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  Two batters later, Altuve smashed Severino’s first pitch into left field—out of the reach of a leaping Frazier at third base—to drive in another two runs.

  New York threatened in the sixth inning, getting two men on against Verlander, who fell behind Sanchez in a 3-0 count. Given the green light to swing away, Sanchez was sitting on a fastball but instead said he was “surprised” by a slider, weakly nubbing it to Correa at shortstop. Another rally stalled in the seventh as Verlander walked Greg Bird, then hit Starlin Castro with a pitch to put runners at first and second with none out.

  Hicks prepared to drop his bat and head to first base after watching a 95-mph fastball tail outside with a 3-1 count, but home plate umpire Jim Reynolds rang Hicks up for strike two. Four foul balls followed, including a deep drive down the right field line that momentarily hushed the crowd, before Verlander struck out Hicks with the tenth pitch of the at-bat.

  “I felt like that pitch was outside,” Hicks said. “I’m getting ready to walk to first base and the next thing you know, he calls a strike. Now I’ve got to battle 3-2 against a very good pitcher. Sometimes it doesn’t go your way.”

  Frazier followed by barreling an 0-1 fastball to the 404-foot marker in left-center field, where it was reeled in by George Springer, who jumped against the padded wall to secure the deep drive for a long, loud out. Watching from the mound, Verlander raised both of his arms in celebration of Springer’s play.

  “Right off the bat, I could’ve sworn it was going out,” Frazier said. “If you play long enough, you basically know if it’s going to go or not, and it was one of the best balls I squared up this whole postseason. I guess it just died and I didn’t get enough.”

  Challenged by a 93-mph Brad Peacock fastball, Judge hit his fourth homer of the postseason, a titanic eighth inning shot that carried toward the train in left field. That cut Houston’s lead to two runs, but David Robertson picked an inopportune time for his roughest outing of the year. Houston pulled away for a 7–1 victory as Robertson allowed hits to all four men he faced, including a homer that Altuve one-handed over the left-field wall.

  It was now win or winter for the Yankees, who had named Sabathia as their probable starter in the event of a Game 7. Houston hadn’t taken that liberty, and it wasn’t until the Yankees had showered and were dressing at their lockers that they learned Charlie Morton had been tabbed as the Astros’ starter. Morton had been solid during the regular season, going 14-7 with a 3.62 ERA, resurrecting his career with some velocity gains after middling results in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It didn’t matter who was on the mound; if A.J. Hinch had activated Nolan Ryan or Mike Scott for Game 7, the Yankees needed to hit them.

  “I’m excited. What an opportunity,” Judge said. “We wouldn’t want it any other way. We’ve been in this situation before. Wild Card games, in Cleveland, same kind of thing. Nothing changes. The mindset is still the same. Go out there and fight, prepare the same way we’ve been doing all year. We’ve had our backs up against the wall. Just continue to do that.”

  There was no rah-rah speech prior to Game 7; Girardi trusted his players to know what they needed to do, and did not believe the Houston fans would rattle them, pointing out that they had experienced hostile crowds within the division all year long. Though the Yankees were playing in their fifth potential elimination game of the postseason, Girardi acknowledged that it was different knowing that the World Series was on the line.

  “You feel like you can almost grab hold of it,” Girardi said. “And it can be snatched away from you really easily, too.”

  The decibel level spiked as soon as Morton fired a 96-mph fastball over the plate for a strike to Brett Gardner, and it took one of the finest plays ever made in a postseason setting to quiet the crowd. That took place in the second inning, when Aaron Judge robbed Yuli Gurriel of a possible homer, leaping and slamming his left wrist into the top of the right-field wall before tumbling to the warning track. Judge nonchalantly pulled the baseball out of his glove and flashed it to right field umpire Jim Reynolds while his teammates waved their caps and applauded.

  Aaron Judge’s six-foot-seven frame came in handy during ALCS Game 7, as the future AL Rookie of the Year memorably stole a home run from the Astros’ Yuli Gurriel. (© Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports)

  “That’s why you play. I wish every game was like that,” Judge said. “That’s why you grind through 162, for this opportunity and this moment. There’s nothing like it. The crowd is into every pitch. It’s what you dream of.”

