Good morning, good afternoon or good evening my friends - whichever applies. Welcome to the July 4 edition of "The Gospel According to 'L'". Hope you had a good Fourth of July weekend - in spite of what transpired. I, once again, apologize for the lateness of this post. We got a few things to talk about - including the series with the two evils - Red Sox and Mets, and some other subjects of interest. Let's get started right now.

We gotta start off on a happy note - with the Red Sox series. I enjoyed that series thoroughly! Let me ask you a question for those of you up in the New England region. Did you really think you were going to just walk into Yankee Stadium and do to the Yankees what you did in April? Did you think you were gonna come in and act as if you owned the place? Well I'm sorry to disappoint you vipers! This is a different Yankee team, this isn't a team that will just give up and die like the one you faced from April 16-19 and April 23-25! Now Jeter and A-Rod are hitting, and the pitching is still good! This is the stuff dreams are made of - sending the Dread Sox home (or to Atlanta in this case) with their tails between their legs!

Let me start off with Tuesday night - God did I enjoy that! If this series taught us anything it taught us one thing - the Red Sox can hit and they can pitch - but they cannot field worth a crap! Three errors on Tuesday night, Kevin Millar boots one and so does Nomah! Chuck Knoblauch would have been perfect for this team. Ahh to crush the Sox 11-3, let me quote Jackie Mason - oh how sweet it is! Then Wednesday night I was at Giants Stadium watching some soccer with my friend. I had the game on radio, and I nearly let out a huge scream when David Ortiz booted the game tying runs and then later when Gary Sheffield and Hideki Matsui singled in the go-ahead runs to win it. Then comes Thursday night - I still could not believe this team would blow a three-run lead - I don't care if it is the Red Sox lineup or not. Brad Halsey did pitch pretty well, and it was the pen who blew it for him, otherwise he'd be 2-1 by now. I swore that game was over in the 12^th. But that wasn't meant to be, and look at the Yankees defense - Jason Giambi at first, Miguel Cairo at second, A-Rod at short and Gary Sheffield at third! To add insult to injury - no DH! Then comes the thirteenth - Manny hits one towards Westchester - damn it no! It cannot end like this! Only two of three? Well bottom of the inning - Posada strikes out - crap only two chances left. Tony Clark grounds right back to the mound. Oh great - two out, the Sox are gonna win it. Sound familiar, say...1986? Then El Indio, Ruben Sierra gets a little grounder with eyes to keep it alive. Ok, a little life support base hit. Then Miguel Cairo is up, well ok he's down to his last strike before you know it, but then, a flyball in the gap! Come on Ruben, score! Please score! He rounds third, no throw home, tie game, Cairo at second! Then up comes Flash - John Flaherty to hit for the pitcher. I had this feeling - ok anything to the outfield we may win this one, hell he's even got a little bit of homerun power. Flyball deep to left, didn't matter if it was gone or not, Manny was playing so shallow he looked like an infielder. Game over, Yankees sweep the Sox out of the Bronx and down to Dixie! That was the happy part of the week.

Now the sad part - the three games at Flushing Meadows. This series made me sick, for more than the obvious reasons. Friday night I can accept - that was an egg laid by the Yankee pitching staff. I don't know what the hell was wrong with Mussina, but he got the living hell beaten out of him. To see Kaz Matsui hit two homeruns - one of them a moonshot, you know this is not going to go your way tonight. Saturday was unacceptable! Check Meriwhether, thank God I'm not a racist because if I were, I'd be using the N-word right about now. It doesn't matter to me if he's white, black, brown, etc. Somehow I often wonder if he was paid off by the Mets' organization in one way or another. Friday night he blew a call on a grounder, one of the Met baserunners - I forget who it was - was clearly out, but Meriwhether calls him safe. Saturday was the biggest atrocity - Jorge Posada in the top of the ninth, two outs, bases juiced against John Franco. "Strike" two and "strike" three were ball four! I don't blame Posada for the way he acted, I would have wanted to end Meriwhether right then and there! One thing that amazes me - the serpents on FOX (Buck and McCarver) were talking about Matt Franco's pinch-hit base hit off Mariano Rivera back in '99 to win game two of three at Shea. Yet they always fail to mention that the pitch before that (or at least one of them) was strike three! Amazing how they will always point out Tino Martinez' World Series game one grandslam in 1998 and how he got a break on what should have been strike three. They'll also mention Jeffrey Mayer in the '96 ALCS. Yet Mariano getting hosed - no that they'll never talk about. When it's a bad call in favor of the Yankees, oh look, they won by default, it's a footnote, etc. But when it's a bad call against the Yankees that's ok! We have until about 2006 or '07 to put up with FOX's garbage, then hopefully NBC or CBS will give them some competition. I'd prefer to see NBC with Bob Costas - an actual Yankee fan! Somebody who will present them in a positive light and won't pander to the lowest common denominator!

