Unlikely underdogs

Anything possible for underdog Yanks

Yes, this time the Yankees are the young, scrappy team hoping to knock off an American League powerhouse in the playoffs.

CLEVELAND — Almost 50 years after the fact, Dusty Rhodes would still laugh himself silly just telling the story. It seems that on the morning of Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, Leo Durocher had come storming through the door of the home-team clubhouse at the Polo Grounds, his face red with fury.

“These SOBs h ave their record,” Durocher fumed, “but they ain’t won a damned thing yet!”

Durocher was raging about the Cleveland Indians, who had won 111 games and lost but 43 that year. In his hands he held a newspaper clipping, which he swore contained quotes from some cocky wives of the Cleveland ballplayers, already spending their husbands’ World Series dough. He never did post the article.

“Leo might have been holding a page of coupons for all we knew,” Rhodes said back in 2001. “But he got his point across.”

The point, of course, is that nobody is unbeatable. The Giants helped prove that a few hours later when Willie Mays made a forever catch of Vic Wertz’s line drive, when Rhodes swung at a long, looping curveball from Bob Lemon and hit a 262-foot fly ball that cleared the wall 260 feet from home at the Polo Grounds.

“Lemon threw his glove farther than I hit the ball,” Rhodes laughed.

But Rhodes had spent the better part of half a century understanding one other thing since the Giants engineered that four-game sweep: “Those Indians were astonishingly good,” he said. “We were going to have to be damn near perfect to beat them. And we were perfect.”

Thursday begins the first playoff meeting between a Cleveland team and a New York team in which the Ohioans will be substantial favorites since that 1954 World Series. The Giants famously had to beat the Browns in back-to-back weeks simply to qualify for the fabled 1958 NFL Championship game, but they were equally matched powerhouses. The ’90s-era Knicks dispatched the Cavaliers a few times with little worry.

And both times the Indians have beaten the Yankees in the ALDS — interestingly, in 1997 and 2007, so this meeting comes right on time — they were essentially equal matches whose outcomes hinged on a pair of unforgettable turning points (Sandy Alomar’s homer off Mariano Rivera in 1997, the midges turning Joba Chamberlain into an allyou-can-eat buffet in ’07).

This time, it’s a different story. The Indians won 11 more games than the Yankees across 162. They won five of the seven meetings between the two, but more impressively swept three games at Yankee Stadium in late August. Those were Games 5, 6 and 7 of what became an epic 22-game winning streak, and for almost all of those 27 innings it looked like the Indians simply played the game at a faster speed than the Yankees did.

“That is a team that doesn’t have a lot of weaknesses,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said after the Indians swept a doubleheader, 2-1 and 9-4, on Aug. 30. “They have a dangerous lineup, great pitching and they’ve been through the wars together.”

This will be a different atmosphere the Yankees encounter in Cleveland. All three previous times they’ve met in the postseason (in addition to the ALDS appointments, the Yankees beat Cleveland in the 1998 ALCS) they were visiting an athletically depressed town, one that, famously, hadn’t won a championship in any sport since 1965.

You could literally walk through the lunch-time spots on a game day — the Winking Lizard, Jack Flaps, the Thirsty Parrot — and the locals would happily bend your ear for an hour about all the sporting atrocities they’d endured through the years. But that was before the Cavaliers won it all in 2016, before the Indians came so close to ending their 68-year World Series drought.

Now, the people seem to reflect their new nickname: Believeland. Time was LeBron James could show up to Progressive Field wearing a Yankees cap and the city would freak out for weeks. That time, by all accounts, is gone.

And the locals have been rewarded for their faith with these 102-win Indians, who host the Yankees in Game 1 Thursday, who seem locked and loaded for another playoff run, who are very much the varsity of the American League. The Yankees can win this series, sure. The Indians should win this series.

Assuming the World Series shares aren’t already spent.