With Damon, Yankees' clubhouse finally loosening up

	Johnny Damon has been a boost to the Yankees on the field and in the clubhouse. Al Bello/Getty Images

So Derek Jeter might have been right.

For a year now I've been complaining that the Yankees, outside of Johnny Damon, are a lame crew. The Yankees captain tells me he and his teammates are fun when the tape recorders aren't around. I tell him that's just talk.

This last time around, he pulled out a parent-child analogy: "You behaved in front of your parents, your parents leave, you act up a little bit." I told him that there are only so many degrees hipper generally bland men can get.

Then the Yankees papered Carl Pavano's locker.

Pavano, a member of the Alyssa Milano pitching ex-boyfriend club (along with Barry Zito and maybe one day Brad Penny), signed a $39.95 million contract with the Yankees two years ago. They hoped he'd be an ace longer than he was the actress' flame, but it turns out he's only aced the flaming-out part.

He's been out all season with a bunch of maladies, and while rehabbing in Florida hydroplaned his Porsche into a garbage truck in West Palm Beach on Aug. 15 and broke two ribs.

So now Pavano gets to run out the season playing catch in Tampa, and the Yankees got themselves a field day with back pages that screamed things like "Crash Test Dummy." They quilted sports sections together and hung them along the back of Pavano's locker, and I might have to apologize to Jeter. The Yankees might actually know how to have fun.

Not that any part of me thinks Jeter had a hand in the papering. But someone on the Yankees did. And Jeter did full-out giggle when he saw it.

"I think it's the whole thing of people being afraid to get something put in the paper," guessed Damon, who'd be the champion of cutting loose if he ever actually played it straight. "These guys in here might've been burned a lot before and they're just a little more conscious."

That's not how it used to be. Just ask the old guys.

"We used to have some guys that would get on the bus and start giving lap dances," Jorge Posada swore.

Lap dances? By Yankees?

"Well, not these guys," Posada said, looking around his clubhouse. "But back in the day."

Back in the day when the Yankees were winning the World Series?

"Um, yeah," Posada said. "Then."

Across town, the Mets are 16 games up and always sticking things in each other's lockers. After David Wright's collection of pink shirts grew past one, Chris Woodward hung a new one in his stall complete with the words: Chicks Dig Men in Pink. When supersensitive and determinedly shy Carlos Beltran was caught shimmying in the Mets infield on Salsa Night, Pedro Martinez obscured the possible MVP's number with a full-color, blown-up photo of him in mid-gyration.