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The Boss, the one who rules Major League Baseball, wasn't in New York Wednesday night as the Yankees celebrated their 27th World Series title with a 7-3 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies. But George Steinbrenner, 79 -- still the architect of champions and the titan of New York sports -- was watching from his home in Tampa.

Every out. Every pitch. Every player celebration. Steinbrenner could see and hear his players express their gratitude, and his family said he was overcome with joy.

"Thank you. Thank you for everything," Yankees catcher Jorge Posada told the owner through a camera lens. "Thank you for this. Thank you for having the team every year, to try to have a team to be here [the World Series]."

The Boss is not in robust health these days. He wasn't in the clubhouse to feel the champagne shower. But he was "teary eyed" said his son, Hank. "It meant everything."

PHILADELPHIA -- Mike Alvarez is a lifelong Philadelphian with a Cole Hamels haircut and a vintage maroon Phillies cap who spent his Sunday in a parking lot. Alvarez didn't have tickets to the Eagles-Giants game in the afternoon. He didn't have tickets to the Phillies-Yankees World Series game at night. What he did have was a parking space for his truck, a seemingly bottomless supply of beer and enough slightly slurred wisdom to know that there was no place he would have rather been than this particular parking lot on this particular day, surrounded by his fellow Eagles and Phillies fans.

"They got flat-screens over there," Alvarez said, waving his beer can in the direction of a nearby RV. "Everybody's grilling food. I've made a ton of new friends. What more could you want?"

PHILADELPHIA -- If the Phillies were trying to get into Alex Rodriguez's head by hitting him with pitches, they're going to need to find another tactic, and fast. Something very strange has happened here in late 2009, and the inside of that particular head is no longer the mushy, insecure, vulnerable place it once was. Matter of fact, when Cole Hamels hit Rodriguez with a pitch in the second inning on Halloween night, the Yankees' All-Star third baseman and would-be centaur says, it had the opposite effect.

"Kind of woke me up a little bit," Rodriguez said early Monday morning, after his ninth-inning double had broken a Game 4 tie and moved the Yankees within one game of a championship. "Just reminded me, 'Hey, this is the World Series. Let's get it going a little bit.' "

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The UFL will debut in New York City's metropolitan area Thursday, though it's unclear who will notice.

The New York Sentinels (0-2) are set to play their first home game this season, when they host the California Redwoods (1-2) at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey (7 PM ET). The contest will be played while the New York Yankees take on the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 2 of the World Series just a few miles away at Yankee Stadium (7:57 p.m. ET).

The UFL has had problems drawing fans on normal nights, without the stiff competition of a highly-anticipated World Series, pitting the defending champions (Phillies) against one of the country's most popular teams (Yankees).

Quarterback Pat White was a second-round pick by the Miami Dolphins in April's NFL Draft. But he wasn't done being drafted. To White's surprise, he was selected in the 48th round of last week's baseball amateur draft by the New York Yankees.

White hasn't played baseball since high school, but he was pretty good back then -- good enough to get drafted in the fourth round of the 2004 MLB draft by Anaheim. He turned down the Angels and went on to have a stellar college career at West Virginia, presumably leaving baseball behind for good. But the Yankees like him enough as an athlete that they took a low-risk chance.

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.

There are very few times (other than contract time) when you can ever say this, but things really do seem to be working out nicely for Alex Rodriguez. The Yankees' star slugger is slated to return to the lineup Friday night in Baltimore, making his 2009 season debut a couple of months after hip surgery. And given the current state of the Yankees and yesterday's news about Manny Ramirez, his timing really couldn't be better.

At the beginning of this week, all the A-Rod news was about the book -- Selena Roberts' tome about the troubled superstar who took steroids and tipped pitches and needed to be loved above all else. Rodriguez's return to the majors was to have been a media circus. The Yankees knew it, which is one of the reasons they waited until they were on the road to bring him back.

But given what's happened this week in New York and L.A., things look a little different.

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.