Cliff Lee, the "kryptonite-hurling" Texas Rangers ace, was in fine form again last night, striking out 13 batters and scattering just two hits over eight innings in the team's 8-0 win over the New York Yankees. Just how dominant was Lee's performance Monday in the Bronx? A sampling of hyperbole from around the Web:

• "When reality not only matches but exceeds the hype, you get Cliff Lee last night at Yankee Stadium." - George A. King III, New York Post

• "There's a legend that Bobby Richardson, the Yankees' second baseman and lead-off hitter in the early 1960s, was known as a great high fastball hitter. In the first inning of the 1963 World Series, Sandy Koufax through a high fastball right by him and glared into the Yankees dugout. Koufax owned the Yankees for the remainder of that series... Cliff Lee, currently of the Texas Rangers, has that kind of dominance when it comes to the Yankees right now." - Dom Amore, The Hartford Courant

• "How do you denote better than an A+? Because he was... Lee is quickly transitioning from the best postseason pitcher of this generation to one of the best ever." - Evan Grant, The Dallas Morning News

• "He had hovered over this American League Championship Series for the past four days, without so much as throwing a pitch. Such is the power of Cliff Lee." - Dave Sheinin, The Washington Post

• "If it was possible for Cliff Lee to take his game to another level, he did it Monday night in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series." - Anthony Andro, Arlington Star-Telegram

• "Cliff Lee didn’t just beat the New York Yankees, he humiliated them. He turned their fans and he emptied their stadium and terrified their town." - Tim Brown, Yahoo! Sports

• "As much as Yankees fans feared Lee, as much as past performance suggested he’d ascended to the very top of the list of postseason pitching phenomena, he was even better. This was 'Born to Run' living up to and beyond the covers of Newsweek and Time. This was 'Avatar' selling more tickets than even James Cameron would’ve dreamed." - Mike Vaccaro, New York Post

• "They could have played another nine innings, and Cliff Lee would have kept racking up Ks, and the New York Yankees would have kept shaking their heads on the way back to the dugout." - Mark McGuire, Albany Times Union

• "Perhaps no man in any profession has ever made such a public and indisputable case for his future salary - and done it at such an astronomical and demoralizing cost to his future employer." - Thomas Boswell, The Washington Post

• "It's difficult to imagine anyone pitching, over the course of 64 innings in the October cauldron, any better than Cliff Lee has pitched." - Rob Neyer, ESPN.com

• "Basically, this is the kind of pitcher who makes a hitter want to sit down and reassess what he does for a living." - Dave D'Alessandro, Newark Star-Ledger

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Ray Gustini