The A’s beat the Yankees 6-3 in ten innings, but I’m not feeling pumped up about it like I usually do after beating them. This felt like a mid-August game between two teams in fourth place, not a tense battle between playoff-caliber clubs.

Barry Zito pitched well (although Macha left him in too long again), and the A’s got a couple of home runs (home runs? what’s that?) from Eric Byrnes and Bobby Kielty. But that’s about it for the highlights. The rest of the game was ugly.

Used to be that you had to play your best mistake-free game to beat the Yankees. But tonight, the A’s played sloppily, left a gazillion runners in scoring position again, and yet still won because the Yankees played even more sloppily than the A’s.

The key play was in the bottom of the eighth inning where Octavio Dotel threw a terrible pitch behind Alex Rodriguez, which glanced off the glove of Jason Kendall, who then threw out Jorge Posada trying to advance to third base with two outs in a tie game. Just a horrible pitch, but an even more horrible baserunning mistake.

Then the Yankees played defense like a bunch of Little Leaguers in the top of the 10th, and handed the A’s three runs. The A’s tried their best to slop the game back to the Yankees in the bottom of the 10th, walking the leadoff man and dropping a pop fly, but the Yankees failed to capitalize, and the A’s held on to win.

The Yankees failed to capitalize? I can’t remember ever saying that before. Something weird is going on here. First the Red Sox break their curse, and now the Yankees can’t get the lucky break they almost always seem to get. The Earth’s magnetic North Pole and South Pole must be flipping upside down or something.

Therefore, I hereby declare that the recipe of the day is Broccoli and Cornmeal Upside-down Cake. What could be more appropriate than that?