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

If there are 2 things you should remember from last night it's:

• Raul Ibanez being perfect as always
• John Sterling completely inexplicably saying to no one in particular, "Shame on you, Encarnacion, for hitting the ball so hard."

No idea what that meant. I mean, there's stuff Sterling says that falls in the "goofy" category. And then there's stuff that falls in the Keith Hernandez/Joe Buck love-child of rhetoric category.

So there's that.

From ESPN.com:

Six of Ibanez's homers this season have either tied the score or given New York the lead, according to STATS LLC. Eight of his 12 long balls have come in the sixth inning or later.

"I don't really think about it that much. Just try to do whatever I can to help out," Ibanez said of his clutch hitting. "Just try to stay in the moment."

Ha. Be less charismatic, Raul. It's like his last job was as a video game avatar for Baseball Stars.

D-Rob got the win last night and Bautista left the game early with a wrist injury. Shame on you, Bautista, for hitting your wrist so hard.

Every time I hear the name Bautista I think of this excessively awesome chick who wrote a song about him.

Annnnd now I will officially have boomboombautista stuck in my head all day. Thank you, Kathy Anderson.

So the Yanks are 9 games ahead of the next closest team, which is Baltimore, and the Red Socks are in 3rd, (they're gaining on us!) and they are 9.5 games behind us, and basically the whole AL East is tied for Bad except for the Yankees.

I'm not going to really expoud on this, though, since I've seen what happens to Boston fans whenever they get cocky. Seriously, think about how many times Boston teams have been all but assured a coasting trip into nirvana...and Boston fans go bananas and basically get things like this.

Or this.

So, yeah, as such, I'm gonna just toast the Yanks for doing so well and hope the Socks can take comfort in the fact they do have one cache right now, which is that there is a woman stalking ex-Socks president Theo Epstein. That's something! (That's how bad the Socks are, that the deranged lady waited til Theo was prez of a legit franchise before she went all creeper on him. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but semantics, yeah?)

Additionally, I apologize for the off-weekend. Was a hectic one, with Ohyob in town from Philly, Ollie and HisDudeness doing work at the beirut table, and an impromptu meeting with the NYSportsJerk. But yesterday was a good way to start the week.

Kind of like how the NY Post makes the crossword puzzle easy on Monday. The Yanks made it look pretty easy. Not really, but I can say that because they won.

Hughes got out of it ok, in standard no-one-really-knows-if-there-will-ever-be-a-point-when-we're-truly-comfortable-with-him-on-the-mound kind of way.

Arod, in a shocking turn of events, had another episode of old man sickness, aka back stiffness. I swear, every 4 games there's some vague complaint of something that makes him sound like he's just playing baseball to get some exercise in in between whittling wood on his porch or something.

And Cano extended his hitting streak to 19. Good God.

Adam Lind went yard to make the game 2-1. Good for you, Adam Lind, for impressively managing to maintain relevance.

Same goes for you, sort of, R-Mart, who took Alvarez deep to put the Yanks up 2-0. Martin: "The short porch has been good to me." Um, ok. I mean, I'm somewhat inclined to advise R-Mart to slow his roll, given he's batting a hot .179 with 9 bombs all season and about 1210 defensive errors.

But I like R-Mart because he's a Yankee and I love the Yankees, so by transitive property, etc. So..cheers, Russell! Keep it up!

I love summer baseball.