Final score: 8-4 Yankees over the Minnesota Twins. That’s really the story right there. The score, and the way four of those Yankee runs were put on the board in the seventh inning, with three World Champs packing the bases, one loud swing of Alex Rodriguez’s bat, and a majestic trajectory out toward left for the baseball flying off its sweet spot.
You look closely at Friday night’s game, you can see a few things that weren’t so good for the home team. Randy Winn and Marcus Thames, aka the “Leave ‘em On” brothers, for instance. When they’re coming up to bat, you can pretty much hit the fridge, or if you’re at the ballpark get up to grab one of those helmet ice creams.
Put either of those guys in the batter’s box with a man on third and less than two outs, you might as well give the base runner a bite to eat and maybe a beverage too, because they aren’t going anywhere except the dugout.
The Yanks are a team with significant depth. They could absorb the injury to Curtis Granderson a couple of weeks ago and maybe only lose a half step. But you get Nick Johnson walking onto the disabled list and then Nick Swisher’s sore right bicep, it spells trouble.
You can go back to that third game in Boston with Marcus Thames out in left making like the baseball was a prop for some slapstick comedy act. You can go back to Winn and Thames and a couple of Triple-A call-ups murdering rallies time and time again in Detroit. You can look at what these replacement players do in key situations, and be painfully reminded that they can’t replace the cumulative losses of three major pieces in the Yankee lineup.
Take the bottom of the 6th on Friday. With his team down 1-0, Brett Gardner does his best Johnny Damon impression and power-swats a homer to right. Then Teixeira singles, A-Rod walks, Cano hits a ground rule double and all of a sudden it’s 2-1 Yanks with men on 2nd and 3rd and no outs. Ordinarily you figure they are in business, figure this is when they can build themselves a nice, cushy lead. But you see Winn or Thames coming up, and you curb your expectations, and they perform right down to the low level you’ve set for them. Neither can get a flyball into the outfield, or a groundball to the right side. Neither can do anything but whiff, and then Miranda joins the party, and the rally is over, and the Twins are still right in the game.
There’s a rough repeat of this again in the 6th, same culprits, making you wonder if maybe it’s time to bring up Jesus Montero from the minors. Now Yanks are hanging onto a slender 3-2 lead, and AJ Burnett -- who’s done a heckuva job in spite of the home plate ump putting the squeeze on him -- is getting up there in the pitch count department. And you glimpse trouble over the horizon from the Twins’ newly amped batting order, one of the best in baseball with those latter day M&M boys in the middle.
Top of the 7th inning, two outs, runner on, and Burnett is pulled. In comes Damaso Marte, the lefty specialist who, this season, has been specializing in being especially ineffective. Joe Mauer’s his man and Mauer smashes a single off him to score a run. So much for that. And so much for getting Justin Morneau, who doubles Mauer home when Marte stays in to face him.
So much for the Yanks leading too. Before the frame ends, it’s now 4-3 Twins, and you’re thinking they ought to send very a special thank-you to the lefty specialist from their dugout, because it looks as if he might have handed them the game.
But the story’s at the bottom of the seventh. It starts with a single by Francisco Cervelli, the energy-ball backup catcher who’s been a revelation behind the plate and is hitting a mere .415 with a ton of those hits coming in the clutch. It clips along with Derek Jeter, who’s been slumping lately, hitting a line drive double up the middle that literally knocks the Twins’ righty starter Scott Baker out of the game. It builds some tension when Twins manager Ron Gardenhire brings in lefty reliever Brian Duensing for Gardner, and Duensing gets his man.
One out, two on. Gardenhire, one of the best managers in baseball, pulls the lefty for right-handed hurler Matt Guerrier, and calls for an intentional walk to Teixeira to load the bases and bring Alex Rodriguez to the plate. Even the best have their weaknesses.
The French term bête noire translates into “black beast”. It is a fancy, colorful term for the thing you dread most, the thing that always comes up to bite you where it hurts.
The Yankees are Gardenhire’s bête noire. Last season they had that all-pie, all-comeback weekend against his team, and then they did what they always do in the playoffs, which is knock them right out of the running. And you look at the head of that beast since 2004, and it’s had the face of Alex Rodriguez. The manufactured game-winning run in the '04 playoffs. The game-tying homer in '09. When it comes to slaying the Twins, Rodriguez does it every way you can imagine. Gardenhire must see him in his dreams, and not his good ones.
So now he’s betting on his guy Guerrier doubling off A-Rod to end the inning. Now he’s apparently playing the numbers, as Joe Girardi and Rodriguez would insist after the game.
They say the right things. They are professional athletes and members of the New York Yankees. Of course they say the right things. But what everybody knows is that Gardenhire is disrespecting the black beast in the seventh inning because that beast hasn’t been hitting the way he usually hits and his home run totals aren’t what they usually are at this point in the season.
Intentionally walking a guy to load the bases and get to Alex Rodriguez, who started out the night as 4-for-6 against Guerrier with 3 home runs against him.
Major drama.
And then the climactic grand slam, that ball sailing out to left and probably smiling all the way, like everybody in the ballpark and the Yank dugout was smiling while Gardenhire stood in his own dugout looking bitten.
And though the Yanks would tack on another run in the next inning, that’s really the whole story right there. It starts at the finish: The bases loaded with players who have done it before to win a World Championship. And one player who last year proved to all the skeptics that he can do it in New York, and do it when it counts.
“That’s why I hit fourth -- and my team is expecting me to get big hits in those situations,” Rodriguez said. “We {he and Teixeira} hit third and fourth for a reason, and we know we have a responsibility in the middle of the order to do damage.”
Word to Ron Gardenhire from the Beast.
