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"I'm not talking about unlucky. I just think luck comes when you go after it. It seems like, at times, we just go through the motions. Today is one of those cases. That's the way it is. I think everybody knows what I'm talking about."
-- Yankees catcher Jorge Posada after Saturday's loss to the Oakland A's.

So, the Yankees lost to the Oakland A's again Sunday afternoon, if anybody's still interested. Final score 11-5. This makes it the second game they've lost in a row, and the third series. Makes it eight losses out of the last 10 games. Makes it 41 out of the last 78 to put the team four games below mediocrity.

Of course, looking at the bright side of this dismal Sunday snapshot of the Yanks' record -- the way some are asking us to look at the bright side of the previous day's loss because Brian Cashman's $46 million "bottom of the rotation help" starter Kei Igawa almost, kinda, relatively speaking pitched well for a handful of innings -- there's still a two-run lead the Yanks are holding in that suspended game against Baltimore.

At least till July 27th, when that game resumes with Jeter on 2nd base and Matsui up to bat with two outs in the top of the eighth.

Maybe what happens that day is they secure the win. Maybe what happens is whoever pitches the bottom of that inning for the Yanks goes up in flames, and Baltimore reclaims the lead, and they take the win instead. Very possibly, whatever happens will be irrelevant.

Because that's what the team is right now.

Irrelevant.

And all signs point to this being even more so the case in three weeks.

Sunday afternoon's loss to Oakland, for what it's worth, wasn't as abysmally disgusting as some others we've seen lately. Again, speaking in the relative. And also assuming we choose to assign gradations of good or bad to any loss -- which, in baseball, is, a bottom-line bad outcome no matter how you cut it.

With those caveats, we can say Sunday's loss was the sort that, in a better Yanks season, one could've swallowed. The usually steadfast and stalwart Andy Pettitte threw a stinker. It happens to the best of them. He gave up an unearned run in the first inning thanks to a fielding error by "Bobble" Abreu, and then faltered badly to serve up seven earned runs in the 2nd inning, five of them on a pair of no-doubt homers.

When Oakland outfielder Jack Cust hit the first of those two blasts, a three-run shot to right, it pretty much seemed the game was over.

"See ya!" exclaimed Yanks announcer Michael Kay as the ball flew into the stands, dispensing his trademark homerun call without prejudice.

"Dan Haren, obviously the starting pitcher for the A's, he's gotta like that!" commented Kay's partner in the booth, former Yanks catcher John Flaherty.

Thusly, the dagger sank in once more.

But, again, give the Yankees some credit. Sunday afternoon they showed a little fight. They did not seem to be going through the motions, as it has, of late, looked to many of us besides just Jorge Posada. They rallied some, they made it a game some. In a better season, we all know they likely would have won it. But in the end we saw them doomed by familiar shortcomings. The same old culprits at the plate left tons of men on base. The same old bullpen guys arrived to promptly serve up a run after Ron Villone commendably pitched multiple scoreless innings of relief.

In the end, the game got out of reach for the Yankees as the A's built on their lead and got healthier. Oakland had had a tough road trip. They had been swept by the Mets, been beaten in three of four games with Cleveland, and lost the first game of three to the Yankees at the Stadium on Friday.

But they won the series, improved their record to 42-39, and are now 5 1 /2 games out of the AL East Wild Card slot.

Meanwhile the Yankees slid further into irrelevancy. Their record is 37-41. They are, as of this morning, 11 games out of first place in the AL East and a full 9 games down in the Wild Card hunt.

So. Here we are. And what is really left to say? What can I write about these failing Yankees that isn't simply rehash? That hasn't been written about to death?

I suppose I could veer off topic, maybe try to amuse. I've done it before in this column, and there's been some funny stuff in the Bronx and here in The Red, after all.

I could write about how, along with the Fellow Author, I discovered the idiotic source of the "Wave" at the Stadium a few weeks ago. Or I could write about what happened Saturday here in Maine, when I went out to a local restaurant/bakery with The Wife, figuring I'd cheer myself up with a cookie after the great master of the mound, A's starter Chad Gaudin, one-hit the Yanks. On June 14, incidentally, Gaudin gave up 9 hits and 5 earned runs to the Houston Astros. On June 19, he surrendered 7 hits and 4 earned runs to the Cincinnati Reds. On June 25, the Cleveland Indians scored 6 hits and 3 earned runs off Gaudin. Saturday, he threw a one-hit shutout against the Yankees.

Incidentally.

And after that game I went out to get my chocolate chip cookie. The Wife, meanwhile, hoped to pick up a muffin or a scone. When we got to waiting on line at the bakery, I noticed the Red Sox cookies in the display case. They were gingerbread, I think. Shaped like little people. And they had red frosting with the names and numbers of Red Sox players on them. There was a "33 Varitek" cookie. There was a "25 Lowell" cookie. There was an "18 "Dice-K". And there was a "? A-Rod".

That's right. "? A-Rod".

I thought that the cookies were sort of clever, and that the A-Rod one was kind of amusing. I thought that maybe when my turn came to order I'd have some fun with the bakery guy over it. But then, as The Wife asked him whether he had any muffins, and he told her they were sold out, staring at her with flat, unfriendly eyes that matched his tone, I decided not to bother. It seemed to me like he'd had a long day or something. Like he needed to go home or something. Like he ought to have been anywhere but behind a counter serving the public. Or something.

"That guy hates me, you know," the Wife said when we were back in the SUV. I'd gotten my chocolate chip, and she had wound up with oatmeal cookies.

