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— former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre

It's locker cleaning day at Deep in the Red. I realize I've taken a while to get back here and pack away my stuff, but I needed a break after the 2007 Yankee baseball season crashed to a halt. Hey, I admit it, the disappointment and frustration got to me.

I've gotta admit, this year's finish was especially depressing. After what the Yanks accomplished this season, clawing their way out of near-irrelevance in the standings to make the playoffs with the best second half record in baseball, I figured they were headed for really big things. That's how the story's supposed to go anyway. But in real life, unlike in most fiction, there's no obligatory dramatic closure. The supreme effort to overcome a rough start, to surmount difficult obstacles against all odds, doesn't assure a triumphant climax.

The thing is that baseball is real. Unscripted, unpredictable. For many of us it's the ultimate reality show, illustrative of so much that happens to us outside the lines of the diamond. In real life happy endings are elusive. In real life, you can fight the good fight and slip into the gaping pit anyway. Real life is capricious — no matter how hard we try to succeed, some bum, buggy luck can do us in when we least expect it. The reason I've always hated Hollywood success stories is because they make us forget that people often try their best and fail horribly. And that in failure, they may deserve our admiration no less than those who made it to the light.

A couple of weeks back, I was at Yankee Stadium watching my team go down to the Cleveland Indians in the fourth game of their American League Divisional Series. I went there with hopes I'd be blowing out my vocal cords there deep into October, and instead found myself hurrying out of the place with Jorge Posada up to bat, and one out left for the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth. I didn't want to see them make that last out. I didn't want to see the Yanks' brief postseason run end with the Indians celebrating on their home field.

And that was it. Adios, 2007 Yankee baseball season, howdy autumn. Nothing left now but my hope — a weak one, mind you — that Cleveland can actually muster the gumption to close out the Red Sox at Fenway and make all of New England miserable. Then the Indians can lose to the Rockies, and their fans can also taste bitter defeat, and it'll almost seem as if nobody really won the World Series this year, since the only people who'll care about it will be in Colorado, where I've never been and may never go, and where they'll only be waving their stupid towels in victory for five minutes before tossing them into the thin air and moving onto college football or something.

Five minutes being about the longest amount of time fan interest in baseball lasts up there.

But listen to me, will you? Just listen to me. It's rude to be chewing my sour grapes in your ears, and for that I apologize. I'll try not to do it again, but forgive me in advance if I lapse.

Well, I'd better get this locker cleaned out. It won't take long — it's already empty except for a few odds and ends of suspect value, and several others that are prematurely obsolete or outright worthless, the scattered detritus of another season that didn't wind up the way I'd wanted. Every so often I wonder if they're worth my emotional investment in this stuff. And then Spring Training comes around and here I am, loading up on it again.

Before heading off into the falling autumn leaves, I think I'll take a moment to list and describe the items I'm tossing into my ratty cardboard box. I'll strive to do a creditable job for you without a performance-related contract, or any contract at all for that matter. Like former Yankees manager Joe Torre, I don't need any incentives to motivate me beyond a desire to do the job right. Like Torre, I have a personal standard irrespective of carrots. When I jump into it, I jump into it.

Item #1: A vial of bitter pills

There are only a few pills inside that I haven't swallowed, and frankly most bear the Chien-Ming Wang brand name — though, uncapping the vial, I do see some with Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina imprints. Still, Wang was the nominal ace of the Yankees' pitching staff. He was their go-to guy. The team played four postseason games, two of which started with Wang on the mound. In the first game, he surrendered eight earned runs in just under five innings. In the second, he coughed up four earned runs in a single inning of work to finish the brief Yankees playoff run with a shocking 19.06 ERA. In both of those games, Cleveland's starting pitching was less than stellar. To give the Yankees a chance to win, Wang just had to keep the damage to an endurable minimum. Instead he flung sizzling sticks of dynamite at their chances.

Wang had won 19 regular season games two years in a row. He'd performed solidly in previous postseasons. Torre trusted him in key games against Cleveland, as he should have. As I toss my bitter pills into the carton, I find myself wondering what Torre would have done differently to win those games if he'd been bound by a performance-related contract, the sort he would've had to accept to manage the Yankees in 2008. Run up to the mound threatening to deck Wang on the spot unless he threw quality strikes and got some outs? What?

