Happy ending for Yankee haters around
Anyone rooting against the New York Yankees and LeBron James should clip and save the sports headlines from Friday night. Borrowing from the rock group U2, you finally got what you’ve been looking for.
How many enjoyed watching the Yankees end another baseball season without wearing a top hat? The sport’s most storied franchise, the best team money can buy, lost 2-1 to the relatively faceless Tampa Bay Rays in the deciding fifth game of their American League Division Series. That’s 11 consecutive years without a world championship for the Yankees, making one wonder if General Manager Brian Cashman, who assembled this group, should fire himself.
Flipping channels, one could watch the Miami Heat force a sixth game in the NBA Finals with a 111-108 decision over James and the Los Angeles Lakers. The Heat, twice world champions when James took his talents to Florida and meshed his talents with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, try to keep it going tonight and force a Game
7 on Tuesday. James hopes to improve his NBA Finals record to 4- 6 counting two previous stays in Cleveland and currently with the Lakers.
Nothing James can do can please his critics in the media, which include Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless. He forever comes up short to Michael Jordan, he of a 6-0 Finals record, in GOAT (greatest of all time) discussions. No beloved figure is James, seemingly not liked, much less well liked.
After a disjointed summer of sports watching in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, viewers are being treated to a movable feast. Basketball tonight bumps against baseball again ( Game 1 of the ALCS, Tampa Bay vs. Houston) after a full serving of pro football.
It’s sports’ equivalent to a triple feature of “Citizen Kane,” “Casablanca” and “The Godfather” on Turner Classic Movies.
An October fade by the Yankees has become less surprising through the years, detracting from the club’s legacy. It’s as if “Damn Yankees” has become a term of derision used by fans, perhaps a Manhattan cab driver. And a streak of futility enjoyed by anyone who remembers when cheering for the Bronx Bombers, to borrow sportswriter Jim Murray’s classic line, was like rooting for U.S. Steel.
Even devoted Tampa fans (I chat with one by Facebook) entered Game 5 fearfully after a 5-1 Yankee triumph forced the series to the brink. The Yankees would be sending ace Gerrit Cole, the Game 1 winner, to the mound in the role for which he was signed in the offseason. And the Yankees, always mindful of history, would be wearing on their sleeves the number 16 in honor of Hall of Famer Whitey Ford, who died the previous night.
Surely the karma would be too overwhelming for the Rays, a team with a winning record (AL East champs, an 8-2 season record against the Yankees in this most convoluted campaign) but without relative portfolio. One club, after all, has a record
27 World Series titles and does not print the players’ last names on the back of their uniforms — what baseball fan, what Yankee hater, doesn’t know that Jeter was 2, Ruth 3, Gehrig 4, DiMaggio 5, Mantle 7, Reggie 44 and Rivera the last player who shall wear 42?
Tampa Bay, by contrast, lost on its only trip to the Fall Classic (2008). One who remembers Evan Longoria and David Price off that team draws a blank when trying to identify their successors. The Rays play in the eyesore that is Tropicana Field before an apathetic fan base largely comprised of moveins. Surely the force of history, if nothing else, would bring down these upstarts.
“We lost our mojo last night,” my Facebook friend who is a Rays fan summed up her team’s Game 4 defeat.
Yet here were the Rays strik
ing a blow for the underdog, playing the Yankees with the respect owed them but without intimidation. It was October baseball to treasure, well worth waiting for through a 60-game schedule that amounted to a snapshot of the standard 162game slate.
That the Rays won is perhaps not as revealing as that they beat the Yankees at their own game. Mike Brosseau’s eighth-inning home run Friday night marked Tampa Bay’s 11th to New York’s 10 in the five games. Nearly hit in the head by a 101-mph fastball from Yankee reliever Aroldis Chapman in a September game, Brosseau connected off the left-handed fireballer for only the third Tampa Bay hit in a game that all runs came via the long ball.
“The revenge aspect, it’s not a thought in my mind. We put it in the past and we moved on. We moved just straight to business,” Brosseau said. “The battle that we’ve had all year with these guys, to go to Game
5 and have such an unbelievably well- played game, well executed — you can’t script it any better.”
Chapman entered the game in unusual context, striking out the last man in the Tampa Bay seventh with the score 1-1. Cole, pitching on three days’ rest for the first time in his career, received a quick hook, gone after
94 pitches with one out in the sixth after nearly serving up a homer. Cole might have found that surprising in that he told Yankee manager Aaron Boone “give me the ball” before the game.
But it was Tampa Bay, not New York, with the “five o’clock lightning” (late-inning heroics) and Brosseau in the role for the Rays that a Jackson or a Jeter might once have had for the Yankees. Diego Castillo pitched the Tampa Bay night like Rivera might have for the Bombers, needing only Metallica’s recording of “Enter Sandman” as an entrance.
“It’s Another Bomber Bust” read the headline on an inside page in the New York Daily
News while “That Stings” led the back (sports front). Aaron Judge, homering in the fourth inning for the only Yankee run Friday, took full responsibility, “being a leader of this team.”
If he were still running the Yankees, George Steinbrenner would have called together his baseball people by now and asked how a team with the sport’s leading hitter by average, leading home-run hitter and the highest- paid pitcher came up short. Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager and perhaps the only other person in the room, would be at a loss for words. Again.