"Um, I think I'll just take a rain check on that," Halladay said with a smile when asked to discuss his scheduled start against former teammate A.J. Burnett.

Fresh off a 3-2 trip and a 5?-game lead over the Yankees, who are in fourth place in the American League East, most of the Blue Jays players spent yesterday underselling the coming three-game series. But there might have been a bit of subliminal messaging going on courtesy of Toronto's Kevin Millar, who turned off the clubhouse lights at one point yesterday morning and provided some extra narration to a documentary on the 2004 Boston Red Sox's World Champions, a video of which was playing one of the clubhouse televisions. "All they needed was some popcorn," laughed Blue Jays media relations assistant Erik Grossman. Millar engaged in witty repartee with Scott Rolen (whose St. Louis Cardinals were defeated by Millar's Red Sox team in the 2004 World Series) and traded good-natured barbs with catcher Michael Barrett over Millar's inability to procure a Montreal Expos championship video.

(Barrett said: "Without the Expos, there wouldn't have been a Red Sox's World Series," referring to the role that former Expos Orlando Cabrera and Pedro Martinez played on that team. Good on Barrett. Got to represent, you know?)

Few people in a Blue Jays jersey have seen as many big series as manager Cito Gaston, who said matter-of-factly that: "I don't have that shove-it-up-the-ass feeling about them [the Yankees]."

Gaston, in fact, is effusive in his praise for George Steinbrenner. But he also related a story from a four-game series in September of 1985 in the Bronx, when the Blue Jays took three of four from the Yankees after losing the first game 7-5. Yeah, he's an old Yankees hand.

"In the past, when we needed to, we beat them," Gaston said, shrugging. "When Coxie [Bobby Cox] was here, we had a four-game series [in September of 1985] and Damaso [Garcia] and Tony [Fernandez] mishandled the ball leading to a couple of runs and we ended up losing the game.

"That's probably the quietest bus I've ever ridden on," Gaston continued, referring to the trip back to the team's Manhattan hotel from the Bronx. "There was construction, too, and we had to walk the final three blocks to the hotel, and everybody's walking really quietly. The next three days we played lights out and kicked them three days in a row."

GARBAGE TIME

I'm not reading too much into Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment's silence on Jim Balsillie's bid to bring a second NHL team to Southern Ontario, and neither should anyone else. MLSE is being sued by the group backing Balsillie for colluding to "preserve market power," so it makes sense the company wouldn't be littering the landscape with press releases. One long-time sports executive says that one way Balsillie might be able to mollify the Maple Leafs and Buffalo Sabres is to offer them a share of future television earnings in addition to an indemnification cheque. ... The woman considered a front-runner to replace Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court has a special place in the heart of Baseball fans. It was Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York, who ended the 1994 Baseball players' strike. ... Lambs to the slaughter department: The Buffalo Bills are on pace to break last year's 56,011 season-ticket mark, which was the second-highest in club history. ... If major-league managers spent as much time whining about umpiring in the postseason as NHL coaches do about officiating in the playoffs, they'd be hit with so many fines their heads would spin. This year's group of disgruntled NHL coaches seems to be particularly pathetic. ****

Monday to Monday

It's typical of the self-absorbed citizens of Red Sox Nation that no sooner would Manny Ramirez's 50-game suspension for violating Baseball's drug policy be announced than they'd get defensive about Boston's 2004 World Series title.

Chiefly, the concern expressed on call-in shows was that now everybody would think the termination of the Curse of the Bambino was somehow cheapened by the fact that the team had a drug cheat on it - and in a starring role, no less. Typical. Everything goes back to the Red Sox, right? Rest assured, Red Sox fans, if in fact Ramirez was using back then, the evidence at hand now suggests he was not likely the only one on the team so doing. Chances are good, too, that they faced opponents who were juicing. So let's call it a draw, okay? You can keep the trophy.

Ramirez's suspension was significant for any number of reasons, but one of them was that he was the first name player nabbed by Baseball's testing program. Most of the other big names were the result of federal investigations or investigative reporting leading to admission, or the Mitchell Report. Ramirez was suspended because Baseball investigators followed up on an abnormally high testosterone level.

Perhaps that's why, just a few days after the announcement, it's clear this suspension is resonating in clubhouses more than any other previous steroid-related matter. My sense is it's made an indelible impression on the game's younger players, because it's happened in-season. It's in their faces.

As for Manny? Know this: No player in the history of Baseball is better equipped to come back from a suspension without missing a beat. Pressure never bothers Manny, nor do heckling fans in other cities or media scrutiny. Manny is such an insular, hitting savant that he is impervious. He will come back and have the same kind of second half he had last year - and Dodgers fans will love him. How will he handle the apology everybody expects? That will be Manny's toughest chore, because even if sincerity isn't beyond his grasp, the fact is he doesn't do follow-up questions well.

He could bring in a lawyer, like Sammy Sosa did in front of Congress. But if I was advising him, I'd tell him to apologize to his teammates, maybe answer a few questions in front of his locker, and leave it at that. Nothing organized. No major news conference.

Manny doesn't need the media. He doesn't need to reach out to anybody but his teammates and Dodgers fans. Because, you see, Mannywood isn't dead. As Yahoo! Sports's Steven Henson reported hearing a father explain to his young son the reason for Ramirez's absence, as they sat in their Mannywood seats at Dodger Stadium: "He's on vacation. He went on a trip. He'll be back." And so he will.