DETROIT — There was only one man to talk to after this one was over, of course, after the Tigers had survived a funhouse ride of a ninth inning to win the ballgame 2-1, to take a 3-0 lead in this American League Championship Series.
“What do you want from me?” Derek Lowe asked playfully. “I didn’t pitch.”
Not last night, he didn’t, and not much in these playoffs. But once upon a time he sure did. Exactly eight years ago tonight, Oct. 17, 2004, Lowe took the mound for the Boston Red Sox in another ALCS Game 4. Those Sox were in the biggest hole imaginable: 0-3 down to the Yankees, at a time when nobody had ever cleared that chasm before.
“Well,” Lowe said, “one thing you know for sure, right? You know it isn’t impossible. It isn’t easy by any stretch. But the record shows: it’s doable.”
Maybe you aren’t ready to hear that just yet. Maybe you aren’t prepared to resort to channeling Red Sox history, since that’s anathema to everything you hold dear as a Yankees fan. But we’re there. The Yankees haven’t been swept in a best-of-seven since the 1976 World Series. That’s 36 years and 18 series ago.
But they’re there now. For eight comatose innings they let Justin Verlander, possessing less than his A game, keep their bats frozen stiff. In the ninth, an heroic nine-pitch at-bat by Eduardo Nunez, culminating in a home run, gave them life. Robinson Cano, hitless in 29 at-bats, finally scratched out a single, and that gave them hope.
And then Phil Coke, of all people, took a Zippo lighter to Raul Ibanez’s Hollywood October, struck him out on a 3-and-2 pitch and sent a frenzied Comerica Park crowd of 42,970 out into the frosty night bellowing about broomsticks.
“I felt confident, even in the end, that we could get back at them,” Ibanez said. “He just made a terrific pitch.”
It tells you a little something about the sudden dysfunction of this outfit that with a left-hander on the mound, it never even occurred to Joe Girardi to summon a pinch-hitter on his bench who happens to have 647 lifetime home runs. Not for Ibanez, a splendid October surprise who also happened to hit .197 against lefties this year. And it was fellow bench exile Nick Swisher, not A-Rod, standing on deck when the game ended.
“Well,” Girardi said, “they were going to bring in [Joaquin] Benoit.”
And there you have what may well be the most damning eight words of Alex Rodriguez’s career. Honestly, Willie Mays didn’t have it as bad in the 1973 World Series, when he was flopping all over the Oakland outfield, as A-Rod, who now must hear that he is no match for 34-year-old Benoit and his 4.28 lifetime ERA.
No A-Rod last night. No Swisher. No Derek Jeter, of course, no Mariano Rivera. They are a hobbled team; they shouldn’t be this hobbled.
Yet they had nothing resembling a professional offense outside of Ichiro Suzuki, who provided the only two hits off Verlander through eight innings. It’s beyond astonishing at this point, since for the eighth time in eight postseason games the Yankees got terrific pitching, even though they had to patch it together after Phil Hughes left in the fourth with a balky back.
“When we get that kind of effort,” Ibanez said ruefully, “we’ve got to figure out a way to score runs.”
Said Girardi: “Tomorrow. Tomorrow. How do we win tomorrow. That’s what I start thinking about.”
In its own way, that sounded like a distant cousin to another defiant oath, uttered exactly eight years ago tonight. It was Kevin Millar that time. “Don’t let the Red Sox win tonight!” Millar had crowed while the Sox were still in that 0-3 canyon. “Do not let the Red Sox win this game!”
We all thought he was daft.
It turned out to be a deft prophesy. Those Sox had been hardened by heartbreak, were as much foxhole mates as teammates. You don’t sense that sense of community around the Yankees just now. And yet …
“We do have CC Sabathia on the mound tomorrow,” Swisher said. “That’s a good place to start.”
Or, as Derek Lowe put it: “We can’t win all four [today]. All you can do is win one.” That, too, is a wise place to start.