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• Hughes (in)corporation:

For now, Hughes is scheduled to pitch Monday at Texas. But if he is back in the minors instead, he will take lessons with him.

“Just be aggressive,” Hughes said. “Sometimes, because of the stage you’re on, you try to do too much or you’re afraid to make a mistake. That’s not the way I pitch. That’s not my plan going in. Really, there’s no difference at this level. You’ve still got to go off your strengths.”

For Hughes on Wednesday, that was a lively 94-mile-an-hour fastball he used to strike out Adam Jones and Nick Markakis in the first inning. Seven of his strikeouts came against those two hitters — both batting well over .300— or Aubrey Huff.

“He can be successful at this level with the stuff that he’s got,” Girardi said. “It’s attacking the strike zone and wiggling your way out of some innings like other pitchers are able to do.”

• Scenes from a looser clubhouse:

Togetherness was what Girardi made a point of in spring training when he arranged that surprise “Day at the Pool Parlor.” Say this for Girardi, he recognized what guys like Damon are only now willing to talk openly about: The Yankee clubhouse was a joyless place in the latter years of the Joe Torre regime. Part of it was the personnel – how could anyone find any fun being around Kevin Brown? – but a big part of it was the generation gap that existed between Torre and his players. Aside from his small coterie of veterans from the championship years, Torre kept his distance from his players and when each new high profile free agent came over from another organization, like Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui or Damon, they were never able to blend in with the championship core as it gradually diminished. It was apparently the consummate “25 players, 25 taxi cabs” team.

“Rarely in the last three years I’ve been here would there be four-five guys hanging out playing video games in the hotel room,” Brian Bruney said. “Now, guys are having fun and they want to hang out together. The shaving cream, the music, people need to realize you can do those things and still win. You can’t win with just All-Stars all around. We’ve done that the past three years and we haven’t done anything.”

“The rules here are much more family oriented now,” said Damon,”and that’s why you have free agents wanting to come to New York instead of a low-key place.”

Funny, I thought it was the money. But there is no question that CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, for all the moolah it took to get them to come here, have had a major influence in changing both the personality of the team and the atmosphere in the clubhouse. Same with Nick Swisher, who was grateful to escape Ozzie Guillen’s dog house in Chicago and get traded to the Yankees.

• Tyler Kepner doesn’t know what to make of Melky Cabrera:

I’ll admit it: I’ve seen his whole career and I don’t know what to make of Melky Cabrera. I see him on a roll like this, and I think he’s a legitimate major league outfielder. He homered on Wednesday and went 2 for 4, raising his average to .321 and helping the Yankees to their eighth victory in a row, 11-4 over Baltimore. And he’s a reliable defender.

But it’s weird. Do you know he’s gone 43 plate appearances since his last walk? That’s kind of startling, since he’s hitting in front of the third- or fourth-string catcher. But what does it really matter? The Yankees are winning and his on-base percentage is .374.

History says this won’t last. Remember, Cabrera was hot at the start of last season, too. Through the games of last May 4, Cabrera was batting .291 with six homers. . . .

“He’s a different player is the way I see it,” Manager Joe Girardi said. “He’s consistent from both sides of the plate, he’s having good at-bats all the time, he’s not trying to do too much, he’s hitting a lot of line drives, some of his line drives have gone out of the ballpark. He’s been aggressive. We’re very pleased with what we’re getting from him.”

• Wang to make one more start in minors:

Wang has thrown 13 scoreless innings over his previous two starts in the Minors, though the Yankees have been looking to see more consistency from his sinker. He showed flashes of regaining that command in a bullpen session on Tuesday at Yankee Stadium.

“We want to see what we saw in the bullpen,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “We want to see him take that into the game. That will tell us a lot.”. . .

“We all know that he wants to be here, and we want him to,” Girardi said. “But he understood where we’re coming from. We want to see that stuff he had in the bullpen in the game.”

[My take: Will Chamberlain taking a liner off his knee last night change the plan for CMW?]

• Notre Dame football . . . at the Stadium?:

Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame’s athletic director, said the Yankees were open to having college football at the new Stadium, and he would like the Fighting Irish to be the first team to play there. Swarbrick stressed that no dates had been discussed.