  Judge’s daring effort helped Sabathia evade trouble through the first three frames, but the lefty’s luck ran out when Evan Gattis slammed a slider over the wall in left-center field leading off the fourth inning. Girardi turned the game over to his bullpen, calling upon Kahnle, who needed one pitch to escape a two on, one out jam in the fourth.

  Greg Bird opened the fifth with a solid double to right field off Morton, and the Yanks sensed that this was their chance. Castro struck out, but Hicks worked a four pitch walk as Morton’s curveball skipped away from catcher Brian McCann, allowing Bird to advance to third base. As both teams learned in Game 1, speed was not among the attributes that Bird had been blessed with, but Todd Frazier walked to the plate knowing that a fly ball would tie the game.

  Frazier’s eyes widened when Morton threw him a 95-mph fastball down in the zone, but instead of lofting a fly ball, the hack generated a two-hopper to the left side of the infield. Bird broke on contact, and third baseman Alex Bregman ranged to his left, fielded the ball and delivered what Bregman would later call “a Peyton Manning dime” to McCann, who dropped his glove in exactly the right place to catch Bird’s spikes in front of home plate.

  “The play was on the ground, so you go,” Bird said. “Generally, when that’s the case if it’s a slow roller, you shut it down. But it was kind of a ’tweener and I went. You’ve got to score a run, so I went. No regrets.”

  Morton then induced Chase Headley to hit a ground ball to the right side that was fielded on the outfield grass by Altuve in the Astros’ overshift, stranding two men on. That was it for the Yanks; Altuve homered and McCann blasted a two-run double off Kahnle in the fifth to open a 4-0 lead.

  The Astros handed over the pitching to Lance McCullers Jr., who snapped off curveball after curveball—twenty-four of them, in fact—to hold the Yankees scoreless on one hit over the final four innings. To borrow Girardi’s analogy from earlier in the series, it was Rocky II all over again: Balboa was leading with his left and Creed was headed for the canvas. In the visiting clubhouse, CC Sabathia shed tears, something he said that he had not done for a very long time. Others stared silently, refusing to remove their uniforms.

  “We were one game away from the World Series,” Bird said. “It just sucks to lose, plain and simple. We were close. We did a lot of great things this year. There are a lot of things we can reflect on and say we did well, but we can get better.”

  If you had to boil the ALCS down to a single sentence, the most damning reason that the Yankees were pointing their charter flight east instead of toward Los Angeles was that they had managed no more than one run in any of the four games at Minute Maid Park. They drowned their sorrows that night in Houston, then flew to New York the next afternoon.

  “The closer you get, the harder it hurts when things are over,” Gardner said. “ALCS Game 7, that’s about as close as we can get to the World Series without getting there. I’m disappointed in the way things ended up, but not disappointed in the way the guys fought this year, the hard work that we put in all year long. We tried as hard as we could, we just came up short. We ran into a really good team and some really good pitching.”

  The Yankees’ 2017 season had started on February 24 with the opener of their thirty-four-game exhibition schedule. The clock read 10:19 p.m. Central Time as Bird lofted a McCullers curveball toward center field, where George Springer camped underneath it, securing the ball as red streamers began to rain down from the roof. Including sp
ring training, this had been game number 209 in 239 days for the Yankees, and they returned to their lockers wishing that they could play one more.

  “We’ll be thinking about this night until spring training of next year,” Judge said. “We’re going to fight and try to get better in the offseason. We’ll rest a little bit, but then we’ll try to get better every day. We didn’t win the World Series, so you’re not really satisfied. That’s what you want. That’s why you play and why you train in the offseason. It’s all for the opportunity to win the World Series and we came up short.”

  EPILOGUE

  The clubhouse doors remained closed for a few extra minutes after the Yankees vacated the visiting dugout at Minute Maid Park, and Joe Girardi gathered his team for what would be his final address as the team’s manager. Saying that he understood how much it stung to get so close to the ultimate goal and fall short, Girardi urged his players not to hang their heads, telling them that they had a great deal to be proud of.

