Get your Nick Johnson tear-flavored dirt! Only $1,400!

We've already covered one of the more maddening, or at least confusing, tenets to Yankee fandom, the idea that there is some sort of "class" associated with being a Yankee. This class precludes facial hair, naturally, as well as overzealous celebrations. Why? Because old men say so.

So maybe it's piling on the Yankees a little bit today -- it is Mother's Day, after all -- but Phil Mushnick's column in today's New York Post is not to be missed. If you're rich, stupid, and looking to cement your True Yankee Fan status to anyone who would dare question it, well, have the Yankees got a deal for you!

"2005 Opening Day Batter's Box Dirt Collage" for $120 (call me cynical, but the dirt looks suspiciously similar to 2006 Opening Day batter's box dirt). Ian Kennedy's "Yankees New York Yankees Clubhouse Locker Room Name Plate" is selling for $500 (how a locker name plate was used in a game escapes us, but Shelley Duncan's is a steal at $300).

For $250, you can own Jose Veras Jose Veras ' alleged "game-used" Yankee duffel bag (I can't recall Veras using that duffel bag in a game, either, but that's the beauty of the hidden duffel bag trick).

The real kicker is a Kyle Farnsworth name plate for ... $100. One hundred freaking dollars. For that, you could buy a GTA 4 and an XBOX Live subscription and actually play online with Kyle Farnsworth, which would be way cooler. As long as you're prepared to take a legendary series of virtual kicks to Niko Bellic's virtual crotch, that is.

Poor Joba Chamberlain. There he is, playing baseball with his typically intense body language -- fist-pumping and so on -- and because he's a young guy and not yet considered a True Yankee, he has to hear quasi-hypocritical nonsense from people that haven't played in ages. Case in point: Goose Gossage, who wants Joba to act like a "Yankee." Whatever that means (via BBTF):

"That's just not the Yankee way, what Joba did. Let everyone else do that stuff, but not a Yankee," Gossage said by telephone on Saturday. "What I don't understand is, the kid's got the greatest mentor in the world in Mariano [Rivera]. He's one of the leaders of the team, so you'd think it wouldn't happen on that team.

"But there's no one to pass the torch anymore, no one to teach the young kids how to act. The Mets did a lot of that [celebrating] last year, and look how it came back to haunt them."

What is the "Yankee way," exactly? Is it having a legendarily blustery owner, who gets to scream and shout and generally act like a jerkoff for 30 years? Is it having that owner but simultaneously decrying long hair, facial hair, and any semblance of individual personality among the team's players? Seriously, I don't understand. You're not a f----ing prep school. You're a baseball team. If Joba Chamberlian stops striking people out, then get mad at him. Until then, let the man pump his fist. It seems to have worked out OK for Derek Jeter.

Kei Igawa's return to a major league mound looked pretty familiar to Yankee watchers. He gave up 11 hits and six runs in three innings as his pedestrian stuff floated up to the plate like beach balls which the Tigers were all to happy to deposit into all corners of the outfield. He got two swings and misses out of the Motowners and, needless to say, no strikeouts.

The only positives were that he didn't give up a home run or walk anyone. Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

Based on last night's incredibly easy to see coming disaster, they couldn't be thinking of giving him another shot on Wednesday? Joe Girardi addressed that following the game.

"The plan is for him to start again in five days, but sometimes ... I mean, that's the plan," Girardi said.

Igawa probably didn't need his interpreter to pass that message along to him. The Yankees aren't overrun with options for the start, however. Ian Kennedy impressed in his first start for Scranton but needs more time in the minors to satisfy both the rules and the intent that sent him there. Two other Scrantonites are on the 40-man roster,. Steven White has done well in AAA, Jeff Marquez has struggled and neither has pitched in the big leagues before.

Maybe signing David Wells isn't so far-fetched after all.

Earlier this week, when the MLBPA made public a formal investigation about collusion toward Barry Bonds, they included a handful of other veteran free agents to the mix. It seemed like a surefire way to weaken their case. Outside of Kenny Lofton, who will be playing for someone come July, using guys like Jose Mesa, Sammy Sosa and David Wells only proved that major league teams had common sense not that they were colluding.

Or so I thought. Today's New York Post reports that Wells has been working out and feels he could help the Yankees survive the less-than-stellar work from Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy. Wells did not pitch well for the Padres or Dodgers last summer and, at 45, doesn't really fit into the idea of building young players to lead you to the next taste of championship glory.

Perhaps we shouldn't write it off, though, since Hank Steinbrenner seems to have inherited his father's patience.

Everybody talks about the great players from the farm system that we had in the '90s, but it was the starting rotation. That was a huge part of the success. Huge."

They don't come any huger than Wells, so this signing could actually happen.

