NEW YORK -- Brian Cashman presented Michelle Damon with a box of 18 roses (a total chosen to match her husband's uniform number) and a kiss (just one).
A Yankee suit walked about the room holding aloft a T-shirt about to go on sale at Modell's for $16.99 that read: ''No Hair . . . No Beard . . . No Problem."
George Steinbrenner publicly rubber-stamped the signing in a concise and typed 15-word statement: ''He looks like a Yankee. Sounds like a Yankee. And he is a Yankee. Welcome."
Johnny Damon, looking both clean and cut but somewhat pensive standing before camera shutters that snapped at a semiautomatic pace, relaxed enough to say, ''Thank you, and obviously, keep on snapping away."
An impromptu press conference even broke out between Michelle and the local media, until a concerned-looking Scott Boras, her husband's agent, stepped in, telling her, ''Come over here."
There was, as expected, pomp aplenty yesterday at the Stadium, where the Yankees effectively handed Damon the deed to that hallowed parcel of land that once belonged to another JD (Joe DiMaggio), Mickey Mantle, and, for the last 15 seasons, Bernie Williams. But what mattered most yesterday was not the pomp but the circumstances that led to Damon signing with the Yankees, circumstances Damon, Yankees' GM Cashman, and Boras explained in detail.
And what became abundantly clear was this: Well before Tuesday night, when the Red Sox balked at upping their four-year, $40 million offer and promptly lost Damon to New York, both Damon and the Sox had come to accept that they'd be parting ways.
According to Damon, that realization hit in November, when Boston made its first offer, which Boras confirmed to be three years and $27 million.
''I knew I became a free agent after I got the three-year offer," Damon said.
Boras echoed that sentiment, saying, ''I don't think he ever considered leaving before receiving that offer."
Surely, Damon and Boras knew this would be a negotiation, and the Sox' first offer was highly unlikely to be their last. The Sox indeed made a second formal offer, for four years and $40 million, Dec. 6. But, in Boras's opinion, the fact that the Sox never sweetened that second offer implied what the team refused to acknowledge in its Wednesday press conference: The Sox pegged Damon's value at $40 million.
The only alternative possibility, given Boston's inaction, would be that the club felt Boras didn't have any other equal or greater offer. That he was bluffing. But, Boras said, given the ''baseball intellect" and ''experience" of the Sox' ownership and management, that ''would be almost impossible for me to believe."
