JUST SHORT: Tigers right fielder Don Kelly reaches up to glove Derek Jeter’s fly ball to the warning track with one on and two out in the bottom of the eighth last night. (Anthony J. Causi)
Off the bat, it had a chance, didn’t it? The men on the Yankees’ bench jumped to their feet, climbed the dugout steps, because they thought it did. Their manager, Joe Girardi, thought it did, even if he was screened by all those hopeful ballplayers. Fifty thousand witnesses thought it did: For much of the game they’d sat in muffled silence, but not now.
Now, there was hope. Now there was a chance. Now there was a baseball climbing toward right field off the bat of Derek Jeter, one on and two out in the bottom of the eighth inning, the Yankees down 3-2, down to their final four outs, begging for a hero, desperate for a savior.
And wasn’t this where Jeter had walked onto the stage, launching a fly ball that looked an awful lot like this one? That was 15 years ago. That was when the merger of ghosts and greatness began to blossom, when the Yankees started to believe, again, that until you got 27 of them out, there would always be a shot.
There would always be a chance.
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“A ball gets in the air here, you always start thinking about what it could mean,” Jorge Posada would say later. “Maybe it’s your heart talking more than your head.”
“When I hit it, I thought it could go,” Jeter would say. “But it went a little too high in the air and . . . sort of died.”
The roar died, too, as Don Kelly settled under the ball, his back to the wall. Even a new generation’s Jeffrey Maier would have needed extra-long arms and maybe a fishing net to help out this time. The ghosts aren’t supposed to need extra apparatus. Not here. Not at this time of the year. The