Afternoon Baseball

Dear Lord. I'm finishing up at work and I check the Yankee score. Little did I realize that I'd see a broken Matsui. 1,768 games in a row, and that's it. It only got worse.
I flipped on YES briefly, and it was the instant that Bernie Williams looked like he could track a ball as well as half-blind Kirby Puckett.
Even Rivera decided to give up a run for kicks.

It erased a great game from Jeter (if you ignore the error that led to two runs, of course), who had 3 hits, a RBI and 3 steals.
But otherwise, there was little to write home about. Shawn Chacon was not as terrible against the Sox as he was in my one Yankee Stadium visit last year, but he was inefficient in an Al Leiter/David Cone at-the-very-end way.

Speaking of problems, Randy Johnson's ineffectiveness was the topic of a comment from Bum on this post. I won't completely agree on his thoughts on Beltran, as even a crummy Carlos is better than what they had last year, but it was very reasonable to assume that the Yanks acquired Randy Johnson too late. On the other hand, they so destroyed Javier Vasquez's psyche that he was perceived as total loss, too. But adding those extension years? At that money?
Here's how I look at it: Much like the Mets with Billy Wagner, the Yanks are paying for more years than they need. If either team wins a World Series in the first year or two of the contract, it's worth having a too-old, too-expensive albatross in the late stages of the deal.

So Johnson basically is being paid to win this year, this being the second year. Maybe not a smart deal, but one in which the Yankees overpaid and overextended on a gamble.