So that was a good one to win, eh? Darrell Rasner continues to impress; the offense continues to plate runs — although Robinson Cano should have taken a strike with the bases loaded and one out in the first before hacking away; Mariano continues to just get outs. He’s a machine. The only damper on the game was Wilson Betemit’s injury. The Former Attorney General will be back in the Bronx in no time.

Meanwhile, while the Yanks need to call up Alberto Gonzalez so they have a backup infielder, the Yanks once again find themselves in a situation where they could call up Ian Kennedy early and juggle the rotation to have him start against Tampa. They could dispatch Kei Igawa to AAA and call up Bernie Castro or Nick Green to backup the infield until A-Rod comes off the DL this week. I know the Yanks want Kennedy to get more work in at AAA, but they can’t really have Igawa make another start, can they?

If Kei Igawa never starts a game for the Yankees again, I will be a happy man.

“Good one to win.”

That’s what the e-mail from my dad said a few minutes after Mariano Rivera and the Yanks sealed the deal on their crisp two-hour thirty-three-minute victory over the Indians. Once again, the Yanks are at .500, and now they embark on a road trip to Detroit and Tampa Bay before facing a Mets team also playing below expectations.

Today’s game was a complete win. The Yanks offense powered four home runs as they scored, and Robinson Cano continues to show signs that he’s snapping out of his season-long slump. He’s three for his last six with a double and a home run. The beleaguered Jason Giambi added an upper-deck blast, his third of the season off of Paul Byrd, and Johnny Damon and Wilson Betemit added solo shots.

On the pitching front, Mike Mussina threw four strong innings before a hit batter and a few hits brought the Indians back into the game. But he emerged, at his magic 86-pitch limit, with a win to improve to 5-3 on the season. His 4.36 ERA is far beyond my expectations for him.

While Ross Ohlendorf and Joba Chamberlain combined for three scoreless innings, the game ended as it should. Mariano Rivera nailed down the save. It took him four batters this time, and he’s now given up five hits on the season.

Let’s stop, though, for a second and appreciate Mariano Rivera. The Sandman has now appeared in 13 games this season. In 14 innings, he’s given up 5 hits and no walks while striking out 12. He has saved all 9 of his save opportunities. And oh, yeah, he’s 38 years old. Right now, opponents are hitting .104 off of Rivera.

Every season as Rivera gets older, I’ve wondered if he can keep this up forever. Will this finally be the season that Rivera starts to return to Earth? While last year, he struggled early, and I thought we may finally be seeing that decline, he finished ridiculously strong in 2007 and looks better than he’s ever looked in 2008. He’s throwing his fastballs around 93-95 with perfect accuracy and immaculate mechanics.

Right now, Rivera is the Yankee I most look forward to play in a game. The Yanks have at least three sure-fire Hall of Famers on their team in Rivera, A-Rod and Derek Jeter. A-Rod can change a game with one swing; Jeter has a legitimate shot at a top five slot on the all-time hits list. But Mariano Rivera just goes out and does his job with a ruthless efficiency game in and game out.

At some point this year, Mariano Rivera may walk a batter. He may give up more than one hit every four innings, and some team may even manage to push across a run or cause him to blow a save. But who cares? He’s Mariano, and he’s just flat-out amazing.

One day, I’ll understand how Cliff Lee has managed to start the season 6-0 with an ERA of 0.81. I’ll one day understand how opposing hitters have managed just 25 hits off Lee in 44.1 innings. I know the walks are key; he has issued only two this year. But his stuff just doesn’t scream out untouchable success.

Tonight, I watched from the third deck as Cliff Lee put on something of a strike-throwing clinic. He threw 103 pitches, 76 of them for strikes, and the Yanks found themselves in few three-ball counts tonight. What he did, though, was to keep the Yankeess off balance by changing speeds. None of his stuff is overpowering; his pitches range from about 79 to 92 miles per hour. But he pounded the zone and kept the Yankees hitters guessing.