That surprised me. I'd just thought he was having a lousy afternoon. Turned out, however, that he'd said some really nasty and insulting stuff about Yankees fans to her one time, and she told him off but good in front of a bunch of customers, and he had been staring flatly at her ever since.

The story, as she recounted it, made me chuckle. If this were another time, I'd share it with you. But I'm not in a chuckly mood this morning, and from the reader emails I've been getting I feel certain you aren't either. I won't play the fiddle and dance while your baseball season plunges down and down into Irrelevancy Gulf.

You'd have thought the Yanks would have wanted to play good baseball Sunday after Posada's postgame comments the previous afternoon, John Flaherty told us from the announcer's booth. But, he said, "It's just not happening right now." They were "a little bit flat."

Thanks, Flash. We needed that.

So what else can I say?

I could, I suppose, be serious here. There are serious baseball issues that might be discussed.

For instance.

The baseball noggins tell us they think Joe Torre needs to be replaced. They cite his in-game mismanagement as a reason, and I would agree that mismanaging is not a good thing for a ball club's manager to do.

I would also probably agree that Torre has indeed mismanaged a bunch of games lately, and that a management change may be needed.

But do we need the baseball noggins to tell us that? We baseball simpletons can all see it for ourselves. We all scream it at our television sets.

A change seems to be needed.

I would, however, and in fairness, take partial issue with one point the noggins like to argue as far as Torre's mismanagement. They remind us repeatedly that by not bringing Mariano Rivera into the game to put out fires in key non-save situations, Torre has failed to maximize the impact he could have in said game. Their contention is that you bring your best reliever in whenever the situation would seem to demand it. If it's the seventh inning, so be it. If it's a tie game on the road in the 9th inning, let it be so. Better at these moments than with a three-run lead in the 9th that they seemingly believe anybody out of the bullpen can hold.

To support their argument, the baseball noggins will haul out a bunch of numbers and charts that all look very nicely laid out, even to an intuitive, non-mathematical type such as me. Their big difference with Torre in this oft-cited regard seems to be that he is a creature of convention, and cannot think out of the proverbial box when it comes to use of his closer. They tell us that he uses Rivera as he does simply because that's the only way he does it.

Now it makes sense to me, sometimes, for Joe to be more flexible using Rivera. It does to all of us baseball dumb-heads. How many times recently have we screamed at the television for Torre to please, please, please call 'Mo' out of the bullpen in the eighth inning rather than some mix-and-match of relievers Mike "Matches" Myers, Kyle "Kerosene" Farnsworth, and Scott "Firestarter" Proctor? How many?

We know it ought to have been done several times this season when it wasn't. We get it. We've seen it all before.

But again, in fairness to Torre: Say Mariano, as is probable, puts out the 7th inning fire rather than aggravates it. Say he maintains a bottom of 9th inning tie on the road instead of giving up the lead -- which, again, we would all kinda expect -- and the Yankees then manage to squeak out squeak out a one, two or three run lead in the 10th or 11th. Which of the aforementioned other relievers out of his 'pen is Torre going to trust to hold that lead and close the game?

The arsonist trio of Myers, Farnsworth and Proctor? Or maybe the very often equally combustible Brian Bruney?

Would you put your faith in them? Honestly? Without at least a freakin' 10-run cushion?

My point being that Torre isn't acting out of spavined reflex when he keeps Rivera out of the game in so-called "maximum impact" situations. What he's doing is recognizing that he can't trust those other guys to do the job. Hand them a single run or four to work with, they've, alone and in combination, managed to turn closing out games into nightmares.

I don't know the numbers.

But I know what I've seen. We all know what we've seen.

If Joe Torre is guilty of anything as far as this type of situation goes, it's being burned so often by these guys -- and their predecessors over the past few seasons -- that he sometimes manages his bullpen nowadays as if he's trying to avoid the previous day's disaster. As if he's trying not to lose yet again rather than win.

I'm no baseball genius. But like the geniuses, I sometimes wish Torre would use Mo in a 9th inning tie game on the road. Ask my cats, who go running for the hills whenever I shout it at him through the television screen.

Like the geniuses, I believe it may be time for a new Yankees manager.

I just wish the geniuses would stop being so disingenuous trying to make their case.

And what else?

On another serious note, there's the whole unfortunate Jason Giambi fiasco. How first the press jumped on him because he apologized for doing something wrong, but didn't say what it was, though we all knew what it was. And then, when Giambi recently did say what it was he was sorry about to a reporter, using an obvious euphemism for the banned performance enhancing substance he allegedly took before it was banned, they got on him because he wasn't clear enough about what it was . . . though, again, we all knew what he was talking about.

More importantly, Giambi knew we all knew. He was being as honest as he could without jeopardizing his baseball career.

He was fessing up, doing the right thing, as no other active player has yet done.

But the press got on him. The press blasted him.

So did Major League Baseball and its club owners, who didn't like it when Giambi suggested they owned some responsibility for steroid use in the 1980s and '90s.

Well, here's former Yankees and World Series '96 champ Cecil Felder on the subject, quoted from a recent newspaper article:

"We all knew. If we didn't know, we ought to really slap ourselves if we didn't think something was going on in baseball from the commissioner's office on down. Guys were getting too big and too strong, little guys turning into big guys -- come on, man."

What more can I add to that?

There's more serious baseball stuff to talk about. A whole lot, in fact. But I've got a hunch we'll have plenty of time to do that in coming weeks if the Yanks continue their all-too-probable slide into Nowheresville.

In other words, I'm saving it for later.

When I really need some material for this column.

When we all may be too mad, or numb, or both over an irrelevant Yankees baseball season to want to tell or hear any amusing stories from Deep in the Red.