All right, I want to talk about the final game since I was at Shea for that one. I sat in the mezzanine - section 7, row O, seat 1 right next to my friend and some of his family members. Let me just say this to you my friends - I no longer fear hell. Now I know what to expect if I do end up in hellfire - I'll be surrounded by Met fans and Satan will take the form of Chuck Meriwhether wearing a Met hat with a black Met jersey. I wanted so bad to win this game and not be swept. I don't know what was wrong with Javy Vazquez - every pitch he threw was either low, high or outside! By the 4th inning it's already 4-1 Mets and unbelievably Jae Weong Seo is pitching a beauty. I so badly wanted to make sure the chants of "sweep," and Met fans' wet dreams of it were going to end soon. Parents make sure your children do not read this next sentence - I can picture Met fans masturbating after this, just knowing that they had our number this weekend, and that's the only time they'll play with their bats. I want to move ahead to the ninth - by then I knew the game was lost, I didn't think anything was gonna happen against Braden Looper. Gary Sheffield did single with two outs, and I had this hope that A-Rod would shut all the vile Met fans up and clobber one towards Long Island. Like hell that would happen, right now I can't even remember if he grounded out of flied out to end the game, but either way, I, as I'm sure some of you had to leave Shea Stadium with our tails between our legs. This is the first Subway Series Yankee loss I've been to - before this game they were 4-0 (2 in 2001 at Shea and 2 in 2002 at Yankee Stadium.) Well Met fans, you beat us. You had a little bit of help on Saturday, but you swept us. Last season we swept you six of six, but this season you had our number. Enjoy this, because come October, we'll be drinking champagne hopefully three times, and you'll get to watch. And remember this - this may be the last time that you ever sweep a three-game set from the Yankees. All right, on to some other subjects.

I want to talk a little bit about Joe Torre and his overconfidence in some guys. I was at Shea for the July 4 game, and I was disgusted over the fact that Torre decided to use Felix Heredia in the seventh and to use Jason Giambi as a pinch-hitter in the eighth. So Heredia had one good outing - big deal! His ERA is still over seven, and he is primarily a lefty specialist. Did Joe really believe that Heredia was not going to give up a homerun to Richard Hidalgo? Heredia is not the lefty this team needs, and neither was Gabe White. The only problem is who is out there? I cannot even think of one guy.

Then to have Jason Giambi come up to hit instead of Ruben Sierra? All because he got himself a double off Jose Parra in Saturday's game? A healthier Giambi would have hit that ball towards Roosevelt Avenue! Instead of bringing in a Ruben Sierra to hit - somebody who has proven ability to get a clutch hit coming off the bench - he brings in a guy who just comes off an illness and still doesn't have enough energy! I did want to mention one thing - when I heard Giambi and Kevin Brown came down with intestinal parasites, I thought to myself - how did Red Sox and Met fans get into his system? Well, anyway, I just wanted to voice off on this, since in some respect, I think Torre is losing his ability to manage. He may not be the same great manager he was the past seven or eight seasons. He can still motivate a team, but strategy-wise, he seems to have lost a step. I don't know, maybe it's just me. All right, on to our last topic.

I want to talk about a possible baseball World Cup in the near or distant future. Personally, I love the idea. After seeing the basketball "Dream Teams," and the NHL use players in the last two Olympics, this sounds like a good idea. I'm also a huge soccer fan and I love seeing the World Cup every four years, so I would love this idea. Let's have MLB players represent their countries and battle for a prize and national pride. Here you could have the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Cuba and Venezuela, just to name a few, compete. If you take any eight of those countries, you put four in a round-robin group. Then you have the elimination rounds, until you reach the final two countries. Of course you have a third place/consolation game and the championship game or series. You'd have guys like A-Rod, Barry Bonds, Randy Johnson, etc. representing the U.S. You'd have Pedro Martinez, Alfonso Soriano, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez, etc. representing the Dominican Republic. You have Jorge Posada, Pudge Rodriguez, Carlos Beltran, Javy Vazquez, etc. representing Puerto Rico. Then you have Hideki Matsui, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideo Nomo, etc. representing the Land of the Rising Sun. With that group - it'll be called the Land of the Rising Runs. And then guys like Richard Hidalgo, Freddy Garcia and Magglio Ordonez representing Venezuela. Who would not get excited over this?

Baseball doesn't exactly get much coverage during the Olympics so this would be a great opportunity to see world class ballplayers compete for national superiority. The only problem is when to hold these games. I'd say the best time would be during the offseason, when some players are playing winter ball down in Latin America. Don't tell me you would not enjoy this - especially you closed-minded baseball fans who won't follow other sports during the winter. If I were running the show - we'd have this tourney every four years and we would have started long ago. See you next week!