AGRI Biz

I liken my feeling prior to first pitch of Game Six last night to how Lindsay Lohan must feel on the eve of a mandatory probation hearing. Unjustly annoyed. Kind of dazed. Quite nervous. Thinking about what can be ingested to take the edge off things. I was annoyed because I knew the series should already be over. I was dazed because all those maddening off days had turned my apartment ...

In the hours since the Yankees allowed a golden opportunity to secure the American League pennant slip away—fans, media, and unnecessarily loud Korean War veterans at Dunkin Donuts are attempting to assign blame for the 7-6 loss to the Angels. Some are saying that Joe Girardi acted alone in this assassination of the Yankees' World Series hopes on Thursday, the opinion being that the second-year manager made a series of ...

There were four references to the 2004 ALCS in one hour of SportsCenter this morning. Your friends who are Red Sox fans have joked about the series on Facebook and Twitter since Tuesday. If you step outside your home or office, there's probably a single-engine plane flying overhead with a "2004 ALCS: You Blew It" message tailing behind. You had to expect this. This is the Yankees' first opportunity to clinch ...

If 2004 taught us anything, besides how to properly apply fake blood on a sock for profound effect, it would be to assume nothing. What you're about to read assumes absolutely nothing. Zilch. Nada. It lives solely in the moment. The Yankees played one of their best all-around games of the season on Tuesday night, a 10-1 win over the Angels that put them one victory away from their 40th American League ...

During the 11th inning on Monday, seconds after Dave Robertson had registered the second out of what seemed to be an uneventful half inning, FOX cameras cut to Joe Girardi. The Yankees manager looked discombobulated...even frantic. He took three quick steps toward his matchup binder sitting on the dugout bench, hurriedly flipped through the first few pages, and then he quickly turned around and shot up the dugout steps to ...

The Yankees outlasted the Angels in Game Two of the ALCS on Saturday, taking a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series. The series continues this afternoon in Anaheim. River & Sunset takes a look at some of the subplots orbiting Yankee Universe. á We're not close to the celebration yet They say in sports that a playoff series doesn't truly begin until the home team loses a game. I'd suggest Yankees fans should ...

Watching Nick Punto face reporters on Sunday night was almost hard to watch, even for a Yankees fan. Almost. A fringe player who looks more like a plumber than a professional athlete, Punto sat ashen and bleary-eyed in front of his locker trying to explain why he had barrelled around third base in the eighth inning like Rex Ryan toward a buffet table. His blunder had doomed the Twins, and now he ...

Alex Rodriguez began his final regular-season game of 2009 with 28 homers and 93 RBI, very respectable numbers for a 34-year-old guy who had missed a month of action following hip surgery. But for Rodriguez, there was undoubtedly disappointment. He had fallen short of the 30-homer, 100-RBI plateau for the first time since 1997. Behind all those stale, controversy-avoiding, positively Jeterian quotes he had given all season about just wanting to fit ...

Derek Jeter batted .334 this season. He had 212 hits, 18 homers, 30 steals, and 107 runs scored. He also played Gold Glove-caliber defense at shortstop, the game's most demanding position. Think about that for a second. Of all the subplots of a superb 2009 regular season for the Yankees, this is by far the most welcomed and unlikely development. This was the season when Jeter was supposed to trend downward, his 35-year-old ...

We can get all worked up into a lather about how the ALDS is a crapshoot, but at the end of the day, sanity must prevail here. The Yankees have no business losing this series, regardless of opponent. New York has certainly struggled in this setting in recent years, having been bounced rudely from the first-round in '05, '06, and '07. But all the evidence points to a different result in ...