling her first. "Do you know that I JUST picked up the phone to call you? Seriously. I was about to dial your number and you called. Can you believe that?"

Anyways, the Yankees beat the Mariners because Sneach was sneaking around the bases and because the Yankees were hitting on the screws and because A-Rod hit a homerun and because the Yankees out-hit the M's 11-3.

Actually, everyone on the team hit except for Grandy, and the 4 ribbies came from the heart of the lineup (which I love, because that's what they're supposed to do. It's like the cockamamie convention of the concept of "achieving expectations." How is that a quantifiable measure? I hate saying whether someone "achieves expectations" because my expectations are for people to go beyond what's expected. So if someone does go beyond, he or she is in fact, achieving my expectations. So I like when the real slugging bulk on the team "achieves expectations.")

D-Rob almost got hurt but didn't. R-So untucked his shirt. And all the Seattle pitchers hmpf-ed their way off the field. Not a great day for them, really.

Boston lost, so they are 11 games back. And they're not happy about seeing our new guy playing against them this weekend. They're 100% in "FAN-F'N-TASTIC. WHAT ELSE CAN GO WRONG. WHAT. ELSE." mode.

I mean, 11 runs, Lester? Sweet Christ, pull your shit together.

And Sneach? 動物園へようこそ。