For a pitcher with 37 innings under his belt, Joba Chamberlain's generated a lot of controversy. There were the "Joba Rules," the way he dealt with the bugs in Cleveland and the feud between his team's owner and general manager. Those all seem temporal, though there's one talking point that won't seem to leave him alone.

Chamberlain struck out David Dellucci to end the eighth inning at Yankee Stadium yesterday and then unlelashed his now-familiar fist pump and yell. That Dellucci beat Chamberlain and the Yankees on Tuesday night with a three-run homer in the same spot couldn't have been far from his mind, not that he needs much goading. Chamberlain caught flak for doing the same thing against Frank Thomas in April though the Big Hurt wasn't the one giving it to him. This time around Dellucci wasn't so kind.

"If he wants to yell and scream after a strikeout and dance around the mound, that's what gets him going. My home run was in a much bigger situation, a much more key part of the game, but I didn't dance around and scream."

I'm all for emotion in sports. A pump of the fist, a yell, a little excitement about what you've done is cool by me. It's nothing that gets noticed in any sport but baseball, hell even golfers get away with it, and that doesn't make much sense.

Everybody likes to pick on Alex Rodriguez. Talk radio hosts do it, fans do it, opposing managers do it -- heck, even his wife does it -- so I guess I'm not surprised to see Donald Trump join the fun:

Trump was in Arkansas on Thursday to speak at the Economics Arkansas luncheon. According to arkansasbusiness.com, Trump talked about Rodriguez, a three-time AL MVP who has been criticized for his perceived inability to come through in important situations.

"He always plays bad under pressure," Trump was quoted as saying. "Derek Jeter, he's the greatest. People love Derek Jeter. Are those cameras on? This is going to get broadcast back home. Oh, now he'll leave my building."

This seems like a good place to remind everybody that Jeter hit just .176/.176/.176 in the playoffs last year, has a .699 OPS thus far this season and hasn't hit a home run in nearly eight months. A-Rod, meanwhile, OPS'd .820 in the playoffs last year and .913 in close and late situations the last three years. But shucks, Jeter's the greatest! If I want advice about real estate (or picking up women half my age), I'll listen to Trump. But when it comes to baseball (and hair), take his comments with a grain of salt.

While we've established that it was more drunken stupidity than sports fan stupidity that led to an utterly senseless death in Nashua, New Hampshire, it doesn't meant that partisans of the Red Sox and Yankees aren't still capable of making fools of themselves and causing themselves bodily harm.

The one bright side is that your foolishness can actually pay off in cold, hard cash. Just ask Mario Melendez. He got into a fight with a Red Sox fan at a Carlsbad, California bar in July, 2006 and injured his right hand when he punched David Sanborn in the mouth. He was awarded $25,000+ from a jury on Tuesday as a result.

Melendez testified last week that he injured his right hand on Sanborn's teeth during the fight, saying he was acting in self-defense.

"He grabbed me . . . and picked me up," he told jurors. "I really thought he was going to body-slam me."

Sanborn said Melendez challenged him to a fight, then sucker-punched him. According to court records, Sanborn's attorneys argued that Melendez "consented" to the fight, which lasted a few seconds, ending when Melendez punched Sanborn.

There's no setting where a fistfight over professional baseball teams is anything but ridiculous but this scrape is beyond the bounds. The Sox and Yanks weren't even playing each other on July 3, 2006 and both teams lost their games that day.

If you ever wonder why Steve Phillips has never gotten another job as a big league GM after the Mets sent him packing, and I doubt that you do, you need look no further than today's column at ESPN the Magazine the Web Site.
He's got his trading cap on and he's coming up with ways for the Reds to improve their roster.

All of his ideas are pretty laughable but a proposed deal he dreams up with the Yankees takes the cake.


I'm not sure you could even pull this trade off in MLB '08 without your XBox exploding. Lil' Stein may flap his gums from time to time but he's not certifiably insane. Also, why would Phillips, in an article devoted to giving Walt Jocketty advice, would propose a deal that doesn't circumvents the general managers? Makes you wonder if his tenure with the Mets was like Costanza's with the Yankees, they only woke him for the important meetings.

If you spent 12 years working at one job, interacting on a daily basis with the same people, you'd probably end up becoming friends with some of them. If you left that job for another one in the same industry, would you stop being friends with those people?

I wouldn't and don't know too many people who would. That makes me and Michael Kay very different people. The Yankee TV announcer and host of his own radio show ripped Joe Torre earlier this week for being in contact with some of his former players with the Yankees.

That's probably surprising to anyone who watched a Yankee game called by Kay. He used to rave about Torre's job handling his players. He also sarcastically referred to him as "St. Joe" while railing about the impropriety of those conversations. Neil Best of Newsday asked him why.


Gosh, what's wrong with people? You rip someone as holier-than-thou after they leave the general vicinity, in the process of creating a mountain out of a molehill, and then they assume that you meant it in a derogatory way.