The Red Sox pounded Jose Contreras one more time...Surprised? While the Yankees didn't go easily (Timlin, Foulke), their pitching failed them once again as the Sox took two of three over the weekend. Saturday's histrionics aside, the Yankees can't be too upset about how the weekend panned-out considering who they were throwing against Boston (Kevin Millar was a one-man wrecking crew). After Friday's demoralizing loss, the Sox bounced back and won two games they had to have. The Yankees lead is seven-and-a-half games (eight in the loss column). John Harper reports in the Daily News:

The weekend was far from a disaster for the Yankees, however. Roughing up Sox ace Curt Schilling in the opener Friday night was surely more significant than anything that happened the last two days - including Alex Rodriguez's rumble with Jason Varitek.

The Sox can argue that beating Mariano Rivera with a walk-off home run on Saturday qualifies as their uplifting moment of the year, but beating Schilling ensured the Yankees of leaving town with a 7-1/2-game lead, in firm control of the AL East.

One thing is almost certain: Boss George has put a full-court-press on his general manager Brian Cashman to get a deal done this week. The Yankee pitching staff is in bad shape. So let the rumors fly. Newsday reports that the Los Angeles Dodgers are a darkhorse candidate to land Randy Johnson--who struck out 14 batters yesterday. It has been widely reported that the Yankees do not have enough good prospects to complete a trade. However, according to the New York Times, Bryan Lambe, an Arizona scout thinks the Yankees have some talent to offer:

"The ones that I more or less wrote up, yes, they would definitely help," Lambe said. "They wouldn't just help the Diamondbacks, they'd help every organization. But it's a matter of what they would be giving up. They'd be giving up, to a certain extent, the face of the Diamondbacks right now. I don't know what their thinking is."

..."They do have prospects, and they have fairly good prospects," Lambe said. "But do they have, for example, a David Wright or someone along those lines, a can't-miss prospect? No, because they haven't had a lot of first-round picks. But I'm not going to say I don't like their guys. I do like their guys."

..."There are a whole lot of guys who wind up being very productive, longtime big league players who weren't rated as great players coming up," Lambe said. "It's my job to scratch a little bit and see what I think will happen in the future."