Bugged Out You know, sometimes you think you've seen just about everything there is to see in a baseball game, and then...a swarm of bugs descends upon the field, and you realize that you haven't.

The Yankees lost to the Indians, 2-1, last night, and the immediate reason why was...bugs.

Wayne Berisford, a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia in Athens, said last night in a telephone interview that the bugs, gnats or otherwise, were likely engaged in a mating swarm. He said warm and wet weather encourages such behavior.



Because he was swarmed by what looked like thousands of mosquito-like critters, Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlain went all to pieces in the bottom of the eighth inning, with the Yankees leading 1-0 in a beautiful pitchers' duel, walked two guys, hit a man, and wild-pitched in the tying run.

Now, the Yankees had other problems. A-Rod is four for his last 50 playoff at-bats, an average of .080, and the Yanks have scored only four runs in their first two games with the Indians. Also, can't Luis Vizcaino go an inning without giving up a run?

But...it was the bugs.

You will counter that the Indians pitcher Fausto Carmona—a great performance—also had to deal with the bugs, but didn't flinch. And this is true. But it is not the whole story.

For two reasons.

One, Chamberlain was the first pitcher to have to deal with the bugs en masse. They sprung up almost instantly, and Carmona had the benefit of watching Chamberlain get distracted by them, so that when he went to the mound, he knew how much that distraction could cost him.

Second, I can't prove this, but I'm convinced that Chamberlain attracted more of the bugs than Carmona did. If we had a John Madden-like blackboard, we could graph the comparative number of bugs landing on their necks; Chamberlain had so many of them on his neck, it was actually kind of disgusting.

I don't know if this disparity was because Chamberlain was sweating more than Carmona, or because their sweat smelled different.

You laugh, but we've all seen instances where bugs swarm around one person and relatively ignore another just feet away. Or at least I have.

A few years back, I took a nature walk with two other people in a Brazil forest. The flies were terrible, like a curtain of insects that you had to push through before progressing. But they were far, far more interested in me than in the other two people, who were both Brazilian (we all had insect repellent on). Was I sweating more? Was there something new and exciting about my sweat? No idea. But the difference was so great that my friends were actually grateful to me for attracting so many of the bugs.

In any case, the Yanks are down, 0-2, their season on the verge of ending. Argh. And the Sox, give 'em credit, are up 2-0. Argh-argh.

Well, as we all know, comebacks happen....  ¶ 8:17 AM