On this sunny SoCal morning, I woke up to a bit of marine-layer fog, knowing that later the sun would come out and warm my heart over again at the thought of the Yankees losing a series in Los Angeles.  Mind you, my heart lies with the Dodgers, but I have MUCH love for the Angels.  And to see the Yankees LOSE there...well, the only way to beat that is to see an NL team win the World Series, especially if that NL team is you-know-who...but I digress.

My joy in seeing the Yankees lose is evidenced in the very fabric that holds the Yankee Nation together: this elitist, pompous bourgeois sense of entitlement that engulfs any discussion around the Yankees actually having a losing streak.  But in this case, "losing" is a very fluid term.

See, not only are the Yankees SEVEN games up on the Red Sox in the AL East (count them: 7.0), but Boston may also lose David Ortiz for the season if it turns out that he needs further treatment for the irregular heartbeat--good luck Papi.  The Yankees could literally obliterate the division, despite the haphazard play out West.  And then there's A-Rod.

Yes, A-Rod, the $250M-man.  There's all this discourse regarding the slump: 1 for 15 with 10 Ks in Anaheim; 1 for 5 in Seattle, blah blah blah! 

Since baseball revolves around its numbers, let's look at a few more of A-Rod's. As of August 29: .380 OBP, .492 SLG, 26 HR, 93 RBI, .279 AVG.  From outside of New York, that looks like MORE than respectable numbers.  Maybe they do New Math in the Bronx, because it appears that nothing but a 1.000 across the board will yield any love from the Yankee nation.

Ahhh, yes, there's that word: love.  Make no mistake, folks: in the Bronx they don't know the meaning of that word.  A-Rod may look mortal now , but maybe y'all should have thought about that before you displaced a natural shortstop and planted him at 3rd base just so you could shout to the rest of us "We've got A-Rod"; maybe you Yankee boo-birds ought to hurl some of that vitriol toward your hurlers, because Yankee pitching is nothing short of LOUSY, unless you count the last #42 in the league; maybe New York could take a lesson from their archrival Red Sox, who show us ALL how to love a team, and love the game.

So leave A-Rod alone.  Show the man that the way out of the slump is via the love of the game, and the love of the fans, and not by JEALOUSY of his paycheck.  Because the view from the West is that as long as you hate, you lose...and when YOU lose, WE WIN!