Or at least, I think that’s what he did. Part of me thinks that the Yanks probably should have crushed Cliff Lee. But the unstoppable force that is Cliff Lee just keeps rolling along. On a night like tonight, you just have to tip your cap to Lee and hope that the Yanks end their 14-inning scoreless drought early in this afternoon’s game.

Now, instead of dwelling further on this loss, let me regale you with a tale from the stadium tonight. Every night, after the second inning or so, a lucky fan gets to answer a fairly easy Yankee trivia question on the DiamondVision screen. It’s long been my family’s theory that the people with the giant cards and the announcer do everything in their power to make sure the contestant gets the answer right. For example, on Ron Guidry Day, Ron Guidry was probably the answer to the trivia question. Other times, the announcer will go, “Is it A, Beeeeeeeeeeeee, C or D?” drawing out the B to the point of absurdity.

Tonight’s trivia question: Who threw the last Yankee perfect game? Was it: A. David Wells; B. David Cone; C. Don Larsen; or D. Jim Abbott? The scoreboard announcer then noted that, as a hint, the answer was in the stadium, and then they flashed on David Cone sitting in the YES broadcast booth.

The contestant picked the card for A. Not only would any fan know that David Cone’s perfect game in 1999 was more recent than Wells’ 1998 effort, but anyone with half a brain could have made the visual connection between David Cone in the broadcast booth and the picture of David Cone on the scoreboard.

When the contestant go it wrong — and it takes some skill to actually get the answer wrong — the scoreboard announcer seemed a little shocked. He amusingly urged the guy to get glasses and thanked him for playing. As the crowd booed the clueless for getting the answer wrong, I laughed at the absurdity of it all. It was one funny moment during an otherwise dreary performance by the Yankee offense.

The Indians really seem to have Joba’s number. Two of his three career blown saves have come against Cleveland, and he’s surrendered more runs to the Indians than to any other team. While Joba now leads the Yanks in blown saves, we can’t exactly blame the midges for this one.

Instead tonight, we can look at the game one of two ways. The first way is the “c’est la vie” approach to baseball. Joba’s giving up a game-changing home run was bound to happen sooner or later, and as Peter Abraham wrote, the kid’s been fantastic so far. That bad night just so happened to be tonight. That home run doesn’t diminish his accomplishments so far, and he’s still one hell of a pitcher.

Through that lens, the game of baseball takes center stage. Joba threw a fastball, and Dave Delucci beat him on his best pitch. You tip your cap to that. Through the other lens however, we can sit here behind our computer screens and keyboards and second-guess the hell out of this one.

In this light, Joba is certainly the one to shoulder the blame for the loss. But Joe Girardi could draw some negative credit too. One could criticize Girardi for keeping Joba on the bench since May 2. Prior to tonight, he had thrown just one inning since April 28, and Joba is used to getting the regular work of a starter. Maybe he was shaky because he hadn’t thrown much later, but who really knows?

So when a one-run lead rolled around, Joba was less than sharp. Prior to the big three-run blow, he had given up a hit and a walk, and he had uncharacteristically thrown more balls than strikes. As he put it, “I was just kind of out of whack out there. You’re not always going to be perfect.”

So with two on and two out in the bottom of the 8th of a one-run game and the middle of the lineup, albeit in the form of a pinch hitter, at bat, the time was ripe for the Yankee manager to turn the game over to the best closer of all time. Joba didn’t have it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If ever there was a tense save situation, it was then.

To further this second-guess to end all second guesses is the fact that Joba, for all the hype and attention, has thrown just 125 professional innings and 88 of those were at the Minor League level. He is, in other words, a rookie. Yes, he is a rookie filled with poise and facing the prospects of a very bright career, but he is a rookie nonetheless. Had Kyle Farnsworth been on the mound in the same situation, Rivera would have entered the game in the eighth.

