The offense got things going quickly, scoring three runs in the first inning. Grandy then hit a homer in the second before Carmona threw a pitch at Tex’ upper body. The beaning, obviously, didn’t sit well with the team and the benches cleared; Girardi even got into it with Tribe skipper Manny Acta. Tex was pissed to say the least. It was good seeing some emotion from the team, but I have to wonder why nobody said boo when the Sox beaned five Yankees over two games…

Regardless, Tex got the last laugh as he had a three-run double (his first double since May 28 — 29 games), two walks and scored twice. It was, though, his seventh hit by pitch of the season after getting hit just 13 times all of last year.

Posada seems to have been revived as of late; he went 3-for-5 with an RBI but did get caught trying to stretch a single into a double. He now has hits in 10 of his last 16 at-bats and, since asking out of the lineup against Beantown, is 16-for-50 (.320). However, he still hasn’t hit a home run since April 23 (104 at-bats).

A-Rod absolutely murdered a pitch for his 625th career dinger, reports said it traveled 460 feet, while Gardy and Cano combined to go 5-for-9 with two RBI and a run scored. Jeet went 1-for-5 with a double and scored twice, and is now nine hits away from 3,000.

SuperNova threw a pretty good game after a few clunkers. He went seven innings and gave up two runs on four hits with six strikeouts to three walks. He said that he felt as strong in the seventh inning as he did early on, which is good. Hopefully he keeps this going and puts up some more strong starts.

The bullpen did its darnedest to give the lead away. Kevin Whelan, who was *brought up before the game, walked in a run while getting only two outs in the eighth. He had walked only six batters in 27 innings in Scranton, but walked four in six batters during his Major League debut tonight. I know it’s an unfair comparison, but Mo has walked four batters in 24 1/3 innings this season.

*Chris Dickerson was sent down to make room

Amauri Sanit then came on and struck out O-Dog to end the eighth before giving up four runs (three of which were charged to him) on as many hits in the ninth. Lance Pendleton walked in a run and Mo gave up a two-run single. The final score really isn’t indicative of how bad the Yanks beat them all game. It would have been a shame if they blew it, Nova really pitched well and deserved the win.

For what it’s worth: the Injuns had scored four runs or fewer in 14 of their last 18 games and two runs or fewer in 10 of their last 15 games coming in.

The clubs will play the second tilt of this four-game set tomorrow at 1:05 with Cy Colon going against Mitch Talbot.

It was announced before the game that Joba will undergo Tommy John surgery on Thursday. The procedure will be performed by Dr. James Andrews. It usually takes at least a year to recover so best case scenario he’s back by next All-Star break, but most likely we won’t see him until 2013. Get well soon Joba!

LET’S GO YANKS!!!

Bad AJ was out in full force, as he gave up eight runs — a season-high seven earned — on seven hits with three strikeouts to four walks in just 5 2/3 innings of work. His ERA against the Sox as a Yankee is now 8.85 in eight starts. Yikes. He’s 6-4 this year and I hope that this isn’t the part of the season where he breaks down and spirals out of control.

AJ has put together some great starts this year, but he has yet to throw a scoreless outing this season. I don’t know what that means, but I feel like he should have at least one scoreless outing. His peripherals are decent though, so I guess I shouldn’t be bitching.

There’s not much else to say, the Yanks had opportunities but committed many errors — mentally and physically. You have Cervelli’s two pick-off attempts that went into the outfield, Gardy not coming home on a wild pitch, Jeter’s GIDP with the bases loaded in the sixth and many other things that made this game a botched abortion. They were 4-for-14 with RISP and stranded seven runners as the Sox won their fifth straight game at The Stadium, their longest single-season streak since July 7-9, 1939.

The Yanks allowed a total of 14 runs on the final seven games of their road trip, but yielded 17 runs in the first two games of this series. Man, I miss playing the AL West.

Cervelli, who was only playing because Russell Martin’s back locked up, had one of the weirdest games. In addition to the aforementioned throwing errors, he went 3-for-3 with a double, two RBI, two runs scored, a walk and took a foul ball off his junk. It was his seventh — SEVENTH!!!!! — career three-hit game. However, since the start of 2010 he has thrown out just 10 of 78 base runners whereas he had caught 13 of 21 would-be base stealers in 2009.

You have to give props to Tex for playing one day after taking a Lester cutter off his knee, an injury that looked like it could sideline him for a while. He drove in a pair of runs on a sac fly and a single.

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Behind a phenomenal pitching performance from CC, the bats exploded en route to a 13-2 route of the Orioles. New York now owns a 6-0 lead in the season series. There’s nothing like a series with the O’s to cure a case of the RISP fails; they went 6-for-13 in such situations tonight. It should be more of the same as the Loser Mets come to town for three games this weekend.

CC (4-3) went eight scoreless innings and gave up seven hits with a season-high nine strikeouts and no walks. He threw 109 pitches and 84 of them went for strikes. In the process he passed Frank Viola for sole possession of 84th place on the all-time strikeouts list with his 1,846th punch out. The outing matched his longest of the season, he also went eight frames against these same O’s on April 23.

The last time the Yanks had back-to-back starts of eight-plus scoreless innings was on 8/27 and 8/28 in 2002 when Boomer and Moose accomplished the feat.

Amauri Sanit came in for the ninth and gave up the shutout, but the game was never in doubt as the Yanks scored five runs in the first inning and never looked back.

This game had pretty much everything: Posada started at first base, Russell Martin made a cameo at third, every starter reached base at least once, every starter — except A-Rod — had a hit, there were three bean balls, and when Cervelli came in to catch in the ninth all three catchers were on the field at the same time. That’s not including AJ pinch-running in yesterday’s game. This two-game series had pretty much every anomaly in the book.

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