ESPN.com: Yankees Acquire Fartinez

I’m predicting about 30 home runs during the remainder of 2013 and 50 next year.

Kevin Youkilis needs back surgery, out 10-12 weeks

######, NYC Tonite, Up Against The Wall

The injury hits just keep on coming for the Yankees, who announced that Kevin Youkilis needs surgery to repair a herniated disc and will be out for 10-12 weeks.

That puts Youkilis’ season in jeopardy, because 10 weeks would get him into September and any setbacks would leave him running out of time. Youkilis hit just .219 with two homers and a .648 OPS in 28 games for the Yankees after signing a one-year, $12 million deal as a free agent.

Brian Cashman Calls Hitting Coach Kevin Long’s Stance On Teixeira ‘Alarming’

As Thomas Carlyle Overbay once said: “Genius is an infinite capacity for taking painful cuts.”

Yankees general manager Brian Cashman insists he’s not angry with hitting coach Kevin Long. But Cashman didn’t too happy with him either when discussing Mark Teixeira’s wrist woes with reporters on Monday.

Long said Saturday night that he wasn’t sure if Teixeira’s right wrist “has been right” since coming off the disabled list on May 31.

“It’s alarming in the fact that K-Long would say that to the group of the reporters, but he never said that prior to that,” Cashman said. “This is a lot of times how things work out when things go bad, things get said. If K-Long felt that way he should have been saying that from Day 1, but we never heard that from K-Long.”

Long said Teixeira was having more trouble swinging from the left side of the plate. He never reported the issue to team officials or the Yankees medical staff, Cashman said.

“Am I mad at Kevin Long because of that? No,” said Cashman. “But do I think that commentary jibes with Kevin Long’s comments internally in that clubhouse regarding this player prior to him going down? Absolutely not. … If K-Long said that, he’s a monk because he kept his mouth shut the whole time.”

“Some people are better with the microphone than others,” he added. “Let’s put it that way.”

Mark Teixeira leaves 6-2 Yankees loss due to wrist trouble, to see doctor on Sunday

The hell with Teixeira’s meaningless .151/.270/.340 slash line…how are the Yankees ever going to replace his 12 RBI’s!? #francesspool

Up close, hitting coach Kevin Long harbored worry about his slugger. A staple of Teixeira’s pre-game routine involves hitting off a tee. When Teixeira attempted that practice left-handed, which places stress on the strained tendon sheath in his right wrist, he felt “discomfort,” Long said. His left-handed swing lacked “the whip and the bat speed that you see right-handed.” At times, Long said, Teixeira looked like a “shell” of himself.

“I don’t think that it’s been right since he’s been here,” Long said after a 6-2 loss to the Angels, his team’s fifth defeat in a row, a desultory afternoon turned alarming when Teixeira left the game midway through the fourth inning with what the team called an “aggravated right wrist.”

Teixeira exited the clubhouse before the game ended, bound for an appointment in New York with team doctor Chris Ahmad on Sunday. Back in March, when Teixeira first injured his wrist, Ahmad told general manager Brian Cashman there was a 30-percent chance Teixeira would need season-ending surgery if the strain failed to heal. For manager Joe Girardi, that threat never ceased, even after Teixeira returned from the disabled list on May 31.

“I’ve been concerned about it since he’s come back,” Girardi said. “Just because it was a tough injury, and you’re never sure if it’s going to hold up, or how it’s going to react.”

Added Long, “Today he had a couple of pitches where he was like ‘I should be able to crush those balls. But I’m not able to take my A-swing.’ We said at that point, you probably should come out of the game.

Madden: Fewer runs, more power relievers lead to ugly MLB marathons

Bill Madden! Elias Sports Bureau! Partridge Pattern Cords! It’s all here!

Why have extra innings, which used to be looked upon with great anticipation, instead been replaced by a sense of dread? And why are there suddenly so many of them? According to scouts and baseball execs I talked to, it starts with the gradual decrease of runs and homers since baseball instituted its ban of amphetamines in 2006.

“There’s less power in the game,” said one exec, “less examples of one swing of the bat ending the game.”