  “He just said, ‘This team has fought the whole year,’” Aaron Judge said. “Through injuries, ups and downs, this team always came to play every day. It’s something that as a rookie seeing the veterans do that, I had a lot of fun playing with them. Watching older guys prepare like [Matt] Holliday, CC [Sabathia], [Chase] Headley, Gardy [Brett Gardner]. What a crew we had.”

  A few minutes later, Girardi made the long walk to the press conference room on the first-base side of Minute Maid Park, ignoring the revelry taking place while the Astros turned their diamond into a raging all-night dance party. Girardi had been enthused about the roster’s potential when they left spring training, believing in their clubhouse leadership and ability to score runs.

  Yet, in his most optimistic moments, Girardi couldn’t have predicted that Judge would unanimously win the AL’s Rookie of the Year Award, that Gary Sanchez would lead all catchers in runs, homers, RBIs, and slugging percentage despite missing a month of the season, or that Luis Severino would finish third in the AL Cy Young race after being banished to the bullpen and minors the year before.

  “It is pretty special how quickly they came,” Girardi said. “I believe that there’s more and there’s more talent down below that are going to continue to push people. It was a lot of fun to manage this group, it really was. I’m as proud of this group as I’ve been of any team I’ve ever managed.”

  On the Monday morning after ALCS Game 7, Brian Cashman spent most of the afternoon on the telephone in his Yankee Stadium office, speaking with managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner. During that lengthy conversation, Cashman officially made a recommendation that had been percolating in the GM’s mind for a considerable amount of time.

  Speaking of issues that he had seen firsthand and investigated concerning communication and connectivity with the players, Cashman suggested that they should allow Girardi’s contract to expire and begin the search for a new manager.

  Steinbrenner replied that he not only would accept that recommendation, but despite a decade in which Girardi averaged ninety-one wins per season while leading club to six postseason appearances and a World Series title, he had also warmed to the idea of having a fresh voice in the dugout.

  Joe Girardi averaged 91 wins over his 10 seasons as the Yankees’ manager from 2008-17, but general manager Brian Cashman cited “communication and connectivity” as areas in which he believed the former big league catcher was lacking. (© Keith Allison)

  “You’ve got to consider the fact that you’ve got a young team, and that maybe a different type of leadership perhaps is needed for a younger team than it is for a veteran team,” Steinbrenner said. “This was not a decision that we took lightly, and not a decision that had to do with two or three weeks. It had to do with two or three years, observing things and hearing things.”

  Making it to the ALCS in what was widely expected to be a rebuilding campaign had been an unexpected treat, with the Baby Bombers developing into legitimate contenders ahead of schedule. With Judge, Sanchez, and Severino, the Yankees were the third team in history to have a 200-strikeout pitcher and two 30-home run hitters, all age twenty-five or younger, in the same season. The others had been the 1961 Giants (Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, and Willie McCovey) and the 2009 Brewers (Yovani Gallardo, Ryan Braun, and Prince Fielder).

  Acknowledging that the easy, safe decision would have been to “plug-and-play” for more years with Girardi, Cashman also voiced his doubts that Girardi’s clenched-fist intensity would be the best fit for the young roster. A World Series victory, Steinbrenner said, might not have been enough to bring Girardi back for another year at the helm.

  “I’m sure there would have been more pressure,” Steinbrenner said. “It would’ve been a more difficult decision to make, but I still believe I would have made it because I felt that was what was best for the organization going forward.”

  The August clash with Gary Sanchez, in which Girardi publicly called out the catcher’s defense as needing “to improve, bottom line,” and his subsequent benching of Sanchez for the same reason stood out as one very public example of Girardi having an issue connecting with a younger player. Sanchez never complained publicly, but Girardi’s actions seemed out of character for a manager who often went to great lengths to defend players from outside criticism.

  “There wasn’t one specific circumstance,” Cashman said. “There wasn’t one very specific issue.”

