This is the problem with perfection, see.
This is the fix you find yourself in when the final month of the season feels less like a series of baseball games and more a daily dance with elimination. This is what it feels like when you have less margin for error than a man juggling six chainsaws on a wire above Niagara Falls.
This is how baseball can chew you the hell up.
“I like how our guys came back tonight,” Joe Girardi whispered when it was over, after the Yankees had risen from the dust and then fallen back into the dirt, after the Red Sox had stolen a 9-8 victory away from them Thursday night, an hour or so after it seemed the Yankees would be the ones to get away with thievery.
“But you have to be able to overcome things.”
Mostly, the Yankees are trying to overcome a 4 ½-months start to the season that left them buried behind a pile of wild-card hopefuls. So much of that time it seemed the Yankees would treat the scoreboard like a gas-rationing line, only touching the plate on alternating days.
Now, they score runs in wonderful, gluttonous bunches.
But they have to. That’s the rub. That’s the problem. The days dwindle down and so do the Yankees’ opportunities, and they know as well as anyone — and say it often — that they don’t simply have to win, cannot merely take series, they have to win — quite literally — every day.
And when that’s the mission, days like this, losses like this, almost feel like they count for two. When Mariano Rivera has two outs, nobody on, two strikes on Mike Napoli, that’s an invitation to stream for the exits. Except when it isn’t. Except when you remember the Red Sox aren’t the White Sox, aren’t the Blue Jays, aren’t even the kid-brother Orioles, that they play varsity ball for 27 outs. And beyond, when necessary.
And can steal one right out of you front pocket after you’d done the same to their back pocket a few innings before.
“They never give up,” Alfonso Soriano said. “They’re like us.”
That is a fair analogy, with one caveat: the Red Sox beat the Yankees here on Opening Day and they’ve never stopped running, never stopped rushing for the top of the division and the best record in the sport. The Yankees kept up for a while, fell back, then way back. They buried themselves, and have spent the better part of a month with a shovel in their hands.
There are times this mission not only seems doable, but inevitable. That was the bottom of the seventh last night, Lyle Overbay at the plate for the Yankees, Junichi Tazawa on the mound for the Red Sox, the count 1-2, the score 7-6, Red Sox, after it had been 7-2, Red Sox only minutes before.
Overbay swung, scorched a ground ball toward second. Dustin Pedroia started to his right before realizing the ball was skipping by him to his left.
Base hit. Joy. Valhalla. Yankees 8. Red Sox 7.
“We were flying,” Soriano would say later. “And it seemed like everyone was in it together.”
There is no doubting their common interest, no escaping the fact the Yankees we’ve seen the past three weeks are a 95-win monster if they’d been given six months together; they’re getting six weeks. They clobber bad teams and hang in there against good ones, and they are hanging around, and they have accepted the chore that lies before them.
Win. Every day. Every game.
“We know what’s in front of us,” Austin Romine said, in the quiet of a beaten clubhouse. “We know what we have to do.”
It was Romine’s poor throw that allowed Quintin Berry — running for Napoli, channeling Dave Roberts — to not only steal second but skip to third when the ball bounced away, and then score on Stephen Drew’s broken-bat single. It was the kind of imperfect play the Yankees can’t afford, the way they couldn’t afford the artistic baserunning stylings of Soriano in the bottom of the ninth when he was, in essence, picked off twice as the winning run.
“I made a mistake,” Soriano said, “and it cost.”
Such is the price — and the problem — of perfection.