Ok, I know I said I was done with Simmons, heretoforth known by his initials as well as the type of garbage he prints, but someone emailed this to me. Basically it was the equivalent of the fan swiping at Sheffield: to provoke me and get some kind of rise out of me. Nice. Which it did, of course, because I think I've gone insane. I'm like Chris, that guy on the Apprentice who gets all sorts of huffy and apopletic if someone so much as drinks the last of the Powerade. So yes, this did get me pissed off. Now the Yankees are getting railed for not starting fights?? This is lunacy. Plain and simple.

They can't win. If Jeter had charged the mound after getting hit with a pitch, you know what all the Boston fans would be saying?

"THIS JUST PROVES HE'S A PHONY, AND HE'S NOT REALLY IMMORTAL! IT WAS ALL JUST AN ACT. YANKEES SUCK."

No, he shakes it off. I guess BS's friend Jack-o wants some more bench-clearers, but I love the Yankees just as they are. They're not pussies. It'd be like BS going up to Tom Wolfe and wildly flapping his arms about how Tom Wolfe can't write for sh*t, and then BS knocking over Wolfe's bookcase so that it falls on top of him. Bestsellers flying everywhere. Do you think Tom Wolfe would retaliate against a writer for ESPN?

The Yankees won't knock over any bookcases.

They know that the Red Sox are beneath them.

****

Last night's incident also played into something larger that's happening with this rivalry. The Red Sox keep pushing this Yankees team around, whether it's fans popping right fielders at Fenway, Jeter getting plunked in the helmet for the umpteenth time, Red Sox players calling out A-Rod during spring training, Varitek nailing A-Rod in the chops or whatever ... and the Yankees keep taking the high road and not sticking up fot themselves. According to one of my editors, the Red Sox have plunked 68 Yankee batters since the start of the 2001 season (compared to just 36 Boston batters hit by Yankee pitchers), including a 5-2 advantage this season. Talking to my buddy last night, I joked how the way the Sox keep throwing at Jeter (intentional or unintentional) is vaguely reminscent of the way Cobra Kai kept going after Daniel-San, to the point I keep waiting for Mike Timlin to scream at him during batting practice, "What's the matter, Derek, Mommy not hear to dress ya?"

"I'm so tired of taking the high road," Jack-O complained. "This team has no [euphemism for something that guys have that girls don't have]. We're a bunch of [euphemism for something that you could also call a group of cats]. Seriously, how many times does Jeter have to be hit? Even tonight, Ortiz is leaning right over the plate and the Unit doesn't even dust him off. I'm embarrassed to root for these guys."

That raises a larger question: Where the hell is Steinbrenner during all of this? Twenty years ago, if Rivera didn't throw at someone after Jeter got nailed in the helmet, he would have questioned Rivera's manhood AND fired the pitching coach. Now his team has been bullied for a solid year, with no repercussions, and we're only six months removed from the greatest choke job in sports history. I'm really starting to wonder if George is in a nursing home somewhere and nobody has broken the story yet.