Power is down; at the same time strikeouts are way up. The Elias Bureau reports there are 2.01 homers per game this season and 15.15 strikeouts per game. In 2006, there were 2.22 homers and only 13.03 strikeouts per game.

“But that hasn’t stopped guys from swinging from their heels,” the same exec said. “The problem is, you get into extra innings, and guys who can’t hit home runs are swinging from their heels anyway and striking out. At the same time you get into the sixth or seventh inning of a tie game, with runners at first and second and nobody out, and nobody seems to bunt anymore. It’s like managers are being disrespectful to the batters to ask them to bunt.”

“There’s far less power and far more hard-throwing relievers,” said one scout. “You get in these low-scoring games, and now it seems almost every team in baseball has two-three relief pitchers who can come into a game and throw 100 mph gas for an inning and it’s a mismatch. Then, by the time you get into extra innings, look at these guys the way they’re dragging!”

Any way you look at it, the common denominator in most of these extra-inning games is a dearth of runs — which suggests that maybe baseball needs to do something drastic to rouse its fans and players out of their slumber. Yo, Bud — call off your amphetamines police!

BtBS: Phil Hughes: Baseball’s own “Jekyll and Hyde”

I’m going to broaden the study to the beginning of the 2012 season and look at a number of possible answers. Slowly, I’ll narrow down the problem areas and identify the real problem area(s).The first task was to separate Hughes’s starts into clearly defined “good” and “bad” samples, to best construct anatomies of each. I used Game Score as a quick and simple method, by excluding all starts since 2012 in which his score was between 36 and 64—roughly speaking, average starts. That leaves us with 12 “bad” starts and 10 “good” starts. [...]

Simply put, guys are making contact much more often in Hughes’s bad starts—and when they do, they’re squaring the ball up and hitting it solidly. That must mean there’s something different about the strikes Hughes is throwing. Something about his pitch selection, velocity, movement, mechanics, and/or location is distinctive when he’s pitching well. [...]

More likely, the irregularity of Hughes’s fastball release points in his bad starts results in location mistakes and/or a loss of deception in his delivery. 

YES Network: An interview with Ken Singleton

Terrific (yet clutch) interview with Singleton.

MW: I found that my personal appreciation of the game has increased exponentially as I’ve explored sabermetrics. I know there is a group of fans out there (and maybe they’re even the majority of fans) who cringe at the new age stats – can’t have the nerds ruining baseball with all their numbers! For me though, the metrics are not diminishing the game, rather they’re merely elaborating on what our eyes see. The “mystique,” if that’s what you want to call it, hasn’t disappeared at all. If anything, it’s grown substantially now that I can further appreciate more of what I see.

KS: Exactly. Exactly, Matt. But the one thing I would caution, though, is that the numbers don’t really tell you about the heart of a player. I mean, who are the real competitors? I’ve always said that when you get in the playoffs – and I like to see game sevens mind you – you see who your real players are. For example, in his last game with the Yankees, Hideki Matsui drove in six runs! He knew it was going to be his last game with the Yankees. He ended up as the MVP of the World Series back in 2009 against the Phillies. And to me, he was a very clutch player, and the Yankees miss someone like him. He was a clutch player throughout his time with the Yankees and those are the types of players I really admire and sometimes those moments can’t necessarily be captured simply.

MW: I think you may laugh at this. I’m almost certain this isn’t the best comparison. But, the first name that came to my mind – and please know I mean no offense to anyone – is Nick Swisher. For lack of a better term, I think he’s kind of a “poor man’s” version of you. His approach at the plate seems kind of similar though.

KS: [Laughs] That’s pretty good. His OBP is pretty good. Umm, nothing against Nick, but I think I was a bit more of a clutch player than him. I think my playoff record speaks to that. I see what you mean though, though my batting average was better too.

Matthews: Yankees go ‘Oh-for-Oakland’ vs. A’s

Cue the dugout camera to Kevin Long nursing his genius.

