BOSTON – It’s your prerogative if you want to dismiss this weekend, diminish this weekend, discount all that could well be in store for the Yankees and the Red Sox this weekend. You can coolly point to the wild-card standings if you like, dejectedly point to the AL East standings if you wish, explain how little there is to be gained by trying to replicate a third edition of the Boston Massacre.
You’re entitled to all of that.
But if that’s where your baseball head is at this morning, then you’ll be missing out on the potential and the possibility of all that could happen this weekend at Fenway Park, when the Yankees and the Red Sox play the final three games of their 18-chapter regular-season passion play for 2007, when they quite possibly provide a little glimpse of another staredown for the ages in a few weeks’ time.
A few weeks ago, asked about whether he’d officially shifted his gaze from the division to the wild card, Joe Torre had this to say in the first-base dugout at Yankee Stadium: “I think that as long as you have a mathematical chance to win a division, you’re doing yourself a disservice to not keep that pretty prominent in your mind. The wild card, that can be a tricky thing, too many teams vying for the same thing. In the division, you know who you’re shooting at.”
At the time, the Yankees sat seven games behind the Red Sox in the loss column, and they were still fighting for their wild-card lives with the Tigers and the Mariners. At the time, it seemed like a standard-issue sound bite from the Knute Rockne Collection, meant to inspire rather than inform. Except Torre insisted, time and again, that he meant what he said. So did his players. Tell us we’re the wild card when we’re the wild card, they said.
Well, if they’ve all but wrapped up the wild card, they are still refusing to be cloaked in its comforting embrace just yet. The Sox have fended off the Yankees’ encroachments before, most recently Wednesday night, when Big Papi Ortiz added to his personal 11th-hour highlight reel by sneaking a ball over the pint-sized right-field fence at Fenway, turning a 4-3 Tampa Bay lead into a 5-4 Red Sox victory.
All year long, the Red Sox have worn the look of division champions, have taken to the role of front-runner, were smart enough to know that the 141/2-game lead they held over the Yankees back in May wasn’t going to last forever, have been resilient enough to keep a couple days ahead of the Yankees even when it seemed the invaders from New York were primed to make a final, fatal thrust.
The Red Sox still look that way, sure. And this weekend, they get to lay a final message on the Yankees if they win two of three at Fenway, a message that Not only will contain the reality that the Yankees’ unimpeded nine-year run atop the division is over but also the promise that the Sox believe they’ll have whatever’s necessary to re-trump the Yankees in October.
Still . . .
These games aren’t played out of history books. The Yankees get no official advantage for the four-game Fenway sweep in 1978, or the five-game whitewash out of last summer. But it does behoove the Yankees to try and make the most of their stay in New England this weekend.
Forget the scars it will leave on the still-shockingly vulnerable psyche of Red Sox Nation. This is all about practicality. The Yankees can, and surely will if it becomes applicable, remind everyone of all the success that wild-card teams have had in recent postseason, the Marlins in ’97 and ’03, the Angels of ’02, certainly the Red Sox of ’04. And that’s fine.
But it’s also worth noting that the two other times the Yankees qualified for the postseason as a wild card, they went 0-for-5 in close-out games on the road, squandering a 2-0 lead to the Mariners in 1995 by going 0-for-the-Kingdome and then a 2-1 lead to the Indians in 1997 thanks to Sandy Alomar Jr. These Yankees surely can win deciding games on the road if they have to. We just haven’t seen it lately, not since Game 5 in Oakland in 2000.
And why put yourself in that position if you don’t have to?
Why concede a pennant just because you’re already all but guaranteed a playoff spot? All summer long, even when the baseball was blightful and the deficit seemed implausible, the Yankees nobly would talk about how they weren’t in the business of concession speeches. So there’s no need for one now. Not from them.
And not from anyone else who might wonder if this weekend in New England is worth paying attention to. Hey, it is Yankees-Red Sox. In the worst of times, that would be worth sitting up for. And these are hardly the worst of times. Not now. Not anymore.