Yankees to Mets: Down, boys!

Yankees to Mets: Down, boys!

NEW YORK -- The New York Yankees do not live in a vacuum. They read newspapers, surf the web, watch sports highlights shows on television and some of them probably listen to local sports talk radio on occasion.
And certainly, they all can read a box score and comprehend the standings.
So all the talk about the very real possibility that the New York Mets were on the verge of becoming the best baseball team in town was surely not lost on them. Nor was their 11-game winning streak, their MLB-best 13-3 record coming into Friday night's game or their status as the front-runners in the NL East by a not-insubstantial 4½ games.
And they would have had to be deaf not to have heard the pockets of Mets fans in Yankee Stadium cheering for their team or taking part in any of several obscene chants directed at Alex Rodriguez.


But home runs speak louder than words, and on a night like this, a single game can say a lot more than the 16 that preceded it. And with three swings of the bat within the first three innings of the game, the Yankees delivered a powerful message of their own: Not. So. Fast!
The "Not" came courtesy of Mark Teixeira's towering first-inning home run. The "So" came off the bat of Jacoby Ellsbury, who added a laser-beam of his own into the lower right-field seats leading off the third. The "Fast" came again from Teixeira, who planted another one into the second deck in right field three batters later.