But Joba is Joba, and he carries around a reputation of invincibility. He had yet to give up a run at Yankee Stadium, and there was no reason to think that Dave Delucci would be the one to get to him. He had thrived in these situations before, and logic would dictate keeping him in.

But fate has a funny way of intervening. Things unfolded as they did; Dave Delucci hit that home run; and the Yanks went home losers with Joba bearing the weight of a costly blown save and a loss. Chalk that one up to fate or chalk it up to a huge second guess. Either way, that was a tough one to lose, and it’s really easy to argue that Joe Girardi was faced with a possible/impossible situation. Either choice could be the right one, and either choice could be the wrong one. It’s just not fair to second-guess this one much.

Meanwhile, the Yanks are right back at .500 with Cliff Lee and his 0.94 ERA on tap later today. But as we all know, it’s still early.

A few hours after I got home from the Bronx, I was talking to my mom about the game. It was, we decided, one of the nicer days at Yankee Stadium. The weather was perfect; the game was fast and crisp; and, of course, the Yankees won. It was, in other words, a day on which I could easily imagine Ernie Banks waking up, stepping outside and saying, “Let’s play two.”

Sadly, for the Yanks, two against the Mariners was not in the cards today. They had to settle for one win and their first three-game sweep of the season. The Yanks now find themselves in second place at 17-16, three games behind the Red Sox for the AL East lead and two back of Oakland for that fourth playoff spot.

The good news for this weekend was the emergence of the Yankee offense. During the three-game set, the Yanks scored 19 runs and banged out 27 hits. With three solid outings from Chien-Ming Wang, Mike Mussina and Darrell Rasner, this weekend’s sweep came easy to the Yankees. It was baseball as it should be in the Bronx, and everything was ok.

The offensive started, as it should, with the top of the order. After racking up 10 hits on Saturday, the Yanks’ one through four hitters dialed it up to 11 on Sunday. Over the last two days, Johnny Damon, Derek Jeter, Bobby Abreu and Hideki Matsui are a combined 21 for 37 with 11 runs scored and nine RBIs. The table-setters are setting the table, and the clean-up crew is cleaning up. While the top of the lineup won’t hit .568 all season, it certainly makes for an easy baseball game when they do.

On the other side of the ball, Darrell Rasner was everything the Yanks expected him to be and more. He got off to a rocky start, giving up a two-run home run in the first, but that would be all the Mariners would muster against the 27-year-old. Rasner threw two-thirds of his pitches for strikes and didn’t walk anyone. He also managed to keep his pitch count low, throwing just 76 pitches through six innings. Ian Kennedy should take a lesson.

And that brings me to my one and only nitpick of the game. Why did Joe Girardi opt to remove Rasner from the game after six innings? Rasner hadn’t thrown a game in a few days, and he’s a 27-year-old. He was rolling, and he could have thrown at least another inning and maybe two. It seemed like knee-jerk management to me: Have your starter throw six good innings, and then turn things over to the bullpen.

In my book, if your starter is rolling through six innings with a six-run lead and his pitch count is at 76, just keep him in. It’s far better to go with the known — Rasner’s command — than the unknown coming out of the Yankee bullpen. (To take this one step further, the Yanks could have used Joba to throw the last two innings today to stretch him out. They have an off-day tomorrow, and he really has to start making some multiple-inning appearances.)

But that complaint is small beans. The Yanks won decisively; they got a good start from someone other than Wang or Mussina; and the bats seem to have woken up from their early-season slumbers. The Cliff Lee 0.96 ERA buzzsaw comes to town on Tuesday, but we’ll worry about then. For now, let’s just enjoy the sweep and hope for more days of solid baseball under the sun this spring.

