After last night's base stealing extravaganza, Johnny Damon is feeling pretty good about himself. Good enough to revive his devilish tongue salute with Nick Swisher. Although I suppose it never really went away, did it?

Can they finally lick it up tonight? And by "it", I of course mean a big bowl of chocolate ice cream that they are eating in celebration of another Yankee championship. I know you're giddy from anticipation, but try to contain yourselves.

[Photo: AP]

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More on the game in a bit. It's Monday morning. We've got a lot to cover today so do what you can to cancel your meetings. Priorities, people.

Have you heard? Alex Rodriguez is the new Mr. October because he's all about baseball now. He's not about Madonna or money or Scott Boras or steroids or any of those other things he was supposedly all about before he was all about baseball. Joe Buck says so. Joe Buck can read body language, and right now Alex Rodriguez's lower lumbar is telling Joe Buck, "Alex Rodriguez is all about baseball."

Which is more than we can say for any of these others guys, especially Nick Swisher. Right, Steve Politi of the Newark Star-Ledger?

The number was illuminated for everyone to see in bright Hollywood lights.

There it was, dead center on the scoreboard, and Nick Swisher had to stare at it as he stepped to the plate. .107. His postseason batting average.

He had not just been a little bit bad in the postseason. He had been epically bad, dumpster-out-in-the-hot-sun-smelling bad, and the way his teammates were hitting, he was adding a lousy lounge singer to this rock-star of a lineup.

[...]

How many more at-bats can manager Joe Girardi possibly give this guy to turn it around?

Girardi has shown faith in his right fielder, rewarding his 29-home run, 82-RBI regular season. He has been a popular figure in the loosey-goosey clubhouse, one of the reasons the Yankees went from button-down to pie-in-the-face during this 103-win season.

"Guys are going to struggle during the course of the season and you just don't give up on a guy if he is struggling because the flip side of that is they are due to get hot," Girardi said before Game 5. "We feel good about Swish."

But everything has his limits, and now the manager should play somebody else - anybody else - to try a different look. Put in Brett Gardner. He might not be an upgrade, but could he possibly be worse?

(Yes.)

Nick Swisher is hitting .103 in the postseason in 29 at-bats. Maybe, like his famous teammate, he'll be all about baseball over the next couple of games and go 3-for-5 in each. His batting average would then jump 130 points, and he'd be, in Politi's terms, no worse than an average-smelling dumpster in a cool sun.

Or I suppose Girardi could heed Politi's advice and, on the basis of 29 at-bats, bench a guy who hit 29 home runs and walked 97 times in 498 regular-season at-bats. Sometimes you just have to make a move, small sample be damned. This is the big time, the limelight, the show of shows, and as we all know, some guys just don't have what it takes.

Politi: NY Yankees can't afford to give struggling Nick Swisher another at-bat [Star-Ledger, via Rob Neyer]
Hughes blows it again [New York Post]
Girardi moves let Angels rally back into ALCS [New York Post]
Instead of finishing off Los Angeles Angels, A.J. Burnett fails New York Yankees [New York Daily News]

Tim McClelland—who has been a Major League Umpire for 26 years—admitted after last night's ALCS game the he botched two calls. The most egregious one was the should've-been double play, where Robinson Cano and Jorge Posada were both caught stranded off third base, but only Posada was ruled out. McClelland came to the press room afterward to explain himself and said that he was expecting both players to tag the base and he thought Cano was touching third when he was tagged. Oops.

His explanation for the earlier gaffe is a little less solid. McClelland said that "in his heart" he believed Nick Swisher left third base early on a sacrifice fly and called him out on appeal. Even though replays appeared to show that he was wrong, McClelland said "I'm not sure I believe the replay of the first one." I think more umps and referees should use that excuse: The heart wants what it wants! And his heart wants Nick Swisher to be out. How you gonna argue with that?

By the way, McClelland's Wikipedia page was locked late last night so don't bother trying to convince people he's a known goat fucker or anything. (Sadly, the line about him being a Michigan State grad is not vandalism.)

