Okay, so the Yankees did not win the game started by Javier Vazquez, as I promised he would. He crumbled in the Fens during the first inning, and New York could never get untracked. So my modified prediction is this:



The Yankees will beat Curt Schilling today behind Mike Mussina, who has saved some of his best career games for Fenway "Pock." I attended two of those games during the 2002 season, and his stuff was filthy (baseball term for "unhittable"). But it does not even approach the game he pitched there in September 2001, when he came within one strike of hurling a perfect game before Carl Everett laced a clean single to left. While a perfect game today would seem highly unlikely, I look for a 4-2 Yankee win behind a two-hit game by Alex Rodriguez (possibly with a home run).



In the other two games, my official pick is this: Jose Contreras will defeat Derek Lowe and Kevin Brown will defeat Bronson Arroyo. Sorry for the modifications, but in the words of Yankees' radio announcer John Sterling, "If you think you've got baseball figured out..."