By GENE COLLIER, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

We now present our own experimental media invasion, Thought Thieving Thursday, in which we secretly tap into the brains of baseball executives in evident states of agitation.Don't ask how we've done it. All I can say is it involves a cell phone, three to five outed CIA operatives, a Slinky, and some Tabasco.

As the summer of love for doomed Yankee Stadium climaxes Tuesday night with the All-Star Game, don't think that you've somehow extracted yourself from the old yard's dense multi-layered history.Soon enough, you'll be reminded that for all its baseball, football, boxing and even papal significance, Yankee Stadium is also where the cure for hemorrhoids was discovered.

Two of the most prominent forces in all of sports, exalted mystic golfmaster Tiger Woods and baseball postseason legend Curt Schilling had surgery last week, and in both cases, their procedures were deemed highly successful.Stunning, I know.

Whether you consider the essential separation between the Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees to be 375 miles of hard road or 375 light years of jagged baseball politics, there is no ambivalence that what begins at PNC Park Tuesday night is the highlight of the sporting summer around here.

DETROIT -- Sidney Crosby hasn't scored a goal since Mother's Day.Evgeni Malkin skates in quicksand.Ryan Malone can't function unless he's under the world's largest formerly retractable stainless steel roof.And that Marian Hossa trade so widely hailed? Did it really happen? I mean, is he here?

PHILADELPHIA -- Philadelphia Flyers goalie Martin Biron sank into Game 3 like a septuagenarian descending the steps of the Broad Street Subway at midnight.He was cautious. He was creaky. He was, in those first minutes, more than just a little pathetic.

NEW YORK -- Among the lesser-known incongruities rattling around the National Hockey League's exhaustive arithmetic, at least as the puck got dropped for Game 3 of these Eastern Conference semifinals, was the Pittsburgh Penguins Evgeni Malkin's total career goals at Madison Square Garden.Zero.Seven career games, two assists, no goals.That couldn't last.

Perhaps you noticed this week that two different sports networks spent two hours of live television examining the just-released NFL schedule, which begins just 4.6 months from tonight when the Super Bowl Champion New York Football Giants entertain the Not Even Close to Super Bowl Champion Washington Football Redskins.At East Rutherford, N.J.

The National Football League has just wrapped up its annual Tweak Week, during which it convenes executives from all 32 clubs to tweak a few rules, consider new policies that are subject to further tweaking and emerge in the same traditional profile it has had lo these many years.