CHEAP CHAMPAGNE
Sorry Red Sox celebrate East crown despite 9th-inning choke job at Stadium
Red Sox blow 3-run 9th-inning lead on Mark Teixeira grand slam, but celebrate AL East crown anyway thanks to Blue Jays’ loss to O’s.
Sometimes the moment is all that really matters. For several days now, Mark Teixeira admitted in all of his post-game glory, he and his teammates have been pretty much resigned to their fate as also-rans this season.
So when he came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth, knowing the Orioles had won, knowing a Yankee loss would officially eliminate them from the wildcard race, he wasn’t thinking about saving the season.
“We did notice that (the Orioles’ score),’’ Teixeira said, “but we’ve known our odds were long for a while now. We weren’t doing the math in our heads.’’
In other words, they know it’s over. They’ve known for awhile, really since that four-game sweep in Boston two weeks ago. Even with three more games against the Orioles at the Stadium to cling to as a potential Hail Mary, the presence of teams like the Tigers, Mariners and Astros in the wild-card race negate such grand illusion.
Yet there was no shortage of powerful incentive, for Teixeira or his teammates. In their situation, nothing could have been sweeter than a ninth-inning comeback to keep the Red Sox from celebrating an AL East title-clinching on the Yankees’ home field.
Teixeira, meanwhile, is counting down the days to retirement, looking for one more moment to cherish.
So when he crushed a fastball off Joe Kelly that soared through a heavy wind to land in the bleachers in right-center, giving the Yankees a 5-3 victory, Teixeira couldn’t have been more giddy.
“I hope that’s the last home run I hit,’’ he said during a TV interview on the field, and only semi-amended that sentiment in the clubhouse.
“I’ll still be trying to hit a home run,’’ he said with a laugh, speaking of the final four games. “But I’ll be happy with some line-drive doubles.
“You don’t want a wall-scraper in an 8-0 game to be your last one. You want it to be a grand slam against the Red Sox. That’s as good as it gets right there.’’
It couldn’t keep the Sox from clinching the division. The Orioles’ win over the Blue Jays had already made it official, and so what would have been a most painful loss was forgotten easily as the Sox held the typical champagne celebration in their clubhouse.
Maybe it was small consolation for the Yankees, but don’t think they didn’t relish it, especially on the heels of that killer weekend in Fenway Park.
“You never want a team to celebrate on your field,’’ Teixeira said. “But more than that, it shows the type of team we are. We’ve been fighting all year.’’
For Teixeira, meanwhile, the moment was a long-time coming. It was the 409th home run of his distinguished career, and his first walk-off in the regular season. He did have a memorable walk-off to beat the Twins in the 11th inning of Game 2 of the 2009 ALDS, en route to the Yankees’ world championship, yet on a personal level he seemed to cherish this one even more.
No doubt the ticking clock on his career, with only four games remaining, helped him feel that way.
“That was more important from a team perspective,’’ he said, “but if this is my last home run, it feels good.’’
Say this for Teixeira: He is going out with quite a bang. He hit a game-tying home run in the ninth inning in Toronto a few nights ago, which came with the rarest of bat flips from him — as payback of sorts for the bench-clearing incident he felt the Blue Jays incited.
On this night, however, he dropped his bat and started running, not sure if
the ball would reach the seats because of what he called “a two-club wind,’’ a golf term to describe the wind blowing in from right.
“I would have looked pretty bad if I flipped the bat and it didn’t go out,’’ he said with a laugh. “I’ll leave the bat flips to the rest of the league after this.’’
That’s never been his style, anyway. Teixeira’s been a class act as a Yankee, right to the end, in fact, telling Joe Girardi that he’d be content to sit on the bench in his final days, if that’s what the manager wanted.
And for awhile, after Teixeira announced on Aug. 5 that he would retire at the end of the season, it seemed he might spend most of those days on the bench, after Tyler Austin arrived with a flourish in mid-August, along with Aaron Judge.
Their early show of home-run power, along with that of Gary Sanchez, produced the birth of the Baby Bombers, but when only Sanchez kept hitting, Girardi turned to the veteran first baseman.
And Teixeira has delivered here at the end. His home runs couldn’t save the season, but you could hardly tell as he stood beaming at his locker Wednesday night. Sometimes the moment is bigger than all of that.