Angels 4, Yankees 3

Pettitte pitched fine, save one inning, against the Angels' meat grind of an order.

The larger question is: Just what is it with Rivera and ties this year?

As a consolation, I sat down to watch the Olympics: specifically, the Men's 4 X 100 freestyle relay.

Reader Desert Rose had informed me of her all-Olympic boycott, and I was already following suit, but was drawn back by my favorite sports, those involving either a race or a ball--meaning swimming, track and basketball. Thus I was able to see The Greatest Swim Relay Ever--or, as those over 40 will remember, the greatest swim relay since the 1976 Women's 4 X 100 free, when Shirley Babashoff and Co. upset Kornelia Ender's East German 'roid monsters for the only US women's swimming gold in Montreal. In those days, the freestyle relays were (as they are in most swim meets) the final events of the competition. The race result was so stunning--Ender and friends had dominated the distaff side in the pool to that point, winning 11 out of 12 gold, most of them in laughably easy fashion--that the East Germans actually filed a protest, claiming that Babashoff, swimming the anchor, had dove off the podium early. Babashoff, who had swum internationally since her early teens, who had spotted the East German cheating for what it was, who had called them on it, and who had then endured terrible press calling her a poor sport as she collected one silver after another, could finally smile. "Her fingernail touched and my toenail touched," she said with a laugh, gold medal around her shoulders, when asked if she had left early.

I would place last night's race just behind that one. But what a race.