’04 ALCS collapse fails to inspire
With their season on the line, the Yankees looked to perhaps their worst moment in postseason history for motivation.
Aaron Boone said that to rally the team before Game 4 of the ALCS against the Astros on Sunday, Chad Bohling, the Yankees’ director of mental conditioning, sent out a clip of the video of the Red Sox coming back from an 0-3 deficit against the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS.
“We watched that video,’’ Boone said Sunday afternoon as his team prepared to try to keep its season alive. “We sent it out to the coaches and players.”
Although the Yankees got out to an early 3-0 lead, they ultimately were swept out of The Bronx by the Astros, blowing Game 4, 6-5.
Boone added that in his pregame availability with ESPN Radio on Sunday, Eduardo Perez FaceTimed with one of the stars of that ’04 ALCS, David Ortiz.
“He put Big Papi on and I said ‘Hey’ to him,’’ Boone said. “He had some advice.”
Boone declined to share Ortiz’ words of wisdom, but apparently it didn’t include not bringing up a brutal moment in franchise history to spark your own comeback.
As Boone noted, the Red Sox are “famously” the only team in MLB history to come back from losing the first three games of an ALCS, when they stormed back with four straight wins against the Yankees en route to their first World Series title since 1918.
Boone was out all that year due to the knee injury he suffered following the 2003 season — an injury he suffered playing pickup basketball after he hit the game-winning homer against the Red Sox to end the ’03 ALCS.
Boone’s injury led to the Yankees trading for Alex Rodriguez and the rest is history.
Though Boone sat out the 2004 season, he had signed with Cleveland as he rehabbed from the knee injury and recalled certain aspects of the series vividly.
“They had [Kevin] Millar [saying] ‘Don’t let us win one,’ ” Boone said. “I remember [Dave Roberts’] steal [in Game 4]. The Game 7 [Johnny] Damon homer. … The [Curt] Schilling [bloody sock] game in Game 6. I can hear Millar [saying], ‘Don’t let us win one’ and ‘Why not us?’ ”
The lesson, Boone said, could be applied to this Yankee team. But in the end did not.
They were trying to do all this against an Astros team that entered Sunday having won its first six games of the playoffs and had knocked the Yankees out of the playoffs in each of the teams’ previous postseason meetings.
The trend began when the Astros defeated the Yankees in the 2015 wild-card game and continued in 2017.
That year, the Yankees took Houston to seven games before losing the decisive final game, as the Astros went on to win the World Series for a title that has since been tainted by the team’s sign-stealing scandal.
And in 2019, Houston beat the Yankees in six games in the ALCS.