Ladies and Gentlemen, the unfounded panic begins!

Pardon me while I play devil's advocate, since the unfounded panic among Yankee fans seems to have reached ridiculous levels. (Come talk to me when the Red Sox aren't on an 11-game winning streak and maybe I'll be less forgiving.) Anyways...

THE YANKEES AREN'T TOUGH ANYMORE, by one panicked John Harper. (Yes this has been torn apart by several bloggers already. But that doesn't stop it from being insane.)

In the end, the steal of home was more than an embarrassing punctuation mark to a sweep at the hands of the Red Sox that was full of heartbreak and exasperation.

For the Yankees, it was symbolic of a weekend in which they were beaten in the cruelest of ways, three losses that leave you wondering if they are as tough as the Red Sox anymore. Is it possible that years of first-round playoff exits and then an empty October in 2008 have stolen whatever grit remained from the Joe Torre glory years?

Yes, it is possible. If that grit was still around it would mean someone never cleaned old Yankee Stadium, and their dirty standards are being kept up in the new place and...ew. Just...ew. Housekeeping aside...

You could surely make the case after the Red Sox seemed to will themselves to comeback victories on Friday and Saturday, and then the Yankees Sunday night looked like a team that had had the fight taken out of them by those stinging defeats...

Y'know, my will to win baseball games would suffer too if I had to constantly read tortured prose like this.

...Suddenly, Alex Rodriguez can't get back fast enough. Suddenly, nobody cares if he wants to kiss himself in the mirror as long as he gets Angel Berroa and his two errors Sunday night out of the lineup.

I know A-Rod is the favorite whipping boy of just about everyone (especially given the admissions of steroids), but give me a break. Why is it a bad thing that the Yankees need him to get healthy? They're are always going to be worse off with him out of the lineup because he's one of the best hitters in the game and plays a decent third base for a guy who's really a shortstop. And yes, Angel Berroa is fucking awful, but the Yankees have already gone through two third basemen so far. (Although Cody Ransom was pretty fucking awful too.) Although that being said, the Red Sox have Nick "Why The Fuck Am I A Starter" Green as a shortstop, and I'm pretty sure he's sole reason why they haven't won 15 of their last 11 games. Asshole.

Secondly if Steroid-Taking-Pansy-Rod (I'm on fire with the nicknames) is such a malignant force on team unity or whatever, wouldn't he automatically make the Yankees less tough and henceforth cause them to lose more games? Is anyone really surprised at the lack of logic here?

Suddenly, the pressure is really on CC Sabathia to shake off his April mediocrity and flex his $181 million muscles tonight in Detroit before this turns into something bigger than an early-season slap in the face.

You know who did this last night? Justin Verlander. (And Tim Wakefield, but that's another story.) At least CC didn't give the Yankees bullpen another chance to suck...

For the moment, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about these Yankees, but if you are looking for the reason this sweep looms as truly significant, it has to be the difference between the bullpens.

In the first two games of the series, the Red Sox had already established the obvious: only one of these two teams has a championship-caliber bullpen.

Statistically the Sox have the best bullpen in the majors, while the Yankees have some real issues, and that difference could wind up dictating the direction of the American League East race this season...

If you look at it, both bullpens weren't that impressive. While Delcarmen, Paplebon and Ramon Ramirez have been good, there's a precipitous and concerning drop-off after that. (Masterson hasn't been awful, but he's in the rotation now, which is where I think he belongs.) Furthermore, by what stats do the Red Sox have the best bullpen in the majors right now? Sure it's good, but I'd argue the Kansas City Royals are at least as good, if not better, and the Los Angeles Dodgers (minus Ronald Belisario) aren't that much farther behind. (Did I seriously equate the Red Sox and the Royals? There's a sentence I thought I'd never write.)

But yeah, the Yankees bullpen is awful. But that's due to their pitchers being young and terrible, not because they aren't tough. This problem certainly could be attributed to the so-called "Golden Years" of Joe Torre, in which the Yankees relied on an increasingly aged group of free-agent pick-ups to staff their bullpen. (In 2004, their last "Golden Year", the main guys coming out of the bullpen besides Rivera were Tom Gordon, Paul Quantril, and Tanyon Sturtze). Such luck couldn't continue forever, and I can't fault them for trying to home-grow a bullpen. Just too bad all those young pitchers haven't been good.

...Tell the truth: had you ever heard of Hunter Jones and Michael Bowden, the two rookies who pitched 2-2/3 scoreless innings? Did you even know that Takashi Saito, the former Dodger who closed out Sunday night's game, was in the Red Sox bullpen?

I will tell the truth: I'd heard of Hunter Jones, I was vaguely aware of Michael Bowden, and, yes, I did know Saito was in the pen, ESPECIALLY SINCE HE PITCHED IN GAME ONE OF THE SERIES. This is one of several shots taken at the so-called "B-squad" of Sox pitchers, and I'll admit that Jones and Bowden are relative unknowns, but Takashi Saito is an established major league pitcher and was part of the much-lauded low-risk bits-and-pieces moves the Sox made in the offseason. In short, the only reason to not know about Saito is just not knowing anything about baseball. Although I wouldn't be surprised if this was true of John Harper, considering how dumb this article has been already.

Maybe Ellsbury's steal of home juiced the crowd and made Pettitte look foolish, but it wasn't the decisive moment in the game. The Sox already led 2-1, and after the game Pettitte wasn't nearly as angry about the steal as he was for getting careless with an 1-2 fastball to David Ortiz that gave the Sox that lead and put Ellsbury at third.

"I had him so set up for a fastball inside that I got careless and I ran it across the plate," Pettitte said. "That pitch changed the game."

It didn't have to, but the Yankees couldn't recover. They couldn't put together any kind of offense against Justin Masterson, the reliever who has taken the injured Daisuke Matsuzaka's place in the Sox rotation, or the "B" relievers.

None of this has anything to do with toughness. And what's with the Masterson hate? He hasn't been the second coming of Pedro Martinez, but he's pitched decently well (career ERA+ of 152 and career WHIP of 1.229) in his time in the majors. Just because Masterson is young and lacking in big league experience doesn't automatically mean he can't pitch. Just because the Yankees' young arms have generally stunk so far doesn't mean the same has to be true for the other team. And it has nothing to do with toughness and everything to do with bad pitching. This stinks of an entitlement complex on the part of John Harper...

The only good news for the Yankees was the debut of Mark Melancon, whose two scoreless innings could prove significant.

With Brian Bruney on the disabled list because of an elbow injury, the Yankees are praying that Melancon, a righthander who some in the organization have been touting as Mariano Rivera's successor someday, can be a Joba-like bullpen phenom immediately for a bullpen that started the night with a 6.68 ERA.

By contrast the Boston pen leads the majors with a 2.38 ERA. Presuming that Masterson goes back to the pen at some point, the Red Sox could have the strongest and deepest relief corps in the majors...

The loss of Bruney hurts the Yankees bullpen a lot, since he was the only one not named Rivera that was pitching well. But, again, WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH TOUGHNESS? Also, ERA isn't necessarily the greatest measure of a good bullpen, just the way that batting average isn't necessarily the best way to gauge hitters. I'd also like to note that this vaunted Boston bullpen contains 3 regulars with ERAs over 4 right now (Okajima, Saito, and Javier Lopez) and that this 2.38 figure is distorted by the impossible-to-sustain-over-the-course-of-a-season awesomeness of Delcarmen and Ramirez. The sum of the whole is greater than its parts.

I will admit however, that Right now it looks like the Red Sox have a very deep pitching staff, but this has NOTHING TO DO WITH TOUGHNESS. It has everything to do with the Red Sox having a better pitchers.

Who knows, maybe the Yankees just caught the Red Sox when they were hot, and no one will remember this sweep in a couple of months.

Yes, exactly. Why are you making my points for me?

Then again, Pettitte admitted, "We know that's a really good team and they play really hard."

This is a throwaway quote. Pettitte is basically saying good teams play good baseball. And yet John Harper is staking his whole toughness assertion on this quote. You sir, fail at writing.

As a side note, you know who else plays really hard? David Eckstein. And he su...oh wait, he's not doing that badly this year. (I started that joke before I looked his stats up.)

Let's try that again.

You know who else plays really hard? Darin Erstad. He plays so hard that he used to be a punter as well as a baseball player, yet his OPS+ is currently -5.

There we go.

What was I doing? Oh right...

The Sox have a better bullpen, no question. But the troubling question that comes out of this series is simple: Are they more tough-minded, too?

Simple answer: No. The Sox just have a better bullpen, and that was the major reason for the sweep. IT'S REALLY THAT SIMPLE.

Better pitching is in no way analogous to being tougher, unless you define "tougher" as "more difficult to beat because Phillip Thaddeus Cocaine IV isn't coming out of the bullpen". (I'm still on fire with the nicknames.) You know what team had a great bullpen? The 2005 Chicago White Sox, yet Dustin Hermanson was a bed-wetter, Cliff Politte had arachibutyrophobia, and Neal Cotts threw like a girl.