BALTIMORE — Some times, you can feel a baseball game teetering on the edge, you can actually see the tipping point as it’s happening. A baseball rolls on the ground, seemingly forever. Another ball settles in no-man’s land. An inning that should’ve been over three different times is extended.
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And a scorching-hot ballplayer, lugging a flaming-hot (or, in this case, flaming pink) bat is there, waiting for just the right opportunity to strike.
“Right now,” Johnny Damon said, smiling the impish smile he always uses when things are going well, as they are right now, “I have such confidence at the plate, I’m feeling so comfortable, I want to have a chance to take a swing with the game on the line. When you feel that way you want to take advantage of every opportunity.”
Yes, it was Damon who struck the key blow yesterday, drilling a full-count fastball from Jim Johnson deep over the fence in right field in the top of the seventh inning, a three-run job that turned a 3-2 Orioles lead into a much-welcomed 5-3 Yankees victory.
Yes, it was Damon — who seems to hit a home run every day now, who has a team-high nine, who has hit six in the last 10 days, who has had extra-base hits in seven straight games, who is slugging at an astonishing .610 clip, who has now hit 17 home runs since last Sept. 1 — who was the leading man in the most important plot twist of the weekend.
But it was also Francisco Cervelli, ostensibly a third-string catcher, who helped tee Damon up, the way a setter sets up a spiker in volleyball. It was Cervelli who killed about a thousand Camden Yards caterpillars with a grounder with two out and none on, chugged down the line and beat Brian Roberts’ throw, made a routine 4-3 look anything but, who, paired with the Derek Jeter infield hit that followed, allowed Damon the chance to change the game with one swing of his stick.
“I just started running and kept running,” Cervelli said bashfully, “because a lot of things can happen if you run and run hard.”
“Thankfully,” Damon quipped, “we’ve found ourselves a catcher who can actually get down the line.”
So it was all there for Damon when he stepped to the plate, tying and go-ahead runs on base, sizable Yankees-fan contingent among the 33,290 inside the park, nervous pitcher on the mound. Already the Yankees had stepped out of character in the inning, showing fight, showing grit, showing energy that has been so chronically absent across so much of the season’s first six weeks.
“If there’s one guy we want up in that situation right now,” manager Joe Girardi said, “then it was the guy who was up there.”
Damon conceded the past few weeks have been practically dreamlike for him. He and hitting coach Kevin Long “found something,” he said, something he termed either “a balance issue,” or a “plate-coverage” issue, but which, in the psycho-parlance of the hitting craft, could just as easily be a self-assurance issue.
Everything looks big as a beach ball to him these days, even on a day like this one, when he had struck out twice and grounded into a double play his first three trips to the plate. Damon is enough of a veteran to know how fleeting these streaks and stretches are. He knows they dissolve as quickly and as inexplicably as they appear.
“You have to take advantage,” he said.
He took advantage, and made another baseball disappear, and on the third day of Alex Rodriguez’s season, the Yankees saw once again what their other savior is capable of, and what they’re all capable of when they play proper baseball. With three games at first-place Toronto beginning tomorrow night, it’s as good a time as any to remember just how vital all of that is.
“We have to feel good about what we take out of this weekend,” Damon said, and as far as he’s concerned he has to feel good about just about everything. The Yankees? The seventh inning was a start. We’ll see if that newfound, feel-good vibe makes it through customs with them.