These are now Joe Girardi's Yankees

For better or worse - and only the season will give us the answer to that one - the Yankees are Joe Girardi's now. It doesn't mean you have to like what Shelley Duncan did against the Tampa Bay Rays, coming in with spikes higher than any Yankee of recent memory. Or that you have to somehow sanctify what Duncan did as some spikes-up version of the way the game ought to be played. It isn't, even when a Yankee does it.

It doesn't mean that the Yankees have turned into a bunch of bushers because one hot-wired kid did what he thought his manager wanted him to do, because that's clearly what happened when Duncan went into second base the way he did. Continue