“We’ve been in contact with Yankee Stadium and asked and inquired,” Swarbrick said. “We will be discussing games with them, but we haven’t entered into any substantive discussions.” . . .

He said he understood the Yankees are going to try to maximize revenue from the new Stadium, and college football could be an option. He also cited the historical aspect.

Swarbrick said Notre Dame’s 35-13 victory against Army at West Point in 1913 is considered the most important in the program’s history. He said he was trying to plan significant anniversary games and would love to have the 100th anniversary of that game played at Yankee Stadium. But Swarbrick said the Yankees may want college football at the Stadium before 2013, and if that is the case, he would like the Irish to be part of the debut.

[My take: Will punts travel farther if kicked towards right field?]

• The Post’s Joel Sherman weighs in on Rivera pitching the 9th inning of what was an 11-3 game on Wednesday:

It was ridiculous that Mariano Rivera went back out to pitch the ninth just to get a save after the Yanks turned a 5-3 game into an 11-3 game. Rivera had gotten the final out of the eighth inning, which already was a red-flag moment because the Yanks have talked so much about trying to limit Rivera to the ninth inning to preserve his surgically repaired right shoulder. But then the Yanks essentially gave Joe Girardi a reprieve by scoring six runs and blowing the game open. It took them about 20 minutes to do that, the long wait giving the manager just another reason to remove Rivera. . . .

Rivera is a precious and fragile commodity. I know Girardi wants to keep such an important leader happy by building those save totals. But Rivera is already the all-time AL leader in saves. He hardly needs an extra one on a Wednesday night in May to enhance his legacy. What he needs is protection for the long season. So his pitching in the ninth inning on Wednesday night was just dumb.

• For all their issues with the cost of tickets, at least the Yanks haven’t had to resort to LOLCATS.
• Happy 66th birthday to Tommy John.  John had two tours of duty with the Yanks (’79-’82,’86-’89), going 91-60 with a 3.59 ERA.  His best year for the Bombers was ’79, when he finished 2nd in the Cy Young vote by going 21-9 with a 2.96 ERA.
• On this date in 1913, Browns rookie Dwight Stone gives up six hits, seven walks and plunks three batters, but still beats the Yankees, 7 – 0. The visiting New Yorkers strand a modern-ML record 15 runners in the shutout.  The record will be matched three times and finally topped, in 1994.

[My take: The papers, in reporting on this game, blamed it all on A-Rod’s lack of clutch hitting.]

• On this date in 1922, the Yankees, who have been sharing the Polo Grounds with the Giants since 1913, begin construction on their own stadium in the Bronx.

[My take: A moatless stadium no less.]

• 1933 – Joe Sewell of the Yankees fans for the first time this season, a 3 – 0 win behind Lefty Gomez over Cleveland. Sewell will strike out only three more times in 524 at bats this year.

[My take: On June 13 and 14 of 1997, the late Ken Caminiti had two consecutive games with four strikeouts in each.]

• On this date in 1934, Lou Gehrig drives in at least one run for the tenth straight game (the second time in his career doing that).
• On this date in 1962, Roger Maris, who went all of 1961 without receiving an intentional walk, gets four in a 12-inning 2 – 1 win against the Angels to set an American League record.
• On this date in 1963, at Yankee Stadium, Mickey Mantle, leading off the 11th, is fooled by Bill Fischer on a slow curve, then cannons a 2 – 2 pitch that almost clears the RF roof. “The hardest ball I ever hit,” Mantle later comments, a ball that, by some accounts, was still rising when it struck a foot below the top. It is conservatively estimated by Dr. James McDonald, a physicist who studies long-ball trajectories, that the ball would have traveled 620 feet if it had not struck the facade. “That was the only homer I ever hit that the bat actually bent in my hands,” Mantle tells Dale Long, from whom he borrowed the bat.
• On this date in 1996, the Athletics hit five solo homers — three by Yankee-killer Geronimo Berroa — to beat the Yankees 5 – 1. The five runs, all coming on homers, ties the ML mark.