Schadenfreude 113 (A Continuing Series)

We'll crawl through your back yard
And whack your yappin' dog
We're having much more fun

Mark Feinsand, Daily News:

After dropping the first two games against the Red Sox this week, players arrived at the Stadium Thursday night to find a piece of paper on each of their chairs - one containing a message of togetherness and inspiration:

"A championship team is a group of individuals that has committed themselves to handle all the highs and lows throughout the season, knowing the ultimate goal of winning comes from each and every one and more importantly, together as a team." ...

"It's frustrating to lose five games in a row to the Red Sox, your biggest foe," Joe Girardi said before the game. "We need to win, that's the bottom line. We need to win a game. There's a lot of pride in that room. You don't like having your pride put down." ...

"We need to win every day we take the field," [Brian] Cashman said. "We're trying to fight for a W. They've had their way with us for a few days and we need to push back and win back."

It didn't happen.

Joel Sherman, Post:

Joe Girardi opened his pregame news conference yesterday by saying, "I have some bad news and then I have some positive news."

Joba Chamberlain has a torn elbow ligament that almost certainly will necessitate season-ending Tommy John surgery and Phil Hughes had thrown two strong innings in a simulated game.

Girardi certainly needs to work on his proportionality. Hey, a planet-ending asteroid is hurtling toward earth, but on the positive side my last meal was splendid.

George A. King III, Post:

The Yankees day opened with terrible news about Joba Chamberlain's damaged right elbow.

And didn't improve.

That's because ace CC Sabathia spit out a late lead against the Red Sox ...

Through six frames Sabathia threw 82 pitches and faced just three batters with runners in scoring position.

Eleven batters later the Red Sox had a 7-2 lead and what was left of the crowd was howling.

Ben Shpigel, Times:

Babe Ruth was a 17-year-old pitching prodigy at the St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys. The Red Sox had yet to win a World Series, and the Yankees did not exist. They were still called the Highlanders, playing not in the Bronx but in Manhattan, at Hilltop Park and the Polo Grounds.

The Red Sox won all 10 games in New York during that 1912 season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. But over the last 99 years of their rivalry, they had yet to win as many as six in a row. ... It took almost a century, but the Red Sox snapped that streak in the early hours of Friday morning, stunning the Yankees, 8-3.

Ian Browne, MLB.com:

The Red Sox have turned the normally hostile grounds of Yankee Stadium into their personal playground.

For the second time in less than a month, Boston has departed the Bronx with a three-game sweep. ...

The Red Sox are the first team to win six games in a row at the new Yankee Stadium, and this is the first time they've taken six consecutive road games from New York since 1912. It's also the first time since '12 that the Sox have swept two road series against the Yankees in one season.

Tim Smith, Daily News:

[T]he pillars of the team - the things that they thought were strengths coming into the season - are shaken.

There is nothing warm and fuzzy about that feeling that your bullpen is missing the seventh-inning guy and the eighth-inning guy and the bridges to your sure-thing closer, Mariano Rivera, are as shaky as your theories on the care and feeding of young pitchers. ...

[Sabathia] served as the big enforcer when he nailed David Ortiz in the thigh with a fastball in the fourth inning ... [I]t was what they needed most from one of their strongest performers. It will reverberate long after this series is over. ...

Brian Costello, Post:

The theory that hitting David Ortiz with a pitch might make him uncomfortable has been floating around this town for years?

Better come up with a new plan. ...

Since Ortiz began tormenting the Yankees in 2003, there has been an idea that he is too comfortable in the batter's box an drilling him might change that.

Ortiz disproved that theory by getting two hits in the seventh inning, starting and finishing the Red Sox's seven-run rally in that inning.

Matt Fortuna, MLB.com:

[A]s Thursday gave way to Friday, and as Ortiz recovered from a hit-by-pitch, the all-too-familiar scene of the Red Sox celebrating in the Bronx became inevitable. ...

Ortiz led off the inning with a single and recorded the Red Sox's eighth and final hit of the frame a short while later with a two-run double, this after hitting homers on Tuesday and Wednesday. He finished the series with four hits, four runs scored and six RBIs.

Mike Lupica, Daily News:

Of course you don't judge the Yankees on the 13-13 baseball they have played lately anymore than you judge the Red Sox on that 2-10 start that seems to have happened to them a lifetime ago. But right after the Yankees win six of their last seven on the West Coast, they look like crash dummies against the Boston Red Sox.

Again. ...

Making their fans worry more than ever about the rotation, the bullpen, the lack of a bench, the general age of the baseball team.

Surviving Grady:

And Now This Brief But Important Message from Puppet Red to the New York Yankees