As Tom Waits put it so succinctly, "it’s hard to win when you always lose."

New York has emptied out for Labor Day weekend – every year at this time I wish I had a car, just so I could park it – and judging from the game thread, outside of the Stadium there were about 17 people watching the Yankees play Sunday afternoon. This is probably for the best. In a performance that wasn’t so much lousy as just listless, the Yankees lost to the Blue Jays 6-2.

It was a fairly gutty outing from Andy Pettitte, but not a good one. He recovered from an ugly three-run first inning (not helped by Xavier Nady, who lost a fly ball in the sun) to allow just a solo shot in the second and nothing else until the seventh, going deeper than expected. But then he ran out of steam all at once, and Jose Veras couldn’t pick him up; in the end Pettitte was charged with all six earned runs. Meanwhile, the Yankees’ only scoring came on solo shots from Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi, and while they had several promising opportunities with runners on base… stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The game’s only silver lining was the long-awaited appearance of Alfredo Aceves, scourge of the Mexican Leagues — and of Toronto, apparently. For some reason, I was expecting him to be some scrawny kid, but instead Aceves is brawny and tough-looking, with a shaved head, wearing #91 in honor of childhood hero Dennis Rodman. He threw two perfect innings, with three strikeouts.