Greg Brady - The Bill Watters Show - Weekday Afternoons 4pm-7pm

I far preferred the Red Sox 2004 model of Johnny Damon.  Long hippie-ish hair, gigantic fuzzy beard and making life miserable for the likes of Javier Vasquez and Jon Lieber.  Can you believe those two started ALCS games in 2004?  Seriously...it's remarkable to think of how much the Yankees have upgraded their pitching since those non-World Series years.  No disrespect to the late Cory Lidle, or an aging Kevin Brown, or a thinking-of-picking-up-a-seemingly-disfigured-prostitute Denny Neagle -- but the Yankees finally got it right when it came to free-agent pitchers in snatching up CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett.  This is as legitimate a World Series win, when it happens, as the Yankees have had in a long, long time.  I still can't for the life of me figure out how they didn't win in 2001 vs. the Diamondbacks, with all the raw and penetrable emotion of 9/11 (even I was cheering hard for them), but 2003 vs. the Marlins is easier to explain.

 

Simply put, Carl Pavano, Brad Penny, and Josh Beckett, remarkably outpitched Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, and David Wells.  I don't know how, and you don't know how -- but they did.

 

Here's the video of Johnny Damon doing something remarkable last night and that's stealing two bases on one play.  ESPN's fantastic columnist Jayson Stark referenced it in his video blog as one of the greatest, most amazing plays in World Series history, and he's right.  It includes a great anecdote involving Yankees coach Tony Pena.