Boomer Wells tried pitching through back pain tonight, but couldn't hold the 5-1 lead his offense staked him to, and didn't make it into the fourth inning. A trip to the DL could be looming for Boomer. Sterling Hitchcock is coming on to pitch, and that never spells good things for New York. Paul Abbott, recently acquired in a trade with Arizona, is either throwing the ball in the dirt or six feet over the Yankees heads, for KC.

The Yankees baserunning has been awful thus far, and further demonstrates how shaky this team is fundamentally. They are a good team, but not the scary air-tight team of 97-2000. (This may be unfair, as that Yankee team will go down as a great team.) In the first, Jorge Posada was thrown out at second, trying to stretch a single into a double for no good reason, to end the inning. In the third, with runners on second and third and just one out, Bernie Williams didn't score from third on a slow ground ball to first base.

Sure, the Yanks were up 5-1 at the time, but by the bottom of the inning the score was tied. Posada and Bernie have always been lousy on the bases: Posada thinks like Raul Mondesi and runs like John Riggins; Bernie is just a flat-out ditz. Alfonso Soriano had a one-out double in the fourth and then was thrown out trying to steal third. The score was tied. Why steal?

Oy veh. This should promise to be a long, drawn-out affair. I expect the lead to change hands several more times. After a long fly out from Giambi in the fifth (he already hit a two-run blast), Matsui cranked a solo shot to straight-away center to give the Yanks the lead, 6-5. Aaron Boone hasn't had a base hit since Christ was a Cowboy.

Going to be a long night. Tim Hudson squares off against Pedro later tonight in Oakland. What a gem that promises to be. Aesthetically speaking, it doesn't get much better than Pedro vs. Hudson, man.