BACK TO BASEBALL
A year later, Girardi’s Yanks focused on Sox, not A-Rod
EXACTLY one year ago, the Yankees were a tangled mess of emotions and ambitions, of corporate agenda and circus atmosphere, replete with enough red noses and floppy shoes to go around for everybody.
That was a Yankees-Red Sox series too, at Fenway Park. This was before the Sox went on a late-season push to win the AL East; the Yankees won two out of three and they inched within 3 ½ games of Boston for the second wild card, and Joe Girardi would have given just about anything for someone to ask him about that.
But Girardi wasn’t a baseball manager that week in Boston as much as he was an unwitting carnival barker, because as you may remember those were the final days of A-Rod. His last game actually was back in The Bronx on Aug. 12, but the lead-up was three long days and nights in Boston: Because how else could Alex Rodriguez’s career have ended than that?
“These games count, you know,” Girardi had said with his signature half-smile, half-smirk before that last game at Fenway exactly one year ago, but 16 of the 20 questions he was asked before the game were A-Rod questions and by then the manager had gotten used to the absurdity of it all. As if to symbolically throw up his hands, he had started A-Rod that night, and had seen him go 0-for-4 with an RBI, Sox fans showering him with invective on one last night, for old time’s sake.
One year later, you can believe Girardi will be the happiest fellow at Yankee Stadium (even if it will be hard to tell) simply because the circus has left town, the Sox are coming to town, and there is nothing at all to divert anyone’s attention from baseball. The Yankees are still doing the chasing, the same as a year ago, but there is no longer any doubt they stand unified behind one corporate mission.
“This is very familiar,” Girardi said earlier this week. “This is when it gets fun, when you look at the schedule and see nothing but big games coming up.”
A year after obscuring an entire Red SoxYankees series with the A-Rod Follies, we are back to where we should be with these teams, back to what’s most familiar, and most fun. Between now and Sept. 3, these two ancient foes will play each other 10 times, 10 times in 24 days, 10 times that surely will tilt the balance of power in the East one way or the other.
The Yankees and the Sox have chased each other all year, back and forth, one team getting hot while the other chills, then swapping places atop the standings. The Red Sox have been baseball’s most precious soap opera much of the summer thanks to an opinionated broadcaster named Eck and a thin-skinned pitcher named David Price, but just when it seemed that drama might overwhelm them, they bring an eight-game winning streak to Yankee Stadium.
The Yankees? They have their own concerns, a kid catcher who lately has been having trouble catching the ball and a kid slugger who lately has been having a hell of a time slugging the ball. But when they are right, they look as dangerous as anyone else in the AL, and that’s all-inclusive. They have that lock-down bullpen. Saturday they will throw Luis Severino, who is starting to summon visions of a young Doc Gooden every time he takes the mound.
And Boston will have Chris Sale on Sunday, and all Sale has done is keep the Sox alive during their spasms of ineptitude and make them look like potential champions during their periods of prosperity. This is what Yankees-Sox has been about for close to a hundred years, and what it is supposed to be about at its very best. A year ago, it was easy to forget that. A year later, it is impossible to. Rodriguez is in a broadcast booth. David Ortiz is living the life of a retired baseball prince. The Yankees and the Sox have fresh faces, fresh batches of names, fresh storylines to tell. Ten times across the next 24 days, they will share a diamond and figure out who really owns the AL East. And who knows? This may well merely be prelude to one more encounter sometime in October.
And that’s when it would really get fun. And familiar.