For all of us who sometimes forget that baseball season is not football season, it was yet another lesson to learn: slow and steady usually leads to victory.
Four days ago, we wanted to shove a mirror up the noses of all the Yankees and see if they were still breathing. The All-Star break will be filled with much noise, fuss and curiosity that fundamental changes may be underway by the time the Yankees reconvene at Yankee Stadium next weekend.
The Yankees then traveled to Baltimore.
And the Yankees started to look more like the May Yankees than the July Yankees, winning on Friday behind Gerrit Cole and on Saturday behind Luis Gil.
and …
Well, then there was Sunday.
On Sunday, the Yankees were down 3-2 in the ninth inning. Craig Kimbrel, an old friend from their days in Boston, walked leadoff hitter Trent Grisham. He also walked Oswaldo Cabrera. You could see the Yankees dugout beginning to look the way it had a few months ago. They believed they could win. They believed someone would tie the game and then win.
And Ben Rice appears to have done both.
Eight days after hitting three home runs in one day at home against the Red Sox, Rice came in and took the most spectacular swing of his young baseball career, hitting a Kimbrel pitch high and deep over the wall in right-center field, to the joy of the strong Yankees fanbase at Camden Yards.
The score was 5-3.
Three more outs and the Yankees, who had nearly died on the flight from St. Pete to Baltimore despite the negativity that had swirled around them in recent days, would have landed a big punch to the Orioles with no added bonuses and go into the All-Star break in first place in the AL East. Yes, we were about to be reminded again how foolish it is to treat a baseball game like a football game.
There is just one exception.
The Yankees ended up not getting three outs. They only got two. At that point, the Yankees were in a terrible situation at the worst possible time. Before the game was over, the Orioles were down 6-5. It was the most heartbreaking loss of the year. And the lesson we learned from that was completely different than the one I was about to tell you. Instead, we got this lesson, the obvious one:
Don’t give the better team extra outs.
Good teams know what to do with extra outs.
The stronger team will try to force their opponent out of the ring with an extra out.
“It was a murder case, wasn’t it?” Aaron Boone said when the massacre was over. “Let’s admit it. It’s been a rough last few weeks for us, let’s admit it.”
The next four days will feel like four weeks, because we probably should have won this game twice. Anthony Volpe, who played great as always to save two runs early, stomped away a grounder that should have been the 27th out. Alex Verdugo, who has been an elite left fielder most of the year, played great in the eighth to probably save one run, but stepped on a Cedric Mullins fly for the out, and the ball went over Verdugo’s head. Those two blunders allowed three runs to score. That was it.
“It was a bad play,” Verdugo said. “I’ll leave it at that. I take a lot of pride in my defense. This is on me.”
That was the responsible thing to do, and there was some truth in that. The reality is, we all take responsibility for this game and the events of the past month that have taken a lot of momentum off the Yankees. It’s going to hurt a little bit this time around because we’re not going to play for a few days. If you three-putt from three feet on the 18th hole in your weekly golf game, you’re going to be a little depressed for a few days.
The Yankees will have a bit of a downturn. That’s inevitable. Their manager, believe it or not, will take a different path.
“It’s all here,” Boone said. “We’re in a great position to write great scripts.”
“There’s a lot of good stuff there,” he said, pointing to the clubhouse.
He believes so, and he’s stuck to it throughout this downturn. If the Yankees had No. 27 out on Sunday, it might have been an easier sell to other teams, but the schedule requires all of them to do so. Boone may often sound like an optimist, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. There’s a lot of good stuff out there if the Yankees can grab it.
If that’s the case.
