Exactly one year ago, the Yankees were a tangled mess of emotions and ambitions, of corporate agenda and circus atmosphere, replete with enough red noses and floppy shoes to go around for everybody.
That was a Yankees-Red Sox series too, at Fenway Park. This was before the Sox went on a late-season push to win the A.L. East; the Yankees won two out of three and they inched within 3 ½ games of Boston for the second wild-card, and Joe Girardi would have given just about anything for someone to ask him about that.
But Girardi wasn’t a baseball manager that week in Boston as much as he was an unwitting carnival barker, because as you may remember these were the final days of A-Rod.