A short wrap-up for you because I’m heading off to the new beer garden in Prospect Heights: Mike Mussina is thriving this year not because he’s a better pitcher but because he’s pitching better. It’s a subtle difference, but what we’re seeing this year is a clinic in pitching by an old master who many of us — including me — had written off. Mike Mussina has learned how to use his killer breaking pitches and the “slow, slower, slowest” approach to set up an average fastball. His striking out the side in the sixth was masterful.

So now, over his last three starts, Mussina has given the Yankees 18 innings. He’s allowed 18 hits while walking just two batters and striking out 10. He’s 3-0 over that span, and his ERA is 2.50. I, for one, am enjoying the career resurgence of Mussina, and I’m happy to see that I was wrong in calling him a dead Moose a little under a month ago.

When Chien-Ming Wang first arrived in the Bronx, it was clear from the start that Wang had the stuff to be successful. Throughout his first three seasons in the Bigs, we grew to know and love that heavy sinker and Wang’s stellar groundball rate. But something’s changed this year, and it’s for the better.

This year, as we’ve seen over Wang’s first seven starts, the right-hander — once so reliant on his sinker to get outs — has picked up a few stellar secondary pitches and has learned how to pitch in a way that lets him dominate a game. Look at his numbers: On the season, Wang has thrown 45 innings, and he’s 6-0 with a 3.00 ERA, and over his last three outings, he’s given up 4 earned runs on 17 hits in 19 innings.

Of the numbers, the most important one to me is Wang’s strike out rate. In the early going this year, Wang’s K totals are well above his career norm. Over his last 19 innings, he’s struck out 19 batters, and on the season, he is average 6.40 Ks per 9 IP. With his normally stellar walk rate, his K/BB is now 2.46.

For the last few years, stats-minded analysts have blown their collective gaskets trying to figure out the success of Chien-Ming Wang, and were it not for my seeing him pitch every five days, I’d be right there with them. How did a guy with a career K/9 IP of under 4.00 prior to this year find a way to win more games in the Majors than anyone else over two years while keeping his ERA under 4.00? It didn’t make sense.

Now, we all know that Wang’s non-traditional success came via those groundballs. When he is on, he can command a double play at will, and Major League hitters look foolish topping his pitches. This year, though, with sliders, sinkers, fastballs and a few change ups, Wang has upped his pitching in a way that cements his status as the Yankee ace. He’s keeping runners off base, and he’s keeping balls out of play. That is a sure recipe for success.

As we all know — and as Hank Steinbrenner reminded us tonight — the Yankees have had a tough go of it lately. They’re one game under .500, and the offense isn’t doing much of anything right now. But every five days, Wang takes the mound, and it’s a beacon of very bright light every day. Watching a pitcher put everything together is a real pleasure, and Wang is living the dream. He will lose a few games this season, and he’s facing Cliff Lee and his sub-1.00 ERA next week. But it’s been quite the roll for a pitcher who almost ended up signing with the Mariners seven years ago.

A composite shot of the new stadium taken on Wednesday evening from the left field entrance to the tier level in Yankee Stadium. Click the image for a bigger version. (Photo by Ben K.)

In all of my years going to games at Yankee Stadium and watching the Yanks play, through thick and thin, from Jack Clark to Alvaro Espinoza and Bob Geren to Derek Jeter and A-Rod, I have rarely seen the Yankees play as flat as they did tonight. The offensive was downright terrible.

After loading the bases with no outs in the first, it looked like the Yankee bats may finally be ready to wake up. The middle of the order — sans A-Rod — was up, and it was time to knock the struggling Jeremy Bonderman out of the game. The Yanks emerged from the inning up 2-0, but it certainly seemed like they should have gotten more.

After two innings, the Yanks had Bonderman at 42 pitches, and it seemed like a matter of time before the offense would put together a few more hits. Little did we know those two runs would be it for the Yankees as their offense eked out just two more hits the whole rest of the way. Bonderman threw just 58 pitches over his last 5.2 innings of work, and the Yanks managed just two more singles. They took weak hacks and did nothing. Sad, sad, sad.

