The walk off walk.  Easily the worst way to end a game.  Even the winning team just kinda trots in and calls it a night.  And this was the case last night for the Yankees in their 3-2 loss to the Orioles.  Who do you really point a finger at though?  Andy Pettitte was once again his All-Star-to-be self, giving up just two runs in seven innings.  Kyle Farnsworth even pitched a scoreless inning.  And if the Yanks were winning, we wouldn’t have seen Scott Proctor in the ninth — a situation that turns the man’s nerves to butter. 

Yes, if you’re catching the drift here it’s all about the offense producing.  It seems that as Bobby Abreu and Johnny Damon go, so do the Yankees…and right now neither of them are going.  Remember when Abreu was hitting almost .500 in the month of June?  The Yankees were winning.  Remember when Joe Torre switched Damon to DH? He was constantly on base and the Yankees had shaved the Red Sox lead to 7.5 games.  I even opened my big mouth to give a ‘told you so’ to Yankee-hater Nation.  Well, once again I must have jinxed the whole thing because these two key elements of the Yankees offense have gone stone cold and the team is losing.  My bad.

Now that the Fogg of a NL West road trip is over and the Yanks are in the friendly confines of the AL East they may begin to hit again.  That’s what I was thinking going into last night anyway.  They certainly don’t hit well against pitchers they’ve never seen before – an age old problem for the club — and that’s what they saw a lot against the Giants and Rockies.  So last night could have been a hangover from that…but the Yankees are going to have to start winning each series they play in if they want to see the light of post-season play. 

And to do that, they’ll require some life and energy out of their lead-off and three-hole hitters.