Baby Bombers Page 25

  Kahnle also retired all seven batters he faced, and the July trade with the White Sox had paid tangible dividends. As bright as Blake Rutherford’s future might turn out to be in Chicago’s outfield, Robertson and Kahnle had combined for 5⅔ scoreless innings in a win-or-go home postseason game. The Yankees popped champagne in their clubhouse, and Gardner had been right—celebrating was more fun at home.

  “There’s a lot on the line in a one-game playoff like this. Anything can happen,” Gardner said. “As we found out two years ago, it can all come and go pretty quick and everything can be done. To be able to move on, it means a lot."

  There wasn’t much time to savor the accomplishment, as they were off to Cleveland in a matter of hours. The defending American League champions presented a formidable challenge: Terry Francona had piloted the club to 102 wins, including an epic run of twenty-two straight victories from August 24 to September 14, establishing an all-time AL record and second in major league history only to a twenty-six game streak by the 1916 New York Giants. The streak helped Cleveland easily claim the AL Central by seventeen games over Minnesota.

  “They might be the best team in the American League, and last year we knew they had a really good team too,” Gardner said. “We know how good their rotation can be, and offensively and defensively. We’ve just got to play well. If we play well, we’ve got a chance.”

  Though Francona’s rotation featured one of the AL’s best pitchers in Cy Young Award front-runner Corey Kluber, the Indians elected to assign Kluber to pitch ALDS Game 2 so he would be on line to start a potential Game 5 at home. Instead, the Yankees arrived at Progressive Field preparing to face eccentric right-hander Trevor Bauer, who had gone 17-9 with a 4.19 ERA during the regular season.

  Bauer had earned a place in baseball’s litany of bizarre off-field injuries during the 2016 postseason, when he required ten stitches after gnarling the pinky finger of his pitching hand while repairing a drone, then had to exit an ALCS start against the Blue Jays after twenty-one pitches because the gash opened on the mound. There were no such mishaps in the ALDS opener, as the twenty-six-year-old Bauer’s nasty curveball made the Yankees look like a bunch that was not ready for prime time in a 4–0 Indians victory.

  “He varies it. He likes to play around with it a little bit,” Judge said. “He’ll throw in there a little softer, and then in certain counts he’ll go a little harder with it and change up the spin a little bit. He works with it. He’s out there pitching. He’s done a good job this year, and he did a good job tonight. Now we’ve got to pick ourselves up and get ready for tomorrow.”

  Sonny Gray struggled in Game 1, giving up three runs in 3⅓ innings. Fireworks popped and the crowd erupted in a cry of “Bruuuuuce!” after a two-run homer by the Indians’ Jay Bruce, a left-handed hitting outfielder whom Cashman had entertained acquiring during the summer months. Ultimately, Cashman balked at the Mets’ request to absorb the remaining $4.2 million of Bruce’s $13 million salary; the thirty-year-old slugger went to Cleveland instead. Bauer shut down the Bombers, holding them hitless until Aaron Hicks doubled off the left-field wall with one out in the sixth inning.

  “We were in the game the whole time,” Todd Frazier said. “We were within grand slam range, but we just couldn’t get on base at the right time. If you get three hits, there’s no chance you are going to win a game like that.”

  Bauer settled for 6⅔ innings of scoreless, two-hit ball, striking out eight, as Judge and Sanchez combined to go 0-for-8 with five strikeouts. Cleveland hurlers tipped their hands at the scouting report on the Bombers duo; twenty-one of the thirty-five pitches they saw were curveballs. Judge in particular had struggled to make solid contact with hooks since the All-Star break, hitting .104 (7-for-67) on breaking balls put into play.

  “They need to beat us three times,” Dellin Betances said. “They’ve got great pitching, but at the same time we believe in the guys we have here. We’ve always fought back when we’re down.”

  Kluber loomed large for Game 2. Nicknamed “Klubot” for his stoic, robotic demeanor, the thirty-one-year-old righty had held the Yankees to three runs and six hits over seventeen innings (0.86 ERA) in two dominant regular season starts, striking out eighteen against two walks. New York was countering with its stopper, CC Sabathia, who’d gone 9-0 with a 1.71 ERA in ten starts immediately following a team loss during the regular season.