Most of all, the game was lost because of numbers like this: Mark Teixeira, 0-for-5 and four runners left stranded; Travis Hafner, 0-for-8 and seven runners left stranded; Vernon Wells, 0-for-8 with three strikeouts, and Kevin Youkilis, 0-for-7 with three strikeouts, a double play and five runners left stranded.

In fact, Teixeira, Hafner, Youkilis and Wells, the heart of the Yankees’ batting order, were a combined 0-for-28 and struck out 12 times.

“That’s a no-hitter in itself,” Teixeira said ruefully. “That’s not good.”

Neither was the entire week, in which the Yankees went “Oh-for-O-Town” and fell from 1½ games behind the Red Sox in the AL East to three games back.

Weeks like this are bound to happen to a team over the course of a season. But games like this are never supposed to happen to one player in a big-time lineup, let alone four of the most important.

“You’re probably not going to see that very often,” a sick-looking Joe Girardi said. “My guess is we probably won’t see that the rest of the year.”

...After Thursday’s loss, Long was nowhere to be found, and really, what more could he say?

The foundation upon which the Yankees offense is built this season is shattered even worse than the bats Rivera broke in the 18th inning of the most devastating loss of the season.

In short, the bats are broken, and nobody seems to know how to fix them.

Yankees’ Rivera surprises longtime A’s employee

Posing as a pizza delivery man, New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera surprised longtime Athletics employee Julie Vasconcellos by visiting her in the mail room where she has worked going on 25 years.

Posnanski: Andy Pettitte and the Van Doren Gene

600* BBWAA writers voted, but no one saw a thing.

* give or take

This, I think, was what made the Bert Blyleven-Jack Morris Hall of Fame discussion so interesting. The statistics made it abundantly clear that Blyleven was not just a better pitcher than Morris but light years better. But Blyleven just doesn’t have the Van Doren Gene … and Morris does. And so the debate over which pitcher was better raged on; in some quarters it rages on still. People don’t just see Morris as a Hall of Famer. They WANT to see Morris as a Hall of Famer.

So Morris’ unassuming 3.90 ERA, which would normally be a Hall of Fame disqualifier (no pitcher with that high an ERA is in the Hall) has been sheltered inside a “Runs did not matter to Morris, winning did” blanket. His lack of a Cy Young Award—which was used to bludgeon Blyleven repeatedly, not to mention Tommy John and Jim Kaat and Luis Tiant and numerous others—was refashioned as an admirable “individual awards never meant anything to Morris” quality. His 1.78 strikeout to walk ratio—which is 161st among pitchers with 2,000-plus innings—has been buried well below his 175 complete games and the number of Opening Days he started and his Game 7 performance in the 1991 World Series and other cheerier topics.

I’m not arguing Morris here—done that enough already—but merely making the point that people want to think the best of him … and if hey did not he would have gotten 3.1% of the ballot first time out and disappeared from the ballot and the conversation. Instead, he might get inducted into the Hall of Fame next year.

Andy Pettitte, it seems to me, has the Van Doren Gene. He might have two of them.

...We want to think the best of him. Everybody does. People seem to see Pettitte as a generally honest and minor character in baseball’s PED scandal. Ask a moderate baseball fan who was named in the Mitchell Report—Sammy Sosa or Andy Pettitte? I’m thinking most will say Sosa, which is the wrong answer. Ask any baseball fan which pitcher denied using HGH, admitted using only twice but never more, admitted later than he actually used it another time, and I suspect Pettitte will not be the first guess.

Silva: Did Pettitte’s 250 Lock Him for Hall of Fame?

I accept responsibility for those two uhh three uhhh four uhhhh five days.

Andy Pettitte locked up his 250th career win this past weekend against the Mariners. It now could be said the win also locked up his Hall of Fame candidacy, something that many thought was dead and buried after his retirement in 2010.

The naysayers will point out how Pettitte is the anti-Hall of Famer. He is good, not great. He is more a model of consistency than dominance. You could even point out the advantages he’s enjoyed playing with the best closer in the history of the game, as well as the Yankees’ resources. Although all are fair points I don’t believe you punish players for good fortune.

