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| Tuesday, October 1 Updated: October 4, 4:44 PM ET Yankee magic surfaces once again By Jayson Stark ESPN.com |
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NEW YORK -- How do they do it? How do these New York Yankees do these ridiculous, mystical, magical things they do?
It's October in the Bronx, and here they go again.
How did Game 1 of the American League Division Series ever wind up Yankees 8, Angels 5?
Couldn't happen. Shouldn't happen.
It happened.
"It's just magic, man," said Jason Giambi afterward. "It's the pinstripes."
And we're sold. Must be. Must be the pinstripes. Anybody got any other decent explanations?
The faces change. The magic remains. Must be the pinstripes.
We're at the point now where we suspect they could dress Britney Spears, Haley Joel Osment and Katharine Hepburn in those pinstripes. They could bat them third, fourth and fifth. And somehow, they'd still conjure up another game-winning rally as the clock ticked toward midnight.
How can you doubt that? We have seen it too many times. In the seven Octobers in the Joe Torre era, the Yankees are now up to 14 games in which they trailed with six outs to go -- or fewer -- and still won. Fourteen. And how many games like that have they lost? Exactly two (on Sandy Alomar's ALDS homer in 1997 and Luis Gonzalez's World Series single last year). Unreal. We thought those ninth-inning World Series rallies the Bombers staged last year were right out of some David Copperfield manual. But what happened Tuesday was right up there on the magic-spell charts, too.
There they were, a run behind with four outs to go. With two outs and nobody on in the eighth. With no balls, two strikes on baseball's most notorious hack-and-chase machine, Alfonso Soriano.
If someone had stopped time right then and told you Soriano would walk, what would you have said?
"Yeah, sure. And Jorge Posada will win the Olympic 100-meter dash, too."
In other words, no chance.
But it happened. Of course, it happened.
Soriano walked exactly 23 times all year. He struck out 157 times. That's the fewest walks in history by a guy who whiffed 150 times or more.
The Angels undoubtedly heard something about that. Ben Weber, the man on the mound, undoubtedly heard something about that. You get Soriano down two strikes, you don't need to throw another strike. That's the theory, right? You flop a couple of sliders up there, low and away, and mark down another K.
But not this time.
"That's what they think," Soriano said later. "He said, 'Let me throw one, two, three pitches out of the zone and see if I swing.' But I said after I got two strikes, I've gotta wait for my pitch. So he threw me four sliders, down and away, and I didn't swing. I walked."
And the moment he headed up that line toward first base, you knew.
The big baseball cathedral in the Bronx, which had grown so silent as the Angels ground out a hard-earned 5-4 lead, suddenly rocked back to life.
Weber, stomping around in his bottleneck glasses, suddenly grew obsessed with Soriano on first as Derek Jeter stepped in to hit. Weber stepped off once. He stepped off twice. Then Soriano took off, stole his first base of the postseason and you knew.
Jeter drew a full-count walk. Giambi singled off the left-hander (Scott Schoeneweis) who had been brought in specifically for his personal occasion. Tie game.
Enter rookie Brendan Donnelly instead of lights-out closer Troy Percival, as clips from "Rocky" played on the scoreboard. You knew.
Williams pumped his 17th postseason homer into legend land in right field. Yankees 8, Angels 5.
Must be the pinstripes.
"Special things happen here," said reliever Steve Karsay, who grew up in this town and then wound up with a win in his first postseason game as a Yankee. "I've seen it over the years. Now I got to experience it firsthand. It's amazing."
No Yankee had hit a home run in the first inning of the first game of the postseason since Mickey Mantle homered off Vernon Law in Game 1 of the 1960 World Series. But on Tuesday, Derek Jeter did it, on Jarrod Washburn's seventh pitch of the game.
"The man is born for October, I guess," Karsay said of Jeter. "Everybody was talking about how he scuffled late in the season, how it wasn't his best year, how his bat was slow. Then he comes out in the first inning and puts us up, 1-0. He's a special player."
But the magic didn't end there, of course. Washburn hadn't given up three home runs in any start all season. But he gave up three in this game (to Jeter, Giambi and Rondell White), All three broke ties and gave the Yankees leads they couldn't hold. Not that that mattered.
"Derek was telling me that this team always finds ways to win," White said, "that something magical happens here every game. Now I believe him."
He didn't just see it, either. He lived it. White said he hadn't hit an opposite-field home run all season. Well, he hit one in the fifth inning off Washburn.
"It was electrifying here, man," White said. "It was electrifying from the minute I got out of my car today. I walked in, and the fans were going crazy. And they were still going crazy, right to the last pitch."
To the new guys -- White and Karsay and John Vander Wal and Jeff Weaver -- this was a chance to live out one of those exhilarating movie plots they'd only seen before from the wrong side of the screen.
"I remember sitting home watching the World Series last year, when they hit those home runs," Karsay said. "I sat there and wondered, 'What's going to happen next? Who's going to be the hero tonight?'"
And then, on this night, he lived it. They all lived it.
"When Bernie hit that home run and he was running around the bases," White said, "I had chills running down my body. It was incredible."
"When that ball went out," said veteran Yankees magician Mike Stanton, riding the October wave for the 11th consecutive postseason, "I turned to Jeff Weaver. And I said, 'Pretty cool, isn't it?' There's nothing like playoff games in Yankee Stadium."
Weaver said nothing, couldn't find the words. Just smiled. Just took it all in.
We can't explain why the October games in this place all seem to end like this one. But the more they do, the more likely they seem to do it again. Must be some kind of law of centrifugal baseball force.
Asked if there was a point late in this game where he knew his team was going to win -- again -- Stanton replied: "I don't want to sound arrogant and say yes. But you know by now there's a pretty good chance we're not just going to go gently into the night."
So no matter how late it gets in the Eastern Time Zone, no one leaves. No one even dares go get a hot dog. Gotta stick around to see what surreal plot line they'll come up with this time. As long as there aren't three outs in the ninth, they keep trying to figure out some new one, just to amuse themselves.
"That," Stanton said, "is what being a Yankee is all about."
So one more night of pinstripe magic had left them limp and hoarse. What else is new? And this time, they weren't even as breathtaking as usual. Sheez, they didn't even wait until the ninth inning this time.
"Yeah, the ninth inning would have been a little more dramatic," Stanton laughed. "But we'll take it." Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com. |
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