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

Bumpbegone.

Back from hospital. Cheers to Lauren and Ollie for their combined efforts in locating me, since I brilliantly never remembered to tell Lauren when/where to pick me up. And now what Ollie termed my "CYH" (Crazy Yankee Hernia) is fixed.

And now the song has a happy ending.

It was pretty nice of the surgeon to do the fixing and all, actually, since I did arrive to the hospital roughly 2 hours after it was slated to start. This, among many reasons, is why I could never be a doctor, because I would have been like, "Just for that, no anesthesia for you! We all learned an important lesson about tardiness today, didn't we."

Ah, so here's what I got on yesterday's afternoon delight game. I'm gonna try to fit it all in (pause) before the codeine kicks in.

Sometimes I like day games. Not often. But yeah, on the weekend, great. But during the week? What the hell am I supposed to do when I get home? Sing showtunes? (That's the only alternative to baseball games.)

But HisDudeness feels otherwise:

HisDudeness is great.

Fortunately, HisDudeness has not put a cease and desist on the whole conversation sharing via blog thing (yet.) Ollie's gems used to be practically a mainstay here, until he started making our chats "off the record." I don't know why. This kind of thing is pure gold.

So, yeah. I'm following the game at work, and while I do actually LIKE following games via gamecast when it's the playoffs, (because it calms me down--I don't need any manic announcers and cheering and additional stimuli to push me over the edge)..watching the gamecast for a regular game is kind of like spooning an inflatable doll or something.

I know, talk about a cliched analogy, right??

The Yankees were winning 2-0 because Z-Pack #3 tripled (excitement!) and then Sneach plated him, and that was cute. Two new guys working collaboratively.

Avila ruined everything with a 2-run homerun in the 5th and it's a 0-0 game, until F'n Dirks singled in Q-Bert. (At the time, I was not amused since they lost the lead and all, but right after I wrote that sentence, I giggled because it was a funny mental image. And because I'm easily amused.)

Closest thing I could find to illustrate my mental image.

Also, I was a little hurt when I just googled "Qbert playing baseball" and google couldn't even do me the courtesy of automatically populating the search field for me. NOR did they do that "did you mean to search for...?" I can't be the first person to ever do a search for that. Stop trying to make me feel bad about myself google. Just stop it.

3-2 game, grumble grumble. Until Chavez and Tex go back to back (or belly to belly as Sterling might say. Does anyone know why? I just really can't figure it out, unless he's trying to make some point that there is really no good reason why we call it back-to-back instead of back-to-belly or belly-to-belly, etc. If so, then good on Sterling for fighting the good fight for literals everywhere.)

Two pitches and boy, did that probably make Benoit sad. And embarrassed. The Associated Press seems to be a little judgmental here about Z-Pack #1's shot.

Teixeira hit a no-doubt line drive to right for his 21st homer. Chavez went to opposite field, clearing the left-field wall with his ninth homer in 35 games after hitting just three in his first 42 games this year.

It's like "Tex hit an AWESOME SHOT that was just was the paragon of home run shots. Nothing cheap about that one! Oh, and Not Endy had a base-rounder, too, but whatever. Put it into context."

Well, I thought it was great, Not Endy. It's easy to hit a homerun when there's no act to follow. It's harder to hit the tail end of a belly to belly-er. Just ask Hunter Pence.

4-3 game and the Yankees hold onto their lead, R-So holds onto his shirt hem.

Kuroda didn't pitch as well as the score would indicate, but who cares? He's been unexpectedly efficient as of late. I don't care that he gave up 10 hits in 6 innings. Fister only gave up 8 hits but I'm pretty sure he'd rather be in Kuroda's shoes. Not just because of the Yankees winning thing, but because Kuroda in all likelihood didn't grow up constantly cloaked in name-jokes. What even rhymes with Kuroda? Soda? I'd take a lifetime of "Nice pitch, BAKING SODA!" over whatever evils pre-pubescent boys conjured up for Doug.

And lastly, I'd be remiss in not mentioned Girardi's ejection. It was great because, despite what Girardi's INTENTIONS were, it did fire everyone up.

Two things:

A. I don't believe for a second that Girardi didn't have motive, however small, of lighting a fire under the Yankees' ass. His tantrums are so rare and few and far between that it's impossible to not assign significance to their occurences. I didn't do the actual fact checking on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if you found that his other ejections seemed to coincide with mini-slumps. Seriously. Check out 2009, especially.

B. The call was ridiculous. But they all even out in the end. People who blame officials for losses are pretty high up on my People to Kill list.

In Toronto tonight, and I hope they win because the AL East is getting a little crowded. It used to feel like taking Amtrak Accela train, with all the room in the world to stretch out and play on the computer and to stroll into the snack car if I so desired. Now, it's starting to feel like 8:30am on the 4 train on a Monday morning.

Plus, don't forget that now we have to worry about the Red Socks, in light of this new announcement about them being a playoff team!

Sweaty Freddy goes up against Romero. So...looks like we got ourselves the promise of a real aces' pitching duel!