Watch out, Astros
These Yankees never doubted they'd complete this comeback
Houston beat down Boston, but now it has to deal with this runaway train of a Yankees team that has won three straight.
CLEVELAND — At the end, the Yankees got to hear one of the great auditory pleasures of sport, the sound of silence, save for their own howling voices and their own rampaging spikes. Around them, Progressive Field emptied in a hurry, 37,802 people dashing away from the celebration on the field, toward a hard winter.
The scoreboard taunted the faithful as they evacuated: Yankees 5, Indians 2. That’s for real. That’s forever. Just five days earlier, this very place had been a baseball asylum, the Indians having seized a 2-0 lead in this best-of-five AL Division Series, this after winning 102 games in the regular season. All that was missing was the victory lap. The Yankees had other ideas. “The fight in this club,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi marveled later, while his players sprayed champagne in the clubhouse, the carbonated evidence of what they’d done, and where they’re going. “All year, that’s what we kept coming back to. Guys who believed in each other. Guys who picked each other up.”
The series, we can say now, turned in one instant, Game 3, a Francisco Lindor drive to right field. If he hits it 2 feet farther, the ball clears Aaron Judge’s massive reach and the Indians have two runs on a night the Yankees scored only one. You can believe that the next few months, Clevelanders will think of that moment and mutter to themselves: “Two lousy feet …”
But the ball didn’t carry those 2 extra feet. It settled in Judge’s glove instead. The Yankees won 1-0 when a fellow member of the Baby Bomber Brigade, Greg Bird, made an Andrew Miller fastball disappear, and they won the next night when the Indians started kicking the ball around in the second inning and didn’t stop until the ninth.
“We made it harder to win in some cases, especially the last two nights,” Indians manager Terry Francona said.
Still, you could almost see the series shift. You could feel the emotion swing. You could tell when the Yankees warmed up Wednesday night they were at home in this biggame atmosphere, and you certainly knew they didn’t fear Corey Kluber because they had treated him like a tomato can in spikes last Friday.
Then Didi Gregorius swung his bat. And swung it again. It was 1-0, and then it was 3-0. To round out the night, he also made a nifty play in executing a killer 6-3 double play that snuffed the Indians’ only rally of the game, after Cleveland had pulled within 3-2 and had the tying and go-ahead runs on base.
“It’s pretty remarkable the season he’s had for us,” Girardi said, but that goes double for the postseason. Remember, it was Gregorius whose three-run jack turned the wild-card game upside down. Heck, it was Gregorius who became the Chosen One to replace the irreplaceable Derek Jeter. The Yankees were hoping for a capable grinder.
What they got was a star instead.
One who happens to love October, too.
“For me I always believed in myself,” Gregorius said. “There’s always people who are going to doubt you. It ends up how hard you work. If you work … it just shows up, for me, during the season.”
Houston awaits, and in the time between now and Friday’s Game 1 of the ALCS, we can list and ponder all the reasons the Astros are the better team, the same as we did a week ago with the Indians. This time it might actually be true. But the Yankees seemed to enjoy playing with the house’s money in this series.
They seemed to like playing the underdog for a change.
“I don’t look at it as beating the odds, because I said from Day 1, I thought we could be really, really good,” Girardi said. “I saw the talent.”
What we see now is the ability, and the skill, to play at that level when the games mean everything, when the pressure is tangible, when the lights shine brightest. It may well be that it was only the 25 men in the room who believed they could come back from 0-2 down in this series. It may only be those 25 who believe they’ll be celebrating a 41st pennant sometime in the next week and a half.
Twenty-five can be enough. Especially when it’s this 25.