The story goes something like this: Chase Utley was a kid, raw as sashimi, green as wasabi, and he was covering second base on a steal. The runner, his name forgotten to the years, had a pretty good jump, and he slid spikes first. Against just about every second baseman in the National League, he would have had the base easily, and eased into a pop-up slide.
Against this second baseman, he never even reached the bag. He only reached flesh, the flesh belonging to Chase Utley’s leg. A half-second later, Utley’s mitt came down with the ball, and the runner was out, and blood started trickling out of Utley’s leg as he trotted off the field.
Photos: Celebrities at the World Series
Larry Bowa was managing the Phillies then.
“Kid,” said Bowa, who played baseball so hard-nosed that his nose might have been made out of plutonium, “you keep playing that way, you’re gonna get yourself hurt.”
And the kid looked out the side of his eyes at Bowa and said something that’s gotten lost in translation in the retelling, but probably went something like this: “Bleep it, as long as we win.”
The moral of the story?
You want Chase Utley on your baseball team. You would move heaven and earth to get Chase Utley on your baseball team. You would pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to secure his services on your baseball team.
Now, this morning, that seems like an awfully smart thing to say, seeing as how Utley hit a home run off CC Sabathia in the third inning, then hit another one in the sixth inning, and those two runs felt like two touchdowns given the kind of gem Cliff Lee was throwing at the Yankees, a game that ended 6-1 for the Phils and with Yankee Stadium sounding as loud as a tomb.
But if you are at all familiar with Utley’s work — and if you aren’t, just ask your neighborly Mets fan, just reserve about an hour of time to let him give you the complete list — then you understand that the things Utley brings to the Phillies can’t always be measured just by simple statistics, although last night was surely an exception to that rule.
No, Utley is the kind of player whose value can be boiled down to the most vital denominator of all. He wins. He beats you. He knows how to the play the game and play it well, knows how to hit a ball over a wall if he has to, how to foul off a half-dozen pitches if he has to, how to slide hard into second base when he has to, how to take an extra base when he has to.
In New York, we have written poetry about Derek Jeter for a decade and a half for playing in much the same way. By the time Utley is finished, it might be a local law in Philadelphia that he can be written about solely in iambic pentameter. A year ago, Utley led the Phillies to a world championship (and, oh by the way, hit a homer in Game 1 of the World Series in Tampa) with a bad hip that required offseason surgery, a bad hip he never talked about, one that was supposed to knock him out for two months in 2009 and instead he was back for Opening Day. This year, it would appear he’s bothered by a foot injury that he won’t talk about, so who knows what we’ll discover was bothering him when the season does end.
You bet you want a player like that on your team.
But really, if you want a Cliffs Notes version of why he is such a remarkable player, all you need to do is study his first two at-bats of the night. In the first, Sabathia got two quick outs on five pitches and jumped ahead of Utley, 1-and-2, before Utley watched three straight breaking balls squeak out of the strike zone, remarkable discipline after an October watching the lunges of Nick Punto and Torii Hunter. That sparked a non-scoring rally that nevertheless bulked up Sabathia’s pitch count.
But his at-bat in the third was even more of a classic. Again Sabathia got Jimmy Rollins an Shane Victorino out easily. Again he jumped up 1-and-2 on Utley. Again Utley refused to give in, fouling three balls off, taking two for balls, waiting Sabathia out … then drilling a towering drive that hugged the right-field line the whole way and stayed straight as a pin.
It was 1-0, and already it felt like 10-0. The Phillies can do that to you. And it’s Utley who does it best for the Phillies.