  Sabathia shrugged that off as a statistical quirk, saying that he had never been one to look too deeply into the numbers, but the Yanks knew they could count on the big man to empty the tank. That was especially true in Cleveland, where he’d made his name after being called up to the big leagues as a celebrated twenty-year-old prospect.

  “I’ve pitched here a lot,” Sabathia said. “I played here parts of almost eight years, so I’m very familiar with the city, a lot of the fans. A lot of who I am as an adult, as a male, as an adult man, Cleveland kind of shaped that. Three of my kids were born here. I have a lot of history in the city.”

  He was about to write more, and perhaps the calendar—Friday the 13th—should have indicated that the contest would be anything but mundane. The plan to force Kluber into deep counts worked with aplomb, as Gary Sanchez and Aaron Hicks each homered off the ace, sending him to the showers after 2⅔ innings in arguably the worst start of his career.

  Sanchez hit a two-run homer to dead center field in the first inning and Hicks hammered a three-run shot in the third, chasing Kluber. Greg Bird’s two-run homer off Mike Clevinger in the fifth inning seemed to seal the deal, putting New York up 8–3 at the time.

  “At 8–3, we were comfortable with that and we feel confident, but anything can happen,” Bird said. “There was still a lot of game left.”

  Sabathia had allowed three runs in the first two innings before settling in, and had retired twelve of the last thirteen batters when Joe Girardi walked to the mound in the sixth inning, lifting the starter after seventy-seven pitches. Girardi wanted the game in the hands of the bullpen and his choice was Chad Green, who recorded the second out of the inning on an Austin Jackson flyout, then got ahead of Yan Gomes 0-2 but couldn’t put the catcher away.

  Gomes dented the left-field wall with a line drive double, and Francona sent up the left-handed Lonnie Chisenhall to pinch-hit for Giovanny Urshela. Green again worked the count to 0-2 before zipping the seventh pitch of the at-bat inside, a 95.7-mph fastball that home plate umpire Dan Iassogna believed had clipped Chisenhall’s right hand.

  The ball caromed sharply into Gary Sanchez’s glove, and Sanchez immediately yelled, “Foul! Foul!” while looking into the visiting dugout for help, believing that the pitch had hit the knob of Chisenhall’s bat. If so, it would have registered as a foul tip and an inning-ending strikeout, since Sanchez caught the ball.

  “I definitely heard something,” Sanchez said. “I wasn’t sure if it hit the bat. I didn’t think it hit him because he never reacted to that. He stood still there.”

  Chisenhall later said that he felt vibration in his right hand and trotted to first base, believing that replay would sort out the issue one way or the other. From the bench, Chase Headley also shouted for a replay, believing Chisenhall’s actions were not consistent with a player who had been hit by a pitch. Girardi hesitated.

  Brett Weber, the Yankees’ video coordinator, frantically refreshed his replay screen, but the super slow-motion video that would be seen in living rooms across North America did not arrive in time for Weber to make a definitive call. It wasn’t until the next batter was already walking to home plate that Weber was able to report what had actually happened, and Girardi was spotted reacting with frustration to the news.

  “Slowly it trickled down that it didn’t hit him, and now everybody is like, ‘We should have done something different,’” Headley said. “But in the heat of the moment, those types of things can happen. That turned out to be a huge play. It’s the biggest play of the game. I think when you get word that the call was right, why would you chall
enge it?”

  After the game, Girardi said that he had already gone beyond the thirty seconds allotted for managers to issue a challenge, though he later acknowledged that he—not the umpires—had motioned for play to continue. Since the use of replay was expanded in 2014, Girardi’s philosophy had been not to waste challenges on inconclusive replays, and the Yankees’ seventy-five percent success rate in 2017 was the best in the majors.

  Though Girardi understood that he had two challenges remaining, he added somewhat confusingly that, being a former catcher, “I think about rhythm and never want to take a pitcher out of rhythm, and have them stand over there [for] two minutes to tell me that he wasn’t hit.”

