Invasion!

Today, I had to work so I drove my car up to the ballpark and parked it on my break time, and then took the train back to work.

When I got off the train a little after 12:20, I thought I had been whisked to the 161st Street stop in the Bronx outside Yankee Stadium.

Where did these NY people get all these tickets? Man, they must have been burning up the DSL lines when they went on sale in February. I waited outside watching the line for a while and almost everyone had a tickets.com ticket (as opposed to box-office sale ticket stock). There were almost as many Yankee fans as we see Cardinal fans here when St. Louis is in town.

I give the Yankee fans credit. They're not all loudmouth drunks (though there were plenty of loudmouths -- one guy kept offering every woman he saw $500 to take off her shirt and pose for a picture with him. None accepted.). They love their team and they're into the game and a lot of them drove the nearly 1000 miles from the NYC area to see this series.

It was definitely a playoff atmosphere, and unfortunately, Carlos Zambrano let the Yankees take an early lead with a Jason Giambi HR in the first (and Giambi put on quite a BP show, skying about a dozen balls onto Sheffield, the best BP show I've seen since the Mark McGwire days). The Yankees never gave up the lead in their 5-3 win over the Cubs today, which was delayed an hour and 25 minutes by a rainshower (I call it a shower, compared to the gusty storm that hit on Mother's Day -- it rained steadily but never too hard). The weather continues rotten here this spring, though it's supposed to be nice tomorrow. Despite the weather, nearly every seat was filled, plus plenty of people standing, though the 39,359 was not the largest crowd of the year -- smaller than Memorial Day. I expect tomorrow's crowd to be the largest of the season, and maybe the largest in a couple of seasons.

Zambrano settled down and threw four more good innings. I say four because he lost it again in the third, and then nearly got out of it with only one run scoring before Juan Rivera smoked a 2-run single up the middle, and that was the difference in the game. The Cubs made a game of it in the ninth, bringing up Hee Seop Choi with the tying runs on base, but Mariano Rivera played the "Here, hit it if you can" game with him, and struck Choi out on three straight fastballs.

The Cubs need a win tomorrow, so I'll settle for seeing Roger Clemens strike out nine to get to 4000. He can wait to get his 300th win.

Sammy Sosa needs three hits to get to 2000; that'd be another cool milestone to see.

There were tons of ejections today, lots of very drunk people, probably because they had an extra 90 minutes to drink with the delay. Tomorrow will be better, as the game is an early start, 12:15 Chicago time.

Sight seen: a skimpily-dressed woman with obviously enhanced breasts pranced by several times. The comment was made (and I can't remember who said it first, Howard or Jeff): "They must be corked." She and her boyfriend were among the ejectees.