Wins have become the worst barometer for success in the modern sabermetric world. Jack Morris‘ entire HOF candidacy is viewed more on wins, which aren’t controllable, and anecdotes instead of the consistency he enjoyed during the 80s. Pettitte falls into a similar category except his performance north of 30 has dwarfed anything achieved by Morris. You could argue that Pettitte is a better pitcher today at 41 than during his mid-twenties.

...Some are waiting for their turn (Maddux, Glavine and Johnson); while others (Clemens) have to hope the voters forget about their PED transgressions. Moyer, John and Kaat have unique careers that are more models of aging well than consistency. Morris may get in with the Veterans Committee since the sabermetricians have made him a sacrificial lamb for their movement. Its possible Mussina is the only “non-lock” that has a legitimate case for the Hall. I probably would have voted for Moose even before his final season in which he won 20 games. With that said, if Mussina is a Hall of Famer then Pettitte should be one, as well.

...There is the possibility Pettitte’s admission to using HgH will factor into his candidacy. He handled that scenario with honesty and class, the antithesis of what you saw with Clemens, Sosa and McGwire. If anything it may have endeared him to the voters more than before.

Japanese Team Expressed Interest In A-Rod During Offseason

A-Rodzilla?

Apparently there was a team interested in acquiring Alex Rodriguez during the offseason, prior to the Yankees disclosing his hip injury and long before the Biogenesis scandal.

Japan’s Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks contacted the Yankees “through an intermediary” in November to express an “interest in obtaining” A-Rod, according to the New York Times.

New York chose not to return serve due to Rodriguez’s injury, which likely would have ended talks right then and there, the Times reported. The Yankees announced on Dec. 3 that A-Rod required surgery to repair a torn labrum in his hip and would miss at least half of the 2013 season.

The team also “knew there was no chance” A-Rod would go along with a move to Japan, the Times reported.

Ian Clarkin sorry for Yanks comments

After saying he “cannot stand” the New York Yankees in a pre-draft video, Yankees first-round pick Ian Clarkin used his first comments to the New York media to say he was sorry.

I really wonder if players play better for a team they grew up rooting for or worse for a team they grew up rooting against. It seems like there could be a psychological factor there.

NY Post: Sherman: Yankees have missed out on drafting stars

Because the easiest way to obtain a young star is to do so high in the draft. But tomorrow — for the 20th straight year — the Yankees will not have a pick in the top half of the first round of the MLB draft. In fact, in the past two decades the highest the Yankees have picked is 17th. Usually, it is in the 20s, sometimes in the 30s and in two extreme cases not until the 51st and 71st selections (with that 71st pick they took current Browns quarterback Brandon Weeden in 2002 as the next-to-last pick of a second round that included Joey Votto, Jon Lester, Brian McCann and Jonathan Broxton).This is what happens when you win 90-plus games consistently and sign free agents that cost draft-pick compensation.  The last time the Yankees had a top-10 pick was 1992 and they took a fella named Jeter with the sixth selection. [...]

Again, this is not to alibi for the Yankees. They have not done well in the first round aside from Eric Milton (1996, 20th pick), Phil Hughes (2004, 23rd pick), and Ian Kennedy and Joba Chamberlain (the 21st and 41st picks in 2006). In their worst miss, with that 17th pick in 2005, the Yankees took C.J. Henry, and behind them — before the first round was done — the Red Sox snagged Jacoby Ellsbury, Clay Buchholz and Jed Lowrie.In perhaps the most delicious what-if, the Yankees had three first-round picks in 2001, two of them before the Mets selected 38th. The Yankees took John-Ford Griffin 23rd and Bronson Sardinha 34th, and the Mets took David Wright 38th.

Murti: Benefit Of The Doubt? A-Rod Doesn’t Deserve It

When you lose Sweeny Murti…well…

These are the first three paragraphs of a Sports Illustrated cover story by Gerry Callahan in the July 8, 1996 issue:

  In the off-season he lives with his mother, Lourdes Navarro, and shares a bedroom with his best friend, a three-year-old German shepherd named Ripper. He plays golf each morning and hoops each evening, and by 10 p.m. he is nestled in bed with his Nintendo control pad. He makes Roy Hobbs look like John Kruk, and he makes you wonder if you’re missing something: A guy this sweet has to be hiding some cavities.

