Rieber: Yankees must keep beating up on bad teams

When the Yankees arrived at Yankee Stadium yesterday morning, they talked about the previous day's events in baseball.

They talked about Roy Halladay's perfect game. They talked about the fluke injury suffered by the Angels' Kendry Morales, who broke his ankle jumping onto home plate after hitting a walk-off grand slam.

One subject the Yankees swear they did not discuss was their own 13-11 loss to the Indians on Saturday and the six-run lead they frittered away. "You have to have a short memory," Derek Jeter said. "No one in here talked about what happened."

The players had lived through it and had digested it. It was "a bad loss," manager Joe Girardi said, made worse by the low caliber of the opponent. That's why yesterday's come-from-behind, 7-3 win over Cleveland tasted so sweet to the Yankees. As bad as Saturday was, Sunday was almost as good.

Almost.

"Seemed like almost the complete opposite of [Saturday's] game," Jeter said after the Yankees scored five in the seventh and two in the eighth to erase a 3-0 deficit, with the big blow Mark Teixeira's go-ahead, three-run homer in the seventh.

Sorry, but not all wins and losses are created equal. The Yankees are in an easy portion of their schedule, with 13 of 16 games against the three worst teams in baseball. History and simple mathematics show they need to win nearly 70 percent of the games against lesser squads if they want to go on to greater glory.

In 2009, the Yankees went 103-59 (.636). Their percentage against .500 or better teams was .598; against teams below .500, it was .689. That last number was helped by the Yankees' record against Baltimore (13-5), Toronto (12-6), Oakland (7-2) and the Mets (5-1).

In 2010, the Yankees have played 32 games against teams with winning records and are only 18-14. Yesterday's game was their 18th vs. teams with losing records; they are 12-6.

The disparity in the number of games against good and bad clubs will level off in the next few weeks as the Yankees face Cleveland, Baltimore and Houston, the last one a gift from the interleague gods.

Players always mouth that they don't take any teams lightly and don't expect to fatten up during generous parts of the schedule. If you believe that, you probably also believe them when they say it's not about the money.

Nick Swisher let the truth slip a little bit when he said, "After yesterday, we may have had a little more fire today." But he quickly backtracked into "yesterday was yesterday" mode when pressed on it.

Girardi seemed to have a harder time hiding his dissatisfaction with Saturday's outcome. He seemed to take that loss harder than his players did, which is not unusual from a man who admits he goes home and watches a DVD of every game before hitting the sack.

Girardi probably punched his pillow a few times Saturday night after viewing the Indians' seven-run seventh inning. It could be why he was a little defensive in his morning news conference Sunday, especially when the subject was Joba Chamberlain, the chief architect of Saturday's collapse.

After yesterday's win, Girardi wasn't doing handstands. But he clearly was pleased that the Yankees woke up after being shut out for 62/3 innings by Justin Masterson, a pitcher with a 6.13 ERA coming in.

"It's gratifying because you don't ever want to have a carry-over effect," Girardi said. "You're going to have tough losses during the course of the year and you want to make sure your guys are mentally and physically equipped to bounce back. And they showed that today."