It's been an eventful couple of days for Kevin Youkilis.

On Sunday, most of New England awoke to find Youk looking back at them from the morning paper as the pitchman for B&M Beans. Even better, that wakeup call was delivered with a timeless photo of Youk opening wide to shovel some baked beans in his mouth. His eyes say, "I am just so thrilled to be taking this picture right now."

Then on Sunday night, with those magic B&M beans fueling him, Youk played the hero - blasting both a single-shot homerun in the 7th AND a walkoff 2-run homer in the 13th to lift the Sox to their first win of the series over the Cardinals.

The luck of the magic beans ran out yesterday, though. During a break in the action between the 4th and 5th innings against Arizona last night, Mike Lowell and Youk's standard warmup game of catch took a nasty black-and-blue turn when a ball tossed by Lowell took a bad hop, skip and a jump... right up into Youk's face.

Even though the battle scar looks something awful (it looks like he came out on the losing end of another dugout scrabble), Youk's precautionary CT scan ran clean. He'll be evaluated at the ballpark a little later today to determine what's next and when he can play again.

Youk was, of course, fired up last night and didn't want to leave the game despite the large swollen shiner puffing up on his face-- especially since there was no one immediately available behind him on the depth chart. Bench backup Sean Casey, in a tastily ironic twist of timing, dropped the appeal of his suspension for Fight Night 2008 earlier yesterday -- and so Sean was unavailable to step in.

Instead, they had to turn to minor league callup (and resident cutie patootie) Brandon Moss- in his first major league start at 1st base. But the rollercoaster ride continued when Brandon bobbled a routine grounder, allowing the winning run for the Dbacks to score in the process. Brandon took on all the heat for the misplay:

"It was a candy hop I got," he said. "It couldn't have been an easier grounder to field. It was right to me. I tried to do too much too soon. It's a shame the game turned out the way it did. It ended up being the freaking winning run. That's my responsibility."

I think the real problem is he hasn't fully mastered the Youkilis look yet. He's got the bald thing working, and the beginnings of a fine chin beard... but it's got a long way to go until that reaches Youk-like proportions.

Hat tip to Surviving Grady for both the Youk scan and Youk screencap. They are wizards with those.