On the other side of the ball, Andy Pettitte was rolling until the fifth. A Marcus Thames home run just out of the reach of Johnny Damon and, an inning later, a Placido Polanco solo shot gave Andy an ugly five earned runs in six innings. He fell to 3-3 with a 3.93 and 0-2 over his last two outings. He’s given up four home runs and nine earned runs over his last 11 innings pitched against the Indians and Tigers. Ouch.

Meanwhile, despite a few raised eyebrows, Phil Hughes’ injury is a real one, according to Kat O’Brien. That explains his poor performance on Tuesday, and this oblique injury could shelve him for six weeks.

Anyway, instead of dwelling on an ugly loss that caps off a losing April and the current spate of injuries, let’s look at photos of the new stadium that I’ve taken over the first month of the season. The full set of 32 shots is here on flickr. Select highlights are bulleted below:

• The front of the new stadium looks really good.
• The right field entrance is getting its own gold lettering. On Wednesday, it said “ANKEE ADIUM.” I guess they were some panels short when the bell rang.
• Two weeks ago, that same entrance looked far from completion, and on April 6, it was simply a metal frame.
• At night, the new stadium really looms over the 4 platform.

It went a little bit something like this: infield single, infield single, line drive single, HBP, ground out, ground out, infield single. And all of a sudden, the Yanks had a 4-2 lead. They wouldn’t look back.

Behind another solid outing by Mike Mussina, the Yanks salvaged a split of their four-game trip to Cleveland. Moose worked his way through five innings, and what we saw today is what we’ll get from Mussina. He tired around 85 pitches; he gave up 7 hits; he struck out just two. But he kept the Yankees in the game.

As long as Mussina’s not throwing against the elite offenses, he seems to be a good back-end starter for the Yanks. He’s 3-3 with a 4.72 ERA, and I’ll be happy if he can keep that ERA around that 4.50-4.75 mark. Anything else is gravy.

After Moose, the bullpen took over. Jonathan Albaladejo, Kyle Farnsworth, Joba Chamberlain and Mariano Rivera combined for four innings of work, three of which were 1-2-3 innings. Tonight’s inning was Kyle Farnsworth’s fourth 1-2-3 appearance of the season. Hell hath frozen over.

Rivera meanwhile continues to wow everyone all the time. In ten games, he’s thrown 11 innings and has allowed four hits. He’s walked no one and has 11 strike outs. He has eight saves already this year.

On the other side of the ball, the Yankee offense again packed little punch. Outside of that sixth inning, the Yanks managed just one hit, and after the wind knocked down a few first-inning blasts, they hardly hit the ball with much authority throughout the remainder of the game. A Hideki Matsui RBI double in the 8th would be the loan rocket. But a win is a win is a win, and the Yanks return home after a brutal stretch of the schedule at 14-13, one game out of first and two games ahead of their 2007 pace.

But for all of this, the win pales in comparison to the news that came out of Yankee camp after the game. When Johnny Damon pinch hit for A-Rod in the eighth, we all knew something was up. And something is up indeed. According to Kat O’Brien, A-Rod has reaggrevated his quad injury. He felt it in the fourth, and it got worse as the game wore on. The slugger says he won’t be able to play on Tuesday, and he feels he rushed back from the initial injury.

In other bad news, the Yankees, according to Tyler Kepner, fear that Posada could have damaged his labrum by playing through his shoulder injury recently. The Yankees and Posada are awaiting word of the catcher’s trip to Dr. James Andrews. It is important to note that this not an age-related injury. Posada tweaked his shoulder on an awkward throw to second on Opening Day. That could happen anytime. Cashman detractors will criticize the Yanks for tossing a 36-year-old catcher a four-year deal, but this injury is not a good selling point for that side of the argument.

The Yanks will take the win, but it’s a bit bittersweet as two of their top sluggers work their ways through injuries. A trip home has never sounded so nice right now.