Top Five Stories From Yesterday

1. The defending champion Saints get a 37-yard game winning FG from Garrett Hartley to beat San Francisco by three as time expires, but lose star Reggie Bush to a broken leg on Monday Night Football.

2. The Yankees increase their lead over Tampa Bay in the AL East to 1.5 games on a night when New York honored its late owner George Steinbrenner.

The advent of sabermetrics has changed the way we look at "clutch."

"Situational hitting" is luck. "Inducing weak contact" is luck. "Performing under pressure" is luck. It's all been proven with math and logic and regression analysis.

But screw that, because it's a pennant race, and even the most logical stathead has subjective ideas about who he'd most want to see step to the plate with his favorite team's season on the line.

I am back from a long weekend, which explains my lack of posts on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It also explains why I woke up at 11:00 this morning for the first time since college. Speaking of college, I attended three football games in a 24-hour span.

Ending a horrid 3-6 road trip, the New York Yankees are glad to be back home.

Home or not though, starting with a 4-game series against the second-place Tampa Bay Rays, the next two weeks will challenge the Yankees in every possible way.

The Tampa Bay Rays are once again a half game behind the New York Yankees. In the first of their three game series against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. The Yankees defeated the Baltimore Orioles 4-3.

It is a good thing the Rays play the Yankees for a four-game series next week at Yankee Stadium.

After watching three exhilarating games between both teams at Tropicana Field this week, baseball can not have enough of both teams facing each other.

It may not be Yankees-Red Sox, but Yankees-Rays is anything but unwatchable. If anything, Yankees-Rays is better than watching that age-old rivalry.

The San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers has always been a rivalry, a fierce and entertaining one at that, while the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees have come to form a partnership of hate, fighting for the American League East crown.

Wednesday night, the Tampa Bay Rays wrapped up a three-game series at Tropicana Field against the New York Yankees with a 4-3 come-from-behind victory.  The second win of the series puts the Rays back in first place in the AL East by half a game.

The Yankees overcame a seven-run fifth inning, battled back to beat the Tampa Bay Rays 8-7 in 10 innings, and regained first place in the AL East.

For several years now, it has been Major League Baseball tradition that cash-strapped teams shop one or more of their best players during the annual Winter Meetings. Lately, the biggest deals have been for elite pitchers: The Oakland Athletics traded Dan Haren to the Arizona Diamondbacks in December 2007--a deal that included current stars in pitcher Brett Anderson and outfielder Carlos Gonzalez--and the dominoes have fallen each winter since.