Starting Five is our wrapup of the previous day's baseball action, with a quick nod to what is ahead. You Oughta Know ... That the Rays seem to be putting it all together. The reigning American League champions left New York with a series victory over the Mets thanks to a big Sunday afternoon from B.J. Upton, who homered and had four hits. Tampa Bay is now 12-6 in the month of June and two games back of the Yankees in the AL wild-card race.
Upton has played a big part in the surge after slumping for the first two months of the season. The center fielder came into June hitting .204, but he's hitting .329 this month.
FORMER BASEBALL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD -- There is a Subway Series this weekend.
There is one again in two weeks.
There will not be one in October.
Friday night's game at Yankee Stadium, which both teams deserved to lose, showed us that.
It will be remembered forever, at least in the five boroughs and surrounding areas, as the Luis Castillo game. The Mets second baseman dropped Alex Rodriguez's popup with two outs in the ninth, allowing two runs to score and the Yankees to win 9-8.
NEW YORK -- Over the past few years, I have been to a lot of Yankees games. They keep it interesting, but there are a few things you come to count on. The YMCA. "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch. And horrendous defense by the home team. This last has become as much a constant as the first two. The Yankees, for the past several years, have been a terrible defensive team.
So imagine my own personal surprise Monday night when I learned that the Yankees, those same bumbling pinstripers who've spent the early part of the 21st century scraping the bottom of the statistical defensive rankings, had set a major-league record by going 18 games in a row without an error.
The Yankees? Setting a record for defense? That's like LeBron James setting some kind of handshake record. Or Lindsay Lohan setting a record for consecutive days sober. There are certain things the Yankees do well. Defense is not one of them. Something must be amiss. I went to Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night to investigate.
BALTIMORE -- Good news was not in short supply for the scuffling New York Yankees Friday night. Alex Rodriguez got the oohs and aahs, the adulation and the jeers, at Camden Yards, homering on the first pitch he saw from Jeremy Guthrie to give his team a lead it wouldn't relinquish in a 4-0 win over the Orioles.
It was CC Sabathia who made that edge stand up, though. A-Rod or not, that might be the best news of all for the Yankees.
"He wants to be the guy who's the stopper," manager Joe Girardi said of Sabathia. "That's exactly what he was."
BALTIMORE -- Where they make oversized Styrofoam syringes, I'm really not sure. But several fans were waving them Friday night as Alex Rodriguez, charter member of the ever-swelling Superstar Juicers Club, stepped to the plate for his first real at-bat since confirming he used steroids. The home crowd stood, booed lustily and rooted passionately for a strikeout, which qualifies as a keepsake ballpark thrill in the performance-enhancement era.
Need I remind you that a dreaded Boston Red Sox jersey, bearing the name and number of David Ortiz, was buried in concrete inside the new Yankee Stadium? And that construction workers last spring had to use jackhammers to remove it, lest the poison linger like salmonella in a service corridor at one of the ballpark's many chi-chi restaurants?
I can't help but think a curse was effectively planted. Because since the Yankees moved into their $1.5-billion pinstriped palace, they've been haunted by non-stop reminders of their greed, arrogance, bad karma and spending foolishness.
NEW YORK – Joba Chamberlain on Tuesday was once again dominant in relief.
The bad news for the Yankees, though, was that it was in relief of himself.
Chamberlain's outing in a 7-3 loss to the Red Sox provided fodder for the Joba-has-to-start crowd and gave plenty of ammunition to the Joba-in-relief lobby.
(And let's not be mistaken: There are two sides to this debate.)
NEW YORK -- It still seems weird, if you can remember back before it all changed -- back before "Cowboy Up" and Aaron Boone and the Idiots and the Bloody Sock and all that went down between the Yankees and the Red Sox right around the middle part of this decade. If you can remember back that far, it feels weird that the Red Sox have become the model franchise and the Yankees are just yapping at their heels, trying their best to become everything their rivals already are.
But then you watch a game like the one they played Monday night at Yankee Stadium and you realize that's exactly what's going on here. The Yankees spent the night whining about the umpires, accusing the Sox of stealing signs, committing errors and passed balls and walking everybody in sight. The Red Sox spent it winning the game. And as they so often do these days, they outclassed the Yankees in almost every possible way.
NEW YORK -- Yankees catcher Jorge Posada left Monday night's game against the Red Sox with a right hamstring injury and will have an MRI exam Tuesday to evaluate the problem. Manager Joe Girardi said Posada would not play in Tuesday's game, and made it sound as if the injury could be serious.
"He said he felt it grab, and it's not something we need right now, but it's something we'll have an answer on after the MRI," Girardi said. "I'm not sure how bad it's going to be."
Posada was dealing with a hamstring injury last week, but Girardi said this one is new and higher up on the leg.
NEW YORK -- Yankees manager Joe Girardi said this afternoon that injured third baseman Alex Rodriguez could return to the team and the lineup as early as Friday, when the Yankees open a series against the Orioles in Baltimore.
Rodriguez had hip surgery in March, will have to have more hip surgery in the off-season and has not played yet this year. But continuing his rehab on the day on which a scathing new book about him hit the shelves, Rodriguez played seven innings in the field and went 1-for-6 with a home run and a walk in a game for the Yankees' extended spring training team in Tampa.
Starting Five is our wrapup of the previous day's baseball action, with a quick nod to what is ahead.
FORMER BASEBALL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD -- There is a Subway Series this weekend.
NEW YORK -- Over the past few years, I have been to a lot of Yankees games. They keep it interesting, but there are a few things you come to count on. The YMCA. "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch. And horrendous defense by the home team. This last has become as much a constant as the first two. The Yankees, for the past several years, have been a terrible defensive team.
BALTIMORE -- Good news was not in short supply for the scuffling New York Yankees Friday night. 
BALTIMORE -- Where they make oversized Styrofoam syringes, I'm really not sure. But several fans were waving them Friday night as 
Need I remind you that a dreaded Boston Red Sox jersey, bearing the name and number of 
NEW YORK – 
NEW YORK -- It still seems weird, if you can remember back before it all changed -- back before "Cowboy Up" and Aaron Boone and the Idiots and the Bloody Sock and all that went down between the Yankees and the Red Sox right around the middle part of this decade. If you can remember back that far, it feels weird that the Red Sox have become the model franchise and the Yankees are just yapping at their heels, trying their best to become everything their rivals already are.
NEW YORK -- Yankees catcher 
NEW YORK -- Yankees manager 