  Given the eventual outcome, Green would have preferred to have his tempo altered. Two pitches later, Green snapped off a backdoor slider that Francisco Lindor clanged off the right-field foul pole, trimming Cleveland’s deficit to 8–7. Green said that as Lindor rounded the bases, it hadn’t occurred to him that the Yankees could have been out of the inning with a challenge.

  “For me, it didn’t even register that it would have been a foul tip and strike three until after,” Green said. “It was an important part of the game, but it just didn’t work out in my favor.”

  Bruce tied the game in the eighth with an opposite-field homer off David Robertson, who seemed to be running on fumes after the fifty-two-pitch outing in the Wild Card game, and the night stretched into extra innings. New York wasted a gift error by third baseman Erik Gonzalez in the 11th when pinch-runner Ronald Torreyes was picked off second base on a snap throw by the catcher Gomes. In the Yanks’ dugout, Todd Frazier fired a paper cup at the wall in frustration.

  “The plan right there was for [Gardner] to bunt and me to go to third. I was trying to be aggressive there,” Torreyes said. “I wanted to make sure that I had a good lead. I tried to get back, I did everything I could to get back as fast as I could. But I couldn’t make it.”

  Two innings later, Gomes knocked home the winning run with a single down the third base line off Dellin Betances, who was beginning his third inning of relief. The mood in the visiting clubhouse was one of stunned disbelief, with the players trying to comprehend that they were now down 0–2 in a series that could have—should have—been tied.

  “When you go in somewhere and you can split the first couple of games, you kind of feel like, ‘Mission Accomplished,’” Headley said. “We had an opportunity to do that, and to let a big one slip away was disappointing. But I think guys were confident that we could beat these guys.”

  Girardi became an instant scapegoat. In the early morning hours immediately following the loss, Aroldis Chapman “liked” an Instagram comment by another user that read, “Let’s hope Joe’s contract is not renewed after the season. He’s a complete imbecile.” The next day, Chapman apologized to Girardi; since Girardi does not use social media in any form, the manager required a primer on what Instagram was and how it works.

  “I really believe it was an accident. We talked about it,” Girardi said. “He came in and apologized. He was concerned about it that night. He had conversations with people, not me, because it was two or three in the morning. I had to ask how it works because I don’t know how that works. I guess it’s easy to hit a button when you’re scrolling. I really believe him, I take his word for it that it was an accident and we move forward.”

  Girardi had bigger fish to fry. As anticipated, he was roasted in the tabloids and on sports talk radio for his blunder, warning his family that they should prepare to hear him get booed before Game 3 at Yankee Stadium. As the team returned to New York for a workout day, Girardi delivered a cleaner version of the press conference that he had held in Cleveland, admitting that he had “screwed up” and was feeling “horrible” about it.

  “Let’s just see what happens tomorrow and as we move forward,” Girardi said. “That will probably determine the severity of it.”

  The contest took place ten years and one day to the date of what Joe Torre would later call his greatest regret in a dugout, which happened to take place on the same patch of turf. In Game 2 of the 2007 ALDS at what was then called Jacobs Field, Torre believed he should have pulled the Yankees off the diamond when a swarm of Lake Erie midges enveloped pitcher Joba Chamberlain. New York lost that game and the series, marking Torre’s final tour as the team’s manager.

  It seemed that if the Yankees were to save Girardi from a similar fate, they needed to win the next three games and end Cleveland’s season. A window into the players’ thinking came courtesy of Gary Sanchez, who whipped out his iPhone and tapped out a tweet that would generate thousands of likes and retweets: “Every great story happened when someone decided not to give up.”

  Girardi’s warning to his wife and children was prescient; when players from both teams were introduced prior to Game 3, an extended, loud boo trailed Girardi from the dugout to the first-base line. Hours before, as part of a ten-minute session with the team’s beat reporters in his Yankee Stadium office, Girardi touched upon the uncertainty concerning his future as the team’s manager. It seemed like an odd topic to discuss so freely before a must-win playoff game.

  “I think an organization has to do what they’re comfortable with, right?” Girardi said. “And it may not always agree with the person that is either being fired or however it goes. But I think that’s Hal and Brian’s decision. Whatever their decision is, you know, I’ll live with.”