Ah, well. All I can say is that it's no surprise that so many of the pills are Wangers. He more than anyone deserves to be the face of the bad medicine that killed the Yanks postseason.

Item # 2: A lifeless flying insect of indeterminate taxonomy

I can't imagine how this dead little creature from Cleveland wound up with the rest of my junk. Could be Joba shook it off when he passed through here a few days ago — I'm told he's still finding their tri-segmented carcasses in his hair and ears.

Which reminds me . . .

While sports reporters have been calling this sort of creature a Lake Erie midge, entomologist Louis Sorkin pointed out their ignorance when I'd interviewed him for what was going to be a special playoff edition of this column. Being on the scientific staff of the renowned American Museum of Natural History in New York, he's someone I trust knows his insects.

In case you're interested, or even if you aren't, Sorkin told me there's no clearcut taxonomic distinction between a midge and a gnat. These are, rather, common terms used interchangeably to describe numerous insect families. So the only way to determine what sort of insect actually attacked Joba Chamberlain in the eighth inning of a playoff game the Yankees were leading 1-0 would have been to collect a specimen or 10 — something none of the reporters at the scene apparently thought to do.

Sorkin seemed a bit surprised by their failure to bag any bugs. So was I. If I'd been at Jacobs Field in Cleveland the night of the bug invasion, I promise you that even without performance-related incentives I would have tried to get onto that field and save some later examination, with the specific purpose of determining whether or not their sudden appearance was a normal, natural phenomenon. See, my mind had been buzzing with thoughts about a possible Bug-gate. I'd imagined a sinister plot by the Indians to deliberately seed their mound with the insects during the seventh-inning stretch, knowing they would swarm Joba in waves as he stepped up to toe the rubber.

Now, of course, I'd heard the major counterargument to this scenario. Heard, from no lesser Yankee executive than Brian Cashman, how the Cleveland Indians also had to deal with the insects. But to me that assessment of the situation was neither here nor there, because the Indians were losing when the swarm appeared in the bottom of the eighth. Losing to Joba, a pitcher who'd made two of their batters look silly the inning before. And losing with Mariano Rivera, the greatest reliever ever, preparing to close out the game for the Yankees in the ninth.

See where I'm going with this? If I was a nefarious type with the Cleveland Indians pondering whether to zap the Yanks with a cloud of bugs — knowing full well they'd bother my guys too — I confess I'd have taken my chances releasing a plague of insects. Facing Mo and Joba without the bugs, the Indian batters were cooked. At least with the bugs, they'd have a wing-and-a-prayer chance of tying up the game and winning in extra innings.

Again, that's if I'm the Cleveland Indians. And again, it's only if I'm looking to pull something sly and underhanded. Call me mistrustful of people but I thought this could've been what happened.

Mr. Sorkin, however, dispelled my suspicions faster than the insect swarm dispersed in the 10th inning.

"Could a swarm of this type have moved in from somewhere and moved out just as quickly?" I asked him over the phone.

"Yeah, I think so," he replied. "It may have been at one part of the lake, or wherever. And then it moved along. And then it moved along to another spot. That can happen."

"But is it possible . . . you could drop a gnat bomb?" I asked in my most objective journalistic mode, adding that their centering on the pitcher's mound seemed especially odd to me.

Again Sorkin doused my conspiracy theory.

"That actually might be what this species does," he said. "It could be attracted to open areas, and little mounds in an open area. There are some species that are just up on hills."

They were probably there, Sorkin explained, for the purpose of mating. The males will set up in groups to get the attention of females, and the females will fly into the group. And afterward they all move on.

"There were the proper conditions to attract them into the place, and then the conditions changed, and they left. They did what they were supposed to do."

Sorkin went on to tell me that, "because the mound was up where it was, and the person there {on the mound} was even higher, they were attracted to this one high point on this open field. In normal light, they're attracted to treetops in open areas." Which means that, bottom line, a Yankees playoff season most likely went into the dumper because a whole bunch of dumb insects confused Joba Chamberlain with a tree, and got to him the way Cleveland's batters couldn't.

Bum, buggy luck, like I said before.

