Six games back.

"My feeling on our kids in Yankee pinstripes goes something like this:

When you're spending $200 million on baseball players, you're sort of not supposed to need a weak wild-card field to make the playoffs."

That's it?

The Yankees are 3 games over .500 for the first time this season. Six games back of Boston, 4.5 games back of Tampa. Not 1927 or 1998, but too early to give up on the AL East, don't you think?


Mussina has rebounded to a truly astonishing ten wins so far (can a 39-year-old win Comeback Player of the Year?); Joba had a decent six-inning start and seems to have adjusted his pitching style; Farnsworth pitched well in back-to-back games, which is something I thought was truly not possible.


Should Rasner replace Pettitte in the rotation if the playoffs started today? Should Cano be benched? When is Bruney coming back?


Damon is OPSing .888 while Coco Crisp is OPSing .676.

Matsui is OPSing .869 while Jacoby Ellsbury is OPSing .763.

ARod is OPSing .996 while Mike Lowell is OPSing .827.

Those stats don't mean too much per se and they are presented out of context. But I just conveyed more information about the 2008 Yankee baseball season after two minutes of research than "America's premier sports columnist" has conveyed in three months of supposed baseball coverage.


It's already mid-June.

The baseball season is almost halfway over.

It's a good time to start paying attention to the New York baseball teams instead of, say, Tim Russert or "American Idol."