Last weekend's pivotal five-game series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees taught us all a few lessons about the game of baseball.

It's an established fact that good pitching beats good hitting. But that doesn't apply here.

What the Yankees and Red Sox proved was that good hitting can have a field day with mediocre pitching. That's why the Red Sox scored 26 runs in the series, averaging more than five a game, which should have been good enough for a minimum of two victories.

But we learned something else as well. While good offense beats up mediocre pitching, that same average pitching staff is likely to get destroyed by fantasy-team lineups.

And that's why the Yankees swept the series and will win yet another American League East title.

If Josh Beckett was pitching up to his capabilities, similar to how he performed during the 2003 playoffs, and Tim Wakefield was healthy, and Curt Schilling was the dominant ace of 2004 and not the very good No. 2 starter he is now, the Sox not only would have won the series against New York, but they probably wouldn't have even needed to.

But Beckett has been maddeningly inconsistent, Wakefield has been out or pitching hurt most of the year — that can happen with aging pitchers — - and Schilling has pitched well enough to win almost every game, but he's not throwing eight scoreless innings, either.

Against the Yankees, those shortcomings were exposed, and it was

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painful. They scored at least eight runs in four of the five games at Fenway Park, sweeping the series despite their own pitching issues.

If any lineup can make a pitching staff's warts noticeable, it's that of the Yankees. They boast a lineup for the ages, one only that franchise is capable of building.

There's simply no break. There are seven excellent, veteran hitters, a rising star in Robinson Cano, and a guy — Melky Cabrera — to whom pitchers figure they can actually throw some fastballs, which allows him to sit back and tee off on hittable pitches.

It's insane. And if Hideki Matsui comes back next month? If you could choose between the Yankees lineup with a healthy Matsui, or the National League's All-Star lineup, which would you choose? Let's just say it's not a no-brainer.

The saving grace of this all for Sox fans is that the Yankees probably aren't going to win the World Series, either. Theirs is a pitching staff without a true ace, and a bullpen loaded with overused arms that are unproven in playoff situations. As great as Mariano Rivera is, he can't pitch four innings a game, and the teams in the AL Central should expose that.

But they will win the division, and they deserve to after pounding and humbling the Red Sox last week.

Jeers

To the demotion of Pluto from planet status. Certainly this has no effect on my life, but it bothers me that these scientists gathered in the Czech Republic and emerged from a meeting with this news. Who gave them the authority? Why wasn't it put to a worldwide vote? All these museums and elementary-school textbooks suddenly contain inaccurate information, and why? Says who?

Well, you know something? I don't think auto racing should be classified as a sport. It's an environmentally unfriendly competition that requires no athleticism, so as of now, I, as a sports columnist, am stripping auto racing of its sport status. And if you all are unwilling to go along with it, that's fine, because in my mind, Pluto, while a less entertaining Disney character than the great Goofy or Tigger, is still a planet. So there.

Cheers To the U.S. Ryder Cup team. The team has virtually no chance of winning next month against the Europeans. I mean, with all due respect to Fairfield's J.J. Henry, I can't believe some of these guys qualified for the team. It's a sorry state of affairs in American golf right now, beyond Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.

But that's what makes this Ryder Cup so interesting. If a team with so many no-namers can put it together for three days and finally reclaim the Cup, it'll be a great story. And can they really perform worse than two years ago, when they were basically out of the picture by the middle of the first day, and eventually lost 18.5 to 9.5? Perhaps the PGA of America can petition to have the team expanded to include all of North America. And South Africa.

Contact Chris Casavant at c.casavant@yahoo.com