Y'know what?

This dead bug isn't getting packed. I'm going to toss the wretched creature aside and forget about it.

Item # 3: A season's worth of sections pulled from the Daily News, New York Post, and New York Times.

There isn't much to say about these bundles of wrinkled, yellowing, smelly newsprint. I just keep them as reminders of how little sports journalists know about sports, and the depths to which they'll sink to manufacture a sensational header. For example, here are some pages from few weeks before the All Star break, when the geniuses were unequivocally telling us the Yanks were finished. They ought to be sellers at the trade deadline, wrote several of them. Trade A-Rod and get value for him, barked the guy from the Post. Torre better do this and better do that or he's gone! hollered that shrill reporter from the Daily News. Torre's out any day no matter what he does, declared his pompous blowhard colleague.

This season, a lot of readers have written to comment on my apparent hatred of the sports press. I tell them they are wrong, I don't hate the sports press. I just have a whoppingly high level of disrespect for its members, and am starting to believe sports journalists should have their work graded according a performance-based model. I mean, since some people think that motivates baseball managers to do better, how about seeing if it compels the hacks who type blatant nonsense about them toward comparable benchmarks? Why not make reporters and columnists apologize in print if their claims prove inaccurate or patently untrue? Repeat offenders might actually risk losing the jobs in which they seem forever entrenched. And here's another idea: For every five surefire predictions that fall flat, a columnist gets a predetermined reduction in salary. Or better yet, is banned from hovering over all-you-can-eat dessert buffets at ballpark press cafeterias.

Trust me on this: Should managing editor take that last step with his reportorial team, we'll see those hacks fall in line one, two, three.

Item # 4: An envelope of unused postseason tickets.

As with the previous item, I don't have much to say about this thing, except that it's gotten pretty stuffed — I have a peculiar habit of hanging onto unused playoff tickets World Series tix from past seasons. Peeking under the envelope's flap, I'm reminded that I would've had decent seats for some Yank home games at the 2004 World Series and even better ones for the 2005 ALCS and World Series. And then there are last year's ALCS and World Series tickets, the latter being infield seats low in the 500 mezzanine section, right field side. And hey, look, here are this year's tickets. There's a whole funny story behind how the Fellow Author and I went through hoops to get our hands on this year's batch . . .

But never mind. Into the carton with them.

Good seats, bad seats, what's the difference? They're all worth the same to me now.

_______________________

Well, I'm about cleaned out for the season — didn't I tell you there wasn't a whole lot to carry off? The lucky squirrel pin I wore to that losing playoff game can stay right where it is, way back on the locker's top shelf — it's small and inconspicuous enough to go unnoticed, and I doubt anybody will disturb it over the winter. Maybe it'll have more of a positive charge next year, who knows? Though it occurs to me that Yankees fans probably shouldn't have on mascots, rally monkeys, or even a rally squirrel named Scooter helping them win games. Yankees fans, we're supposed to have the Stadium Ghosts on our side, aren't we?

Call me a fool, but I still haven't stopped believing in them.

Okay, here we go. I tape carton's shut, tuck it under my arm, step out of the Deep in the Red clubhouse, and start closing the door behind me before I walk on down the hall.

That's when I notice the signed, framed photo of Joe Torre on the wall right outside the door. It's an image we all have in etched our minds: A teary, very emotional, very human Joe being hoisted up on the shoulders of his team when they won that first World Series back in '96.

My wife gave the photo to me as a birthday present maybe five, six years ago, and I recall exactly why I chose to hang it near the door, where I could see it every time I went through:

For me, it's always been a reminder that if you never stop trying in life, and remain a human being through your mistakes, failures and brushes with adversity and bad luck, sometimes — sometimes — things work out okay, or better than okay. And when they don't, and you can still look yourself in the mirror and know you've done your best, and are loved and respected by the people you respect . . . hey, that's really not too bad either.

Joe Torre never needed extra incentives to do his best as manager of the Yankees. That was just his normal way. And with those final words, Dear Reader, I take my leave. Season over, door closed behind me, box of assorted junk under my arm . . .

Photo of Torre, Yankee manager, still right up beside my door where it belongs.

Thanks from all of us, Gentleman Joe.