  So there would be a new Yankees manager for the 2018 season, with Girardi joining John Farrell of the Red Sox and the Nationals’ Dusty Baker as those to be dismissed during the 2017 postseason. The news broke on a Thursday morning in October, after Girardi had been spotted exiting Yankee Stadium on back-to-back days, a glum expression on his face as he pointed his sport utility vehicle south on River Avenue.

  The Yankees employed two managers over twenty-two seasons, with Girardi’s decade-long run following Joe Torre’s twelve-year shift at the post. That was an unprecedented run of stability in the Bronx, considering that George Steinbrenner cycled through twenty managers before finally landing upon Buck Showalter in 1992. Steinbrenner used three different managers in 1982 alone, canning Bob Lemon after fourteen games in favor of Gene Michael, then turning the team over to Clyde King in August.

  The next Yankees manager would have to be someone on the younger side who could handle the New York media crush while remaining in tune with a growing emphasis on analytics. The team was among the heaviest investors in the field, and the job responsibilities would be handed to someone who was able to distill those advanced numbers and have it make sense to the players, while using it to influence and defend his in-game decisions.

  Part of the reason that Girardi had been hired over Don Mattingly in 2008 was that he was open to embracing the wave of big data, whereas Mattingly had seemed to be more of an old-school type out of the Torre mold who preferred to manage based upon gut decisions. Cashman did not have a specific replacement in mind, but he desired someone willing to take on the numbers while exhibiting more warmth than Girardi had.

  While most of the current Yankees offered positive words or remained silent following news of Girardi’s dismissal, retired Bombers first baseman Mark Teixeira offered a candid opinion, saying that Girardi’s personality had worn thin with some members of the team.

  “Everyone loves Joe, everyone respects Joe,” Teixeira told the New York Post. “He is a good manager, he is a good man. But with baseball the way it is played today, and the need for a manager to be a better communicator and communicate with the front office the reasoning for doing things and to be a little bit more relaxed—especially in a place like New York, where the pressure is everywhere—he just wasn’t the best man for the job anymore.”

  After being named the AL’s Rookie of the Year (he’d finish second in the MVP balloting to Altuve, who received twenty-seven of thirty first-place votes), Judge said that he had a “great relationship” with Girardi.

  “He was my first manager in the big leagues. He stuck
with me in good times and bad times,” Judge said. “He always had my back, always stayed positive with me. I thought we communicated well. My goal is to go out there and play, and that’s what I focus on. I’m excited to see who we get, but I have a lot of respect and love for Joe and what he did for me my first year.”

  Over the five weeks that followed Game 7 of the ALCS, Cashman and his lieutenants compiled a list of men whom they believed might be worthy of becoming the thirty-third manager of the New York Yankees. Cashman acknowledged that there was no perfect candidate who would check all of the necessary boxes, so the team cast a wide net, inviting a diverse group of candidates to Yankee Stadium for lengthy interviews.

  Yankees bench coach Rob Thomson, former Indians and Mariners manager Eric Wedge, Giants bench coach Hensley Meulens, former big league infielder and ESPN analyst Aaron Boone, Dodgers third-base coach Chris Woodward, and recently retired slugger Carlos Beltran comprised the six who made the final cut. The sessions in the Bronx were intensive, often spanning more than six hours and involving many different departments.

  Each candidate spent time going over strategies and scenarios in a conference room, surrounded by a group of high-level executives that included Cashman, assistant GMs Jean Afterman and Mike Fishman, vice president of baseball operations Tim Naehring, senior director of player development Kevin Reese, assistant director of professional scouting Dan Giese, director of quantitative analysis David Grabiner, director of mental conditioning Chad Bohling, head athletic trainer Steve Donohue, and vice president of communications Jason Zillo.

  Cashman said that while each man delivered valuable insights, Boone was able to distinguish himself, overcoming the fact that he had no previous coaching or managerial experience. No Yankees manager had taken the reins in that fashion since Hall of Famer Bill Dickey in 1946. Though Steinbrenner had said his preference would have been to hire a manager with a tangible track record, those concerns were relaxed after hearing how Boone had won the room.