NOT ENOUGH
It's gonna be a long winter after falling short vs. Sox
FOR a tantalizing instant, time stood still at Yankee Stadium. The bases were loaded in the bottom of the ninth and the fans — those of the 49,641 who remained, anyway, those who hadn’t abandoned the cause — were dizzy with delight.
There are times as a sports fan when you don’t just wish for the impossible, you can see it. You can feel it. You can anticipate it. This was one of those times. A 4-1 Red Sox lead had already melted to 4-2. Craig Kimbrel, the Red Sox’s closer, looked like he was ready to burst into tears. He’d walked a pair and hit another and allowed a soft single.
Now he had to throw fastball to Gary Sanchez, full count, sacks juiced, the season standing out there on those loaded bases. And Sanchez squared it up. In July or August, when the ball carries more generously in The Bronx, maybe that travels 5 or 6 feet farther. At Fenway Park, at the least, the ball hits high off The Wall for a game-tying double, probably finds its way into the Monster Seats. But this was October. This was Yankee Stadium. The ball died in Andrew Benintendi’s glove.
The season perished five minutes later.
“You’re always chasing Utopia, you know,” Aaron Boone said.
The Yankees’ manager had a scratchy voice and a sullen disposition, because he wasn’t ready to lock the stadium doors for the winter. He wasn’t ready to say goodbye to a baseball team that soared so high, so long this season, that won 102 games in total, that was every bit as good as any team in baseball.
Just not as good as the one they’d just played.
“These guys staying the moment, play the right way, run the bases well,” Alex Cora said, saluting this Boston club that has made his rookie year as a manager a wire-towire dream ride so far. “We’re a complete team. We rely on every- one to win games.”
The Yankees, in the end, didn’t have near enough guys they could count on, not in the teeth of the fight, and that issue is now officially one that Giancarlo Stanton, more than any of the others, must wear. He finished the series at a sickly .222 with zero extra-base hits and a diminished presence that was shocking to behold.
In the ninth inning, the Yankees and the crowd had already gotten in Kimbrel’s head, a four-pitch walk to Aaron Judge and a scratch single to Didi Gregorius putting two on with no outs for Stanton. It was a moment screaming for a leading man, and Stanton is surely paid the part.
“I have to put the ball in play there,” Stanton would say later. “I have to get a pitch over the plate and keep the line moving.”
He didn’t put the ball in play. He waved weakly at three breaking pitches, never came close to any of them, and in the process he tossed Kimbrel a life preserver that he would wind up clinging to for dear life. The Yankees still had their chances after Stanton, sure, and for half a heartbeat it looked like Sanchez might pick him up.
Didn’t happen. So much didn’t happen for Stanton this year, a season that began with such promise with two bombs on Opening Day in Toronto and ended in a productive rush to reach 100 RBIs on the dot, but one that included too many times when he simply didn’t look equal to the dueling burdens of his extraordinary talent and his enormous contract.
“I’m going to use this as fuel for next year,” he said. “I think we all are.”
But it will always be Stanton who will have the target on his back. He’ll never be a home-grown fairhaired child, the way his fellow behemoth Judge is. He seems neither inclined nor hard-wired to embrace the bigger-than-life existence a slugger in New York demands; Judge plays that part as easily as he flicks BP meatballs into the second deck.
And even he felt compelled to address the 800-pound elephant that will follow him around for a while when he said, “I’m just as disappointed as the guys who went farther last year and came up short.” In the same way Alex Rodriguez’s biggest hurdle was that he joined a freighter that had already won four titles without him, Stanton, for now, plays the part of an interloper who couldn’t even get the Yankees as far as Houston again.
“The one thing I’m proud of,” Boone said, “is that we always compete.”
They did hold on to every ounce of season they could, straight to the end. They did win an awful lot of baseball games this year. Just not enough of them. The Yankees are the ones who make their own rules of engagement. The Yankees are the ones who pay their stars to deliver on October’s grandest stage. It will be a long winter for all of them.