. . . . and sometimes, it rains

So a breather on Monday, and a first look at the standings. Down 2 1/2. Meh.

Word all weekend was about balls flying out of Yankee Stadium at a "record pace."

Interesting. Twenty home runs in four days? Considering something like sixteen of them were served up by Wang, that's an outlier. So the joker who emailed Rome yesterday to ask, "Since when does someone spend a billion and a half on a softball field?"--yeah, funny, guy, you can sit down now.

Still, it will be funny to see what a couple of years brings--and, really, that's the only way these things can be measured. When Minute Maid opened as Enron Field, it was derided as "Ten-Run" Field, a softball track that was reconfiguring batting records as much as steroids. Jeff Bagwell, not given to complaining about anything, openly admitted to mental exhaustion, saying it was difficult to come to the park knowing you had to score six runs just to keep you in the game.

A big hint about that first season came on a Thursday afternoon game I attended, an early-season game against the Cubs. Jose Lima, a change-up/breaking ball pitcher, had won 37 games the previous two seasons feasting on the cold, dead air and faraway fences of the Astrodome, quite possibly the worst hitters' park of all time. Enron Field, and specifically this game, ended his career as we knew it. It wasn't that he gave up four home runs in the first inning. Nor was it that he gave up four home runs and none of them were hit by Sammy Sosa (and this was 2000, mind you, when Sosa could have run in the Kentucky Derby). What struck us all was the sheer towering magnitude of the home runs he gave up: something like, say, a line-drive beneath a left field archway, two scorching line drives off the left field facade, then finally, a shot by Henry Gonzales up to the train tracks that had the assembled Astro faithful giving up any pretense of the 'Stros actually winning the game and shouting, "Whoaaaaaaa!," like ten year-olds watching fireworks.

That game did it: Shell-shocked Astros pitchers were afraid to step on the field. They seemed to start every at-bat down 2-0. In May, in pretty much the game that sealed the season, Billy Wagner gave up a ninth-inning home run to Ken Griffey, Jr., that landed somewhere in downtown Conroe. People called in sports talk shows demanding the playing field be restructured. Radio guys wondered aloud if Drayton McClane would simply tear out the left field Crawford Boxes (let's see: 1700 seats at forty bucks per, every one of them sold out for every game . . . let me do the math here . . . oh, I got it: No).

Then . . . nothing. Pitchers adjusted, and began treating Enron/Minute Maid like any other ballpark. The whole place kind of settled, the way a new building does. And this season, in the last four days, in a four-game wraparound series with the Reds, the 'Stros pitchers allowed, in order, two, zero, four and four runs, and lost three of the four games. Absolutely common.

Fixating on the X number of homers the Yankees have allowed in four games makes as little sense as those "at this pace" items people used to run anytime somebody got multiple home runs on Opening Day, long before Sportscenter and Jim Rome shamed them into stopping it.