Wakefield: "A Bigger Menace To The Game Than Steroids"

Wallace Matthews, Newsday:

If the commissioner of baseball truly wants to get to the bottom of one of the great mysteries of his game, he can shelve the steroid investigation and start looking into how Tim Wakefield has managed to get away with his act for the past 15 years. ...

His knuckleball, or whatever you want to call it, is a bigger menace to the game than steroids, growth hormone or Clomid will ever be. When Wakefield is pitching, the game moves slower than David Ortiz going from home to first. If as many guys in major-league baseball threw the knuckler as have taken performance-enhancing drugs, the game and its fans would have died of boredom years ago. ...

Wakefield may very well be the least entertaining player ever to appear in a major-league uniform, unless of course passed balls, uncontested stolen bases, endless delays between pitches and three-ball counts on every batter is your idea of fun.

I think he's serious.

This is pretty funny, too. Filip Bondy, Daily News:

There was finally something familiar about the Yankees last night, something the people up in Boston probably didn't want to remember and the fans in the Bronx had nearly forgotten. Here were the Bombers again, full of pep and power and pitching, beating up on the Red Sox. ...

The Yanks will have to keep playing like this right through September, if there is to be an October. There is no margin for error anymore. They must keep beating the Red Sox, like old times.

This is more like it. George King, Post:

Two dry days don't guarantee a drunk is going to be sober forever. But sobriety has to start somewhere, and that's the genesis of the "One Day At A Time" recovery mantra.

For the Yankees, it's no longer about taking it two-dozen hours at a time. The ditch they dug themselves is far too deep to think that long term. With May tumbling into June soon and the Yankees losing touch with the AL East-leading Red Sox, they must take it one at-bat at a time.

Joe Torre, on his team's 43rd game of the year:

It was a big game. It was a huge game, to start the series like this.