Speaking of Joey Cora, I'm pretty sure he held the Seattle consecutive game hitting streak record until Ichiro came along. Not a bad trivia question, since the obvious guesses would be Junior or ARod ... or Bruce Bochte.

Rodriguez checked with Torre to make sure he hadn't goofed [on the DP]. "I said, 'I don't worry about your instincts,"' Torre said. =

But the one thing that does get me about his game--and I have a similar reaction to Ortiz as well--is when he hot dogs at inappropriate time. If he hit that dinger to win the game last night, I can understand if he showboated it up. But his team was still down big, and there he was on the bench laughing and smiling. Both Manny and Ortiz are also the guys who turn mad sensitive if anyone tries to push them off of the plate.

Call me cranky, but that kind of stuff doesn't sit well with me.

From Chris Snow's column in the Globe this morning...

"For a few fleeting minutes, it appeared as if the Yankees might have stayed one inning too long. Trailing, 5-1, entering the ninth -- which had seminal moment written all over it -- Manny Ramirez led off with a prodigious blast to left-center off Tom Gordon. He finished his swing with an emphatic flourish that seemed to tick off Posada.

Posada followed Ramirez a few steps up the line, then turned for the third base line, perhaps to say something to Ramirez on his way home. But plate umpire Jerry Meals made sure to occupy Posada as Ramirez completed his trot. The two players did not exchange any words, at least not at that moment.

'We try to play the game the right way,' Posada said later. 'That's the only thing I have to say. You're down by three runs.'"

Amen, Jorge. As Crash Davis once said, "Run Dummy!"

For the runner to be out on a force play, the fielder has to be in possession of the ball before the runner touches the base, and that means that the ball must beat the runner. If the ball and the runner arrive at precisely the same time (in the umpire's judgment), then the fielder did not have possesion before the runner touched the base, and the runner is safe.

Effectively, that means that a tie does indeed go to the runner.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

At least the ump was consistent in giving the benefit of the doubt to the fielding team.

Jdrennan, Brown threw a bullpen session on Friday. The decision to activate him was based on that bullpen and how he recovered from it on Saturday. They likely wanted him to have two full days of rest between the bullpen session and his start.

* The Homerun: Run the bases and hope that you can somehow get a rally going. Act like the guy you're trying to beat: Has there been a more likeable guy than Rivera?

* The pop-up to Tino. Watching the game, we all thought the ball would end up 30 rows deep in the stands. It was two-feet foul?

* His Single to LF in the 6th. He did his homerun pose while the ball sailed toward the mid-way point of the monster. Should have been an easy double.

Say what you want about the Yankees, but they don't do much of that stuff.

I don't know the Hernandez you are talking about with Detroit?

Jul 18 Royals starter Runelvys Hernandez allowed two hits through five innings before he was ejected after inciting a bench-clearing brawl in the sixth inning against the Tigers Sunday. The skirmish began after Hernandez pegged Carlos Guillen in the helmet, his third hit batter of the game. "What he did is not acceptable," Tigers catcher Ivan Rodriguez told the Associated Press. "A pitcher cannot throw at a player's head. It's not a good thing to do." Hernandez still managed to win.

Had that been a Yankee, it is all we would have heard this morning.

Farnsworth has a live arm. The guy throws gas, but he's your classic million-dollar-arm, ten-cent head goon. If he's pitching the 6th, 7th inning for your team, you are ok. If you need an extra body always ready to throw bolos, he's your guy. But trusting him with the closer's role? I'm not sold.

I agree that's the way it's done: if they hear the thud before they see the foot on the base, the runner's out -- otherwise, he's safe.

As for the difference between the speed of light and of sound, I don't think it's terribly significant given the dimensions we're talking about, but I'd have to do the math to be certain. I'd rather think that the difference between them falls beneath the human perceptual processing lag-time (the same kind of lag -- although much less in scale -- that gets your fingers burned picking up something hot, because the message doesn't get to the brain quickly enough to react before you're scorched).

As I said, I'd have to look up the figures and do the math, and that seems like a lot of bother, when the bottom really is that the ball has to precede the runner.