  On July 27, Alex Rodriguez will turn 21, making him old enough to have a beer with his Seattle Mariners teammates. He says he’s not interested. “Can’t stand the taste,” he says. Rodriguez has always felt more at home among milk drinkers.

  He grew up in the Miami suburb of Kendall with a poster of Cal Ripken Jr. over his bed and number 3 on the back of his baseball uniform, tribute to another of his idols, former Atlanta Braves star Dale Murphy. “My mom always said, ‘I don’t care if you turn out to be a terrible ballplayer, I just want you to be a good person,” says Rodriguez. “That’s the most important thing to me. Like Cal or Dale Murphy, I want people to look at me and say, ‘He’s a good person.’ “

No, it’s not even comical.  It’s absurd.  Dale Murphy? Murphy has more integrity and goodness in his pinky than A-Rod does in his whole body.  He was supposed to be the face of everything that was good in baseball, and now he is the exact opposite.

Remember, it was A-Rod who—after his teary admission of previous steroid use in 2009—asked us to judge him from that day forward.  He was being given a chance to write the final chapter of his baseball legacy.  Well, now we know how that final chapter reads, don’t we?

...Bottom line is this—A-Rod will no longer be considered among the greatest players ever, and he will not be in the Hall of Fame, as a Yankee or anything else.

Alex Rodriguez issues statement

Just as Jason Keidel issued his! “Have Any Dignity Left, A-Rod? Retire Today And Don’t Come Back”

Alex Rodriguez said Thursday he is not ready to talk about the alleged connection between him and the founder of a Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal in Major League Baseball.

“Myself and others are being mentioned in a media report before the process is even concluded,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “I would hope this thing would follow the guidelines of our Basic Agreement. I will monitor the situation and comment when appropriate.

“As I have said previously, I am working out every day to get back on the field and help the Yankees win a championship. I am down here doing my job and working hard and will continue to do so until I’m back playing.”

MLB: Ichiro embraces magnitude of 4,000 hits

Ichiro Suzuki is about to join the pantheon of the baseball gods on a statistical plateau only two other players have passed: 4,000 hits.

Including his infield single in the Yankees’ 6-4 victory over the Indians on Wednesday at Yankee Stadium, Ichiro needs only 67 to match that lofty level.

Considering his legendary durability, it will happen sometime during the months ahead, certainly before the end of the season. True, Ichiro gets there by combining the hits he accumulated playing for Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan. But it’s a major feat nonetheless.

“Today I’m not thinking about that,” the Yankees outfielder told MLB.com the other day through his latest interpreter, Allen Turner. “I’ve come to this point by doing it this way: day to day, every day. If I could get [67] hits in three or four days, I’d think about it. But it’s still a little bit too far out to be thinking about that.”

...As an active player, he is treated to visits inside the museum’s refrigerated basement archives, where many of the Hall’s most cherished artifacts are kept. The mystique of the Hall keeps drawing him back, he said.

“When you go and see all the equipment those guys used back then, you know we’re blessed with the stuff we have today,” Ichiro said. “You only begin to understand how different the game might have been. I’m shocked and amazed at that alone. For example, I was able to see the equipment used by George Sisler. It’s impossible to believe that he put up those numbers with that equipment.

“Because of that record and those numbers, I was able to go and feel that connection with him. Those are the reasons I constantly go back.”

Thanks to VB.

Al Leiter, ex-Yankees and Mets pitcher, ‘interested’ in Lautenberg’s senate seat

Good, out with the righty lefty…and in with the lefty righty David Cone!

Could Al Leiter be a potential name on the long list of possible replacements for the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg? The ex-pitcher said he’d be interested.

