Mike Maher

The Bronx that was burning just a few short weeks ago now resembles a city without the faintest ash mark or sign of distress. When the Yankees fans awoke this morning, they found their beloved bombers a mere 3 ½ games back of the first place Rays and 3 games back of the second place Red Sox. Not too shabby when you consider stacks of newspapers showing an 8 ½ game deficit are still stacked in a few recyclable bins. The question is: how the heck did they do it? The answer: I have no idea.

It just doesn’t make any sense. Melky Cabrera is batting .244, and Robinson Cano is riding a hot streak to a meager .263 average. In fact, Johnny Damon and Alex Rodriguez are the only starters with respectable averages over the .300 mark. Their ace is on the DL until September at the earliest, while their All Star left fielder may not return at all (his replacement, Brett Gardner, is hitting a less than respectable .161). Jorge Posada is on the DL, and will either join the team’s crowded first basemen/DH room or call it a season with surgery.

Their makeshift rotation consists of Darrell Rasner and his near-5.00 ERA and the banished boozing brawler Sidney Ponson in the fourth and fifth spots and the over-forty duo of Pettitte and Mussina on the front end. And their starter with the best numbers, Joba Chamberlin, only has two wins because of run support. The bullpen is made up of journeyman like Kyle Farnsworth and Latroy Hawkins and youngsters such as Edwar Ramirez and Jose Veras. So, I’ll say it again: how the heck does this team keep winning. They’ve won nine in a row at home and five in a row overall with nothing but smoke, mirrors, crutches and mustaches. Or have they?

Mike Mussina is pitching like he has an Orioles uniform on, and Andy Pettitte is pitching like he has an, err, Yankees uniform on (the first time around), with 11 and 12 wins, respectively. Mariano Rivera has been borderline untouchable, shortening games to eight innings like the Rivera of old. The starters (minus Darrell Rasner) have stepped up and kept them in games, while the bullpen seems to only give up runs when it doesn’t matter, locking things up in tight games.

The hitting, likewise, seems to come when it’s needed the most. A .260 average doesn’t seem to matter when all of your hits seem to come with runners in scoring position. Case in point: Bobby Abreu is hitting .277 with only 11 home runs, but he leads the team in RBI with 64. I’ll say that again, Bobby Abreu, on a team with Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi and their 40-plus home runs, leads this team in RBI.
Right now, Major League Baseball should make a tape of how the Yankees are playing and send it to little league and high school teams everywhere on how to play the game. That’s right, old cliché alert: good pitching and timely hitting. I hate resulting to using that analysis but (to use another shameless cliché) it is what it is. It’s the only logical explanation to how this team is winning. The numbers just aren’t there to prove otherwise. They’re pitching well enough and hitting (only) when they need to.

As a Red Sox fan, this scares me. To think that this team is riddled with injuries and not batting up to potential and still winning games with seemingly relative ease is not a thought that comforts me at night. The only thing that could make this worse right now is if Richie Sexson can manage a typical Yankee career resurrection that seems to occur all to often with players that other teams give up on and the Yankees pick up.
With the Red Sox making road games look like the Iditarod, thank goodness the upcoming series is at Fenway Park. Red Sox fans will look to welcome back David Ortiz and hopefully to welcome back the Yankees of June.

Even with the Philadelphia Eagles offense as big a question mark as it has been in the post-Torrence Small/Stanley Pritchett era, all of the off season excitement seems to be circling around the defense. Jevon Kearse is gone. Takeo Spikes is gone. Lito Sheppard is, well, still here. In are cornerback Asante Samuel and defensive end Chris Clemons, the two big splashes the Eagles made in the free agency pool, and Stewart Bradley, the second-year linebacker out of Nebraska getting his chance to start at middle linebacker.

The problem is that the Eagles don’t seem to learn their lessons. Clemons is replacing the last big-name defensive end they signed in free agency. Spikes isn’t the first veteran linebacker to be surprisingly let go (Jeremiah Trotter, twice). As for Sheppard, the last guy who showed up to training camp unhappy was named Terrell Owens. You may have heard of him.

Every football fan with access to a television, newspaper, or radio knows of the Lito Sheppard situation: Asante Samuel is the new hire who shows up to work and finds out the guy he is replacing hasn’t been fired yet. What many fans may not know is the names of these young Eagles linebackers.

Long gone are the glory days of William Thomas, Bill Romanowski and Seth Joyner. But also long gone are the forgettable names of Barry Gardner, Mark Simoneau and, yes, Levon Kirkland. Okay, so Kirkland was only with the Eagles for a year in 2002 at the end of his career, but it was still fun to watch him in pass coverage when teams threw on first or second down.

On July 21, the Eagles will roll into training camp with a starting linebacker corps of Omar Gaither (WILL), Stewart Bradley (MIKE) and Chris Gocong (SAM). Gocong started at SAM last year and finished with a solid 92 tackles, gaining more confidence from the coaching staff every week. Gaither, despite a rocky start, finished the year with an eye-opening 170 tackles at middle linebacker. With Gaither moving back over to the weak side to replace Spikes, Bradley will take over this season in the middle. This won’t be Bradley’s first rodeo, however, as he started a game in the middle last year. You may not remember that start, but I bet Drew Brees does. In his first start on December 23, Bradley sacked Brees and intercepted one of his passes.

This defense has every chance to be an exclamation point for the Eagles this season. However, it has an equal chance at being a big question mark for them. Brian Dawkins is going to be Brian Dawkins, even if he is a little bit older now. A solid defensive line is returning three of its four starters, and Clemons will surpass Kearse by leaps and bounds if he can merely find his way to the field. The variable is going to be this young linebacker corps, and whether or not they step up is going to be the key to the Eagles’ season.