Bill Klem Would Be Ashamed [ESPN]
Umpire Tim McClelland makes the worst call of all time [Big League Stew]
October 20 - Tim M cClelland [ASAP Sports]

Damon smacks a homer and Swisher's right there to tap the keg at home plate. You would think that because it's against the Nationals they would tamp down the tongue flickery, but the rock never sleeps. It was not enough Wednesday night— the Yankees lost 3-2 — or last night as the Yankees lost again to the Nationals and Brett Gardner almost broke the expensive Dunkin Donuts fence with his spine (That fence is worth more than you, Brett. It has platinum reinforcements.)

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Good morning. It's Friday. Gay rocks the highway.

On first glance, it looks to be the classic sign of the horns so beloved of Slayer fans and certain residents of Texas, with perhaps a vulgar twist. But you'll notice the extended thumb. This seemingly minor detail turns the gesture into the ASL sign for "I love you."

We contacted Pete Abraham, the Journal News' excellent Yankees beat guy and proprietor of The LoHud Yankees Blog. He traces the gesture's roots to spring training, a slack time of year particularly suited to developing nonverbal modes of communication. Swisher is very likely the originator, as evidenced by this photo (note the index fingers, however):

Abraham, on our behalf, asked Swisher about its meaning. "It doesn't mean anything," Swisher said. "Just something we do. Rock and roll, I guess."

But surely there's more to it than that. For further elaboration, we showed the photos to David McNeill, professor emeritus of psychology and linguistics at the University of Chicago, who is writing a book about the role of gesture in the development of language. He e-mails:

Your guess (the 'horn' - meaning evil eye, cuckold) seems good to me. That is, I think it's a kind of contempt gesture. This, combined with the tongue sticking out, plus the home run context, makes me think that the whole constellation is a gesture of triumph plus derision. ... The two live-action Damon examples differ from the original in interesting ways. First of all, he combines hand and face into a single gesture, whereas the original had them as two gestures (how you count gestures is somewhat arbitrary, but I mean there is more integration in the Damon versions). Second, he has three fingers extended, one more than the original. This interests me, and I think it may be an adjustment to having combined hand and face. If you try to do that with the hand in the original 'horn' gesture form, it's quite difficult, but by folding his index and second finger under his chin, and extending the ring and first fingers, he makes a nice chin cup; then the extended thumb is really unnecessary but was part of the original 'horn' and is quite awkward to fold in to get rid of, so it is still there, too. So Damon has transformed the gesture into a true symbol, with parts working together.

"Triumph and derision" is a fairly succinct summary of the Yankee Way. I-Team's conclusion: The gesture is a commingling of all of the above — a symbol of rock 'n' roll, triumph, derision. And, perhaps, one Yankee outfielder's taste for cunnilingus.

Gamba, a former Raiders cheerleader, was fired by the team in 2003 for posing for a porn site (sorry, it doesn't say which one). She then went on to Playboy. But here's one thing Swisher may not know. Gamba, along with fellow Playboy model Carrie Minter, were once arrested for alleged public intoxication on a San Antonio-bound flight, and then for "making sexual advances" to police in an attempt to avoid the charges.

According to a police report, Gamba and Minter were "yelling and cussing" and were "intoxicated to the point that they were a threat" to themselves and others. Arresting officers noted that the women, who got rowdy on a two-hour Frontier Airlines flight from Denver, had slurred speech, watery eyes, and reeked of booze. Gamba (identified in the report as AP2, or arrested person 2) was also "continually using the word Fuck," while Minter (AP1) "just sat there crying and yelling."

SbB also points us to Gamba's online resume, which curiously mentions none of these things, not even the nude modeling. To which we say, models have resumes? Wouldn't an airline security photo suffice?

Swisher's New (Nude) Dish Is Danielle Gamba [SbB]
Big Busts At San Antonio Airport [Smoking Gun]
Danielle Gamba Resume [DanielleGamba.com]

(UPDATE: Nick Swisher's rep emails us and says this story is "100 percent not accurate." So there's that.)