PHILADELPHIA – It had to boil down to this, didn’t it? That’s always been Alex Rodriguez’s rarest gift, the way the moment seeks him out, stalks him, finds him. That hasn’t always been a good thing, but those moments all seem another lifetime ago. In these playoffs, in this year, there is nobody better equipped to seize them.
And nobody the Yankees would rather see stepping to home plate.
“He’s the reason why we’re sitting here and in Philadelphia right now,” Johnny Damon would say later, after everyone could start breathing again. “Without him, who knows where our road may have stopped? He’s been huge.”
Damon was the reason Rodriguez was standing at home plate in the top of the ninth inning, with 46,145 people screaming at him, slandering him, calling him a cheat and a bum and every other stand-by hidden in the Philly lexicon. It was Damon who’d wrestled with Brad Lidge through nine pitches of hand-to-hand combat, who’d battled from 1-and-2 down in the count to 3-and-2 to a clean single to left.
It was Damon who’d stolen second base with Mark Teixeira up, who’d made one of the heads-up plays of all time by dashing to third when the Phillies left the base uncovered, who’d no doubt rattled Lidge to the point where the Phillies’ closer promptly plunked Teixeira, sending him to first, all but inviting Rodriguez to the plate.
And to this moment.
“Did he lose it?” Phillies manager Charlie Manuel asked, rhetorically. “He was up 1-2 in the count. But once he stole, did he lose it?”
He paused.
“I don’t know,” Manuel said. “I mean . . . I don’t know.”
Lidge, in many ways, might know more about the demons that have plagued Rodriguez than anyone else in baseball, for there have been few who’ve had to conquer larger ghosts. Back in 2005, he’d famously surrendered a knee-buckling home run to Albert Pujols with his Houston Astros one out away from the World Series. From that personal piece of hell, he’d risen to go 48-for-48 in save opportunities last year, and was on the mound when the Phillies won the World Series.
He knows the redemptive power of autumn as well as anyone.
Now he threw a get-me-over fastball, and Rodriguez watched it zip by. The two men had faced each other only three times earlier, and A-Rod knew he’d done well: two hits, three RBIs. Back in May, he’d drilled a home run at Yankee Stadium off Lidge off a fastball. He figured he’d have to get another; no way Lidge could risk burying a slider, letting the go-ahead run score that way.
Lidge threw a fastball.
“I think it was a decent pitch,” he said.
But if you’ve seen Rodriguez across these playoffs, you knew it was going to take more than decent. It might have required more than Mathewson, Gibson and Maddux, to be honest, because you could almost see what was happening a half a breath before it happened. His swing has been that true, his confidence that high, his performance that extraordinary. The ball leapt off his bat, and it immediately started curling away from Raul Ibanez in left, soaring beyond him.
And it was like someone kicked a plug out of the wall at Citizens Bank Park. All you could hear was the sound of Yankees screaming from the dugout, of Teixeira shouting at A-Rod from third base, of the couple thousand Yankees fans in attendance yelling themselves into a hoarse hysteria. It was 5-4, Yanks, on the way to 7-4, Yanks.
“You’ve got to give him credit,” Lidge said. “It could have been off the plate.”
It could have been six feet over his head or an inch off the ground the way he’s going. Rodriguez has preached about “swinging at strikes” all postseason, but he is in the kind of groove, the kind of zone, that all players dream about and few actually attain.
He’s been there an awful lot in his career, an awful lot during 15 of the greatest regular seasons anyone has ever strung together. Just never in the playoffs. Certainly never like this. He would try and brush that aside, talking about how his struggles early in the Series, and Teixeira’s throughout the playoffs, show how balanced a team the Yankees are.
And they are.
But A-Rod is the ballast. He is the one who saved two games that had gone to the brink earlier in the postseason, and he is the one who delivered them all to the doorstep of a 27th title last night. Standing on second base, drinking in the moment, you can knew exactly how he felt, because if you cheer for the Yankees you were feeling it too.
“I’ve never had a bigger hit,” he said.
It would be hard to imagine he’ll ever have a bigger one. Only with this player, in this season, you simply can’t say that for sure. There’s still room. There’s still time.