  Girardi had addressed his team briefly before Game 3, apologizing for what had taken place in Cleveland while reminding his players that he had believed in them since the first day of spring training, and he still did so. Todd Frazier had been the first to speak up, shouting, “Let’s go!” as he led the Yankees out of the clubhouse and toward their dugout.

  “He talked to us for a little bit, had a quick meeting,” Gregorius said. “He admitted to it. It just shows everybody is united. Everybody has accountability. That’s the best thing. If you made a mistake, you admit it. You pass it on. That’s in the past. All he told us was, ‘Hey, let’s play one game at a time right now, and that’s all we can control right now. Whatever happened in the past happened in the past,’ We, as a team, we always have each other’s back.”

  The Yankees had the house on their side, having played exceptionally all season at Yankee Stadium, where they owned a 51-30 record at home that rated as the best in the American League. Now, with thousands of pairs of stomping feet making its triple decks quiver and liquids flying through the air anytime something positive happened on the field, many observed that the building was finally beginning to look, sound and feel like the old Stadium.

  “I’ve never been a part of something like that,” Judge said. “I heard stories about the old Yankee Stadium, what it was like during the playoff runs then. What I’ve experienced in the couple of home games in the playoffs is out of this world. It’s a jungle out there. They’re behind us every pitch. It’s a real home field advantage.”

  Todd Frazier agreed; for a moment, he said that he was transported to 1995, when he’d been a nine-year-old in the far reaches of the upper deck for New York’s fifteen-inning Game 2 ALDS win over the Mariners.

  “It was crazy. I remember telling my dad, ‘Hey, man, are we going to be all right up here?’" Frazier said. "He’s like, ‘Yeah, we’ll be all right.’ They’re exciting. You can hear the crowd playing a big part. We appreciate them and the way they’re getting after it, man. We’re having fun. It’s just a great place to play, and with the crowd behind us 100 percent, seems like every pitch, it helps out that much more.”

  Mariano Rivera had pitched the final 3⅓ innings of that epic against Seattle, and he was an appropriate guest for Game 3 of the ALDS, firing a cutter over the outside corner for a ceremonial first pitch strike. Wearing a pinstriped No. 42 jersey over a collared shirt, the forty-seven-year-old Rivera looked like he could still get big league hitters out, but so could Masahiro Tanaka.

  Claiming the mound from Rivera, Tanaka fired wha
t he called “probably the biggest win that I have gotten since I came here,” handcuffing the Indians to three hits over seven scoreless innings by getting them to flail regularly at his lethal splitter over the course of a ninety-two-pitch effort.

  The bright lights and pressure-packed atmosphere were exactly what Tanaka had envisioned when an eight-person contingent of team officials traveled to Los Angeles in January 2014, going up against at least nine other interested clubs to sell the Japanese standout on why he should accept $155 million of the Bombers’ cash.

  “I came here to pitch in these types of games, and to be able to help the team win in these types of games,” Tanaka said. “As a player, those are the moments that you want to go in there and shine the most.”

  Judge’s large frame saved two runs and potentially the season in the sixth inning, leaping at the right-field wall to deny Lindor’s bid for a Yankee Stadium special. Chants of “M-V-P!” echoed throughout the crowd of 48,614, and Judge’s glove-work made it easy to look past his three strikeouts and a walk, as he remained hitless in the Division Series.

  “I wasn’t making any contact at the plate, so you’ve got to make an impact on the game somehow,” Judge said. “Luckily, I was able to do it on defense.”

  Indians right-hander Carlos Carrasco shut down the Yanks through 5⅔ innings, and Greg Bird provided the only offense of the night, turning on a 96-mph Andrew Miller fastball for a majestic seventh inning homer that landed in the second deck of the right field seats.

  It was the kind of moment that had kept Bird sane and focused through what seemed to be an interminable series of doctors’ waiting rooms, abbreviated minor league assignments, and finally a mid-summer surgical procedure. Bird screamed and pumped his fist as he began to run to first base, then repeatedly thumped his chest when he returned to the dugout. Gary Sanchez said that it was the first time he could remember ever seeing the stoic Bird so animated.