Leiter was listed by Philadelphia Inquirer’s Matt Katz as an “outside the box wildcard” earlier this week. When the former hurler was asked by ESPNNewYork’s Andrew Marchand yesterday about it, he responded, “Who wouldn’t be interested if the governor of your state for whatever reason of their due process thought [you were] worthy, in their opinion? So, yeah, I would be interested.”

After a career that included a dazzling performance in the Mets’ 1999 one-game playoff win against the Reds and his bullpen work for the Yankees in the 2005 postseason, the Toms River native became involved in politics, as this PolitickerNJ article from 2007 pointed out. He helped campaign for various candidates including George W. Bush and Michael Bloomberg.

While working as an announcer for the YES and MLB networks, he’s also worked closely with Chris Christie—he was a member of the governor’s transition team and, as his bio said, he was appointed by Christie to the New Jersey Hall of Fame Advisory Commission and placed on the board of the New Jersey Hurricane Sandy Relief Fund last year.

Madden: Putting Overbay in right field shows just how desperate struggling Yankees have gotten

But right now what troubles the Yankees and their high command has nothing to do with A-Rod. Rather, it is everything that was troublesome for them back in March when they faced the season with an aging team that was seemingly breaking down everywhere. The loss of Curtis Granderson for the second time, combined with Vernon Wells’ prolonged May slump has opened up the new hole in right field that, against the Indians’ right-handed ace, Justin Masterson, Joe Girardi elected to fill with Overbay. That Brennan Boesch, a left-handed hitter like Overbay and an accomplished right fielder who had gone 4-for-7 with a homer and two RBI on the current homestand, was sacrificed to the minors to make room for Monday night’s starter, Andy Pettitte, spoke loudly to the Yankees’ distrust in Teixeira’s wrist remaining sound.

“We feel a need to be a little creative here because of all the injuries,” Girardi explained. “It’s a small ballpark and I don’t feel you need to be a Gold Glove to play right field here.”

Small ballpark? Wait…the Yankees swore the dimensions were exactly the same as old Yankee Stadium.

Indeed, Overbay sounded as surprised as anyone to be told to start shagging flies. It was either that or go back on the unemployment line and, happily, his first game in unfamiliar territory was uneventful.

“They told me they needed me to be versatile or not be here. They needed me to play the outfield,” said Overbay, who went 1-for-3 with a walk. “That’s why I got released in Pittsburgh and Boston — because I lacked versatility.”

But these are desperate times in the Bronx right now — in which the Yankees currently have no other recourse but to force versatility upon him.

DallasNews chat: A-Rod an “insufferable human being,” “completely phony.”

Flink: People here seem to hate Josh Hamilton. That replaces Alex Rodriguez, who also put up huge numbers for fans here only to get booed mercifully. Is this an odd current phenomenon?

Tim Cowlinshaw: The booing for A-Rod and for Josh exists for very different reasons. With A-Rod, it’s entirely with his persona. He’s really an insufferable human being and, in many cases, completely phony. Josh is not that. Josh is honest. Josh speaks from the hip. He doesn’t measure his words and he certainly doesn’t overthink things. ... There’s nothing unfair about the booing of Josh here as long as they don’t throw things.

At least Hamilton didn’t call the Rangers “Me and 24 kids” on his way out of town.

The 111-Year-Old Yankees Fan Is Probably Lying About His Age

Just another phoney dimension of the Trost/Levine regime.

It was the ultimate photo op: Derek Jeter, the face of the Yankees, meeting Bernando LaPallo, who at 111 years old would be older than than Yankees franchise itself. Like every other good thing, it’s probably not true. LaPallo’s age is very much in dispute, and he’s been accused of lying about it to sell books.

LaPallo met with Jeter and Joe Girardi before Saturday’s game, and regaled reporters with tales of attending New York Highlanders games at Hilltop Park, which closed in 1912. He spoke of meeting Babe Ruth:

  “I shook his hand and he said, ‘My greatest admirer, my youngest admirer,’” LaPallo said. “I remember that like yesterday.”

(Why Ruth, who made his major league debut in 1914 and joined the Yankees in 1920, would have called a teenager or 20-something his “youngest admirer” isn’t clear.)

