Another year of almost
With loss to Rays in ALDS, Yankees fall short once again
Moments before leadoff hitter DJ LeMahieu stepped to the plate Friday night — 2,500 miles from New York yet only a heartbeat away from Yankees fans — Aaron Boone looked into the television camera.
“Do this for Whitey,” the Yankee manager said.
Three outs later, a determined Gerrit Cole would take the Petco Park mound in San Diego for the first start of his career on three days’ rest. Whitey Ford, who died Thursday night at age 91 in his Long Island home watching his Yankees, made 156 starts on three days’ rest.
Yes it was a different era, but what the Chairman of the Board and the Yankee legends before and after him did was to push the demands so high that there is only one truth. When the Yankees win the World Series, as they have 27 times, they break even.
Every other year is a failure.
“I hate that question every year,” Boone said. “No one in that room is a failure. Our goal is to win a world championship … We have a team capable of being a champion. We haven’t gotten there yet. I believe, in my heart, we will.”
Baseball is the greatest game and Tampa Bay’s Mike Brosseau proved it again in the decisive fifth game of the American League Division Series. No, baseball doesn’t compare with the athleticism of basketball. Or the relentless ferocity of Stanley Cup overtime hockey. Nor is the scoreboard roulette as exotic as our national pastime: gambling on football.
Yet the untimed drama of the game, its essential ties to its past, the endless chess moves and possibilities for the climatic moment between pitcher and batter — sports ultimate mano y mano — are what led to an unforgettable 10-pitch at-bat that made a hero of an undrafted 26year-old utilityman. One who swore he wasn’t out to settle a score with one of the most menacing closers in baseball.
“No revenge,” Brosseau said after his solo homer in the bottom of the eighth inning against Aroldis Chapman gave the Tampa Bay Rays a gripping a 2-1 victory and ended the Yankee season. “We put that in the past.”
I’d hate to see what would happen if Brosseau really was looking for revenge, because what happened to the Yankees could not have been served any colder. Brosseau worked an 0-2 count with two outs in the eighth to 3-2, fouling off four pitches. You could see Brosseau getting his timing and, sure enough, he stepped into a 100.2 mph Chapman fastball. Exit velocity 105 mph on a line into the empty left-field seats. Exit Yankees. Enter history. It was the first go-ahead home run against the Yankees in the eighth inning or later of a winnertake-all game since Bill Mazeroski in the 1960
World Series.
“Hands down the greatest moment I’ve been part of in baseball,” Rays manager Kevin Cash.
“I mean it’s awful,” Boone said. “The ending is cruel. It really is.”
Chapman, who still has to serve his three-game suspension in 2021, could have killed Brosseau with a 101 mph fastball that missed his head by an inch or two on Sept. 1. The next day a defiant Brosseau hit two home runs at Yankee Stadium and his teammates rejoiced. The Rays, who have one-third the Yankees payroll and seemingly three times the smarts, went on to beat New York eight of 10 games for an easy run to the AL East title that almost everyone believed the Yankees would win.
The Rays were 14-5 in one-run games during the COVID-shortened 60-game season. They are comfortable in tight games as they are with each other. There’s a tightknit joy and camaraderie enviable in professional sports and they seem to feed off their immense distaste for the high and mighty Yankees.
As Cash said menacingly after Chapman’s near beanball, he has “a whole damn stable” of pitchers who can throw 98 mph. He lined up them up perfectly Friday night, getting 2 1⁄ innings
3 out of Tyler Glasnow on two days’ rest, followed by Nick Anderson, Peter Fairbanks and Diego Castillo. Everybody had one shot through the batting order.
Yankees fans are bitter today. It is understandable. The Yankees haven’t been to the World Series since winning it in 2009. This was their year. Yet this group of fearsome hitters is
four years and hundreds of millions of dollars deep and have proven only they are terrific at finishing second.
George Steinbrenner didn’t do second. Yankee fans don’t so second.
If this was the Miss American League pageant, the Yankee would be the ones annually holding hands for the dramatic announcement and then watching the winner get crowned and walk around with the flowers.
And now some want the head of Boone, who has proved he can manage a winner and hasn’t proved he can manage a world champion. Some think Brian Cashman has had a long enough run for a second title in the 21st century. The joint decision to use Deivi Garcia as a Game 2 opener followed by J.A. Happ clearly was a blunder. Still the Yankees did even the series Thursday night and, with No. 16 honoring Ford on their sleeves, and an ultra-focused Cole, the series was there to be won Friday night. There would have been great romance in the victory that pushed them to the ALCS.
It didn’t happen. They didn’t hit in the closing innings. They didn’t hit with men on base. Chapman, hardly an embraceable figure since his suspension for spousal abuse in 2016, is at the tip of every angry Yankee fan’s tongue. When Boone used Mike Ford in the eighth to pinchhit for catcher Kyle Higashioka, whose defense was stellar and might have saved Game 4, you could almost hear the howls on Twitter. Gary Sanchez is another one on the Yankee fans hate list.
Cole got $324 million to prove himself an ace he did everything he could on short rest. He struck out nine in 51⁄ innings and the
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only hit he allowed was a fastball Austin Meadows swatted 370 feet for a solo homer in the fifth. Aaron Judge, who broke out of a slump to slice a 340-foot homer to the short right field porch in the fourth, may have caught Meadows’ ball if he hadn’t jumped headfirst into the wall’s protective overhang.
“Every year we come to spring training with a stacked team, ready to roll and compete for a World Series title,” Judge said. “To come up short for the last few years is tough.”
The Yankees obviously need to get their starting pitching staff in order. They need to re-sign LeMahieu. The hot stove will get hotter and Cashman will burn millions more. Names will arrive. Names will leave. That’s the way it always is with the Yankees, only title No. 28 has yet to arrive.
And it has to really dent the Bronx ego to see a guy like Brosseau, undrafted out of high school, undrafted among 1,206 players out of college, signed for a $1,000 bonus, to work his way out of minor league oblivion to deliver one of the greatest paybacks in major league history.
“You couldn’t script it,” Meadows kept saying. “It’s unbelievable. There were no fans, but it was so exciting it felt like there were.”
Meadows talked about tears in his clubhouse. Boone talked about tears in his. They weren’t the same kind of tears.
“It stings,” Boone said. “I believe it makes us closer and I hope it makes us hungrier. But it is a hurting room.”
Another year of almost.