Yankees Are Now Red Sox Wannabes

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.

The game was actually a good one -- Boston holding on 6-4, Jonathan Papelbon getting the final out at 1:10 am with the bases loaded and what remained of the rain-soaked "crowd" urging on Robinson Cano in vain. The Yankees had a chance to win this game, as they have a few other times against the Sox so far this year, but they didn't. And now they're 0-4 against their bitter Beantown rivals. You'd better believe they're feeling every bit of it.

"It's frustrating," said Yankees manager Joe Girardi, who failed miserably at hiding his frustration and was ejected from the game after 4 1/2 innings of screaming at the home plate umpire and the opposing team's first-base coach. "We've felt that we've had a chance to win three of those four games and we weren't able to do it, and we've got to find a way."

It's going to be tough. Neither the Yankees nor the Red Sox have pitched as well or won as many games as they would have liked so far this year, but the Red Sox look far better equipped to overcome their troubles. Boston's roster is everything New York's is not -- deep and varied, with capable injury replacements and players who can fill multiple useful roles.

While the Yankees spent the last two winters in the market for an expensive ace left-hander (passing on Johan Santana and coming up with C.C. Sabathia), the Red Sox were growing one of their own -- Jon Lester, who struck out 10 Yankees (including six of the first nine he faced) in seven innings here Monday night.

While the Yankees flounder in their efforts to find somebody -- anybody who can get outs in the late innings in front of Mariano Rivera, the Red Sox trot out wave after wave of the deepest and most talented bullpen in the major leagues, much of it also homegrown.

The Red Sox pack Manny Ramirez off to L.A. and watch David Ortiz play the first 26 games of this season without a home run, and they manufacture two-out runs with a deep, textured lineup packed with good, patient hitters. The Yankees on Monday struck out 13 times and scored all four of their runs on home runs.

"The bottom line is, they've beaten us," Derek Jeter said. "And we've got to figure out a way to get it done against them."

The Yankees have actually looked pretty good this year when they haven't been playing the Red Sox. They're 13-8 if you take away the Boston games, which is a nice record considering they have the worst team ERA in the league, their No. 3 starter is in the minor leagues and their best hitter, Alex Rodriguez, has yet to play a game. You watch the Yankees on most nights, and you see a team with some level of grit and determination and ability to come back against other team's bullpens -- hallmarks of the Yankee teams that made the final few years at the old Yankee Stadium so perpetually exciting.

But then they show up to play the Red Sox, and all you see are the warts. It's as if seeing up-close how much the gap between them has widened brings out the worst in the Yankees. Monday, Girardi was screaming at home-plate umpire Jerry Meals from the start about pitches he believed Lester was getting and his own starter, Phil Hughes, was not. After Lester struck out Jeter in the fifth inning, Girardi rushed onto the field to make his argument up close and was promptly ejected.

Worse, after the game, with a few hours to cool off, Girardi was still blaming Meals.

"I thought (Hughes) threw the ball pretty decent," Girardi said. "There were some things I didn't like in those four innings, and they had nothing to do with Phil Hughes."

Jeter, the team captain, went the same insane route -- laying it on the ump.

"I just didn't agree with some of the calls he made throughout the game," Jeter said. "I really can't give you anymore than that, because you're in a no-win situation when you talk about umpires."

That's because umpires don't decide games and nobody wants to hear it. Honestly, didn't you guys used to be the Yankees?

To his credit, the 22-year-old Hughes refused to blame Meals for his poor night, assessing the ump's performance thusly: "He was pretty consistent, actually, and I was missing by just a little bit. I don't think I was as sharp tonight overall."

When the kid pitcher is outclassing the manager and the captain...makes you wonder, doesn't it?

And then there was this thing with Girardi and Boston first-base coach Tim Bogar. Cameras caught the two of them going at it during a Kevin Youkilis at-bat in the fourth, and after the game Girardi dismissed the whole thing as "baseball men being baseball men." But the talk in the Yankee clubhouse was that Girardi believed Bogar was stealing signs -- that he was able to see the signs Yankees catcher Jose Molina was flashing to Hughes and in turn signal his hitters to tell them what pitch was coming.

But that's not Bogar's fault. That's on Molina. The catcher needs to be able to squat in such as way that the freaking first-base coach can't see his fingers. And if that's what was going on, Girardi should have paid a visit to the mound and told Molina to fix the problem. Even Molina (who also declined to blame the ump for Hughes' poor night) said that much.

"We've got to do a better job of hiding that stuff," Molina said.

It was a rough night for the catcher and a rough night for the team. They sat through a two-hour, 15-minute rain delay only to be outplayed, outhit, outpitched and thoroughly outclassed in their beautiful new ballpark in front of their home fans. That's no fun, and it didn't help that it was the Red Sox who were administering the beating.

"Once you get on the field, you realize who you're playing and you understand the magnitude of the game," Girardi said. "These are important games."

And right now, the Red Sox look much better equipped to win them than do the Yankees.

But even so, the Yankees need to find a way to handle it better.