A day after the story made the rounds, a researcher who specializes in validating the birthdates of supercentenarians, or people over 110 years old, came forward to point out that LaPallo likely isn’t a day over 103.

Robert Young of the Gerontology Research Group says public records show LaPallo was born in 1910 instead of 1901. “Many extreme age claims in the past have turned out to be false,’’ Young, who verifies ages for Guinness World Records, told the Associated Press.

Thunder Scares Yankees, Red Sox Players During Rain-Shortened Game

Thunderclap NEWMAN! (But hear me and hear me well!)

The players in the Yankees’ and Red Sox’ dugouts may be on opposite sides of a historic rivalry but they have at least one thing in common: Thunder is scary.

With a storm having sent the players to their respective dugouts during a rain delay at Yankee Stadium on Sunday night, both teams were startled by a loud boom of thunder in the Bronx. ESPN cameras showed the reactions of players in both dugouts, notably New York’s Brett Gardner and Boston’s Jarrod Saltalamacchia.

Led by the Boston catcher, a few Red Sox players immediately darted to the locker room.

Torrid April start distant memory for slumping Vernon Wells

I guess there’s a little Francoeur in every hitter.

After going hitless again in the Yankees’ 11-1 loss to the Red Sox at the Stadium, Wells is just six for his last 48, dropping his average to .253.

“I just have to ride it out,” Wells said, who went 0-for-4. “I know I can get back to where I was that first month or so, I just have to get back to it.”

Sounds simple, but for a player coming off two horrendous seasons with the Angels, it’s hard to think his April production will be seen again anytime soon.

“I don’t remember what happened the last couple of years, to be honest with you,” Wells said with a wry smile. “I don’t remember the bad stuff. You learn from it and move on. It’s in the past. The last thing I’m going to do is panic. I have no doubt what I did earlier in the season wasn’t a fluke.”

Wells has looked at video and said the only difference between when he hit 10 homers by May 15 and his current slump is a lack of execution.

“Everything looks pretty much the same,” Wells said. “I’m just not squaring the ball up now.”

Assault at Orioles game sends man to intensive care, police say

Matt Fortese came 75 miles from Hagerstown to meet Taylor Queen at Camden Yards. She drove more than three hours from Virginia. Their second date was going well, Queen said, until an hour of taunting from two fans boiled over into an altercation that left Fortese fighting for his life.

Fortese, a lifelong Yankees fan who wore his team’s cap to Wednesday’s game, suffered severe head trauma and a skull fracture. He was listed in serious condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center Saturday. Police said they had arrested two men in the incident.

At the hospital, Fortese’s family and Queen recounted the ordeal — and a chance encounter with a childhood friend who they said helped save the 25-year-old man’s life.

By the fifth or sixth inning of the matchup with the Washington Nationals, the couple had endured about an hour of heckling, mostly about Fortese’s hat, from two men sitting a section above them, said Queen, 21. Then one of the men threw a beer that hit the couple, according to police, and when Fortese approached the men and began arguing with them, one punched him in the head.

The blow sent Fortese over a railing and onto the concrete about five feet below.

Two men — Gregory Fleischman, 22, of Jarrettsville, and Michael Bell, 21, of Annapolis — were charged in the attack.

Police said Fleischman punched Fortese.

Fortese’s brother, Jimmy, said the family is devastated.

“It’s very serious,” Jimmy Fortese, 30, said. “They’re not saying he’s out of the woods yet. They tell us we have to wait and see.”

NY Times: A Mets Fan for Life, and a Deliriously Happy One for a Week

After the Mets’ first two victories, I received an e-mail from a good friend, Peter Kurz, who lives in Israel, where he has become the secretary general of the Israel Association of Baseball. Decades ago, Kurz and I played catch at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park in Manhattan, my imagined Tom Seaver to his imagined Jerry Grote.

“To all those Yankee fans who are crying this morning into their cereal,” Kurz e-mailed, “and to all those Met fans who are now on Mount Everest at least for the next 12 hours before the Mets collapse once again, beating the great Mariano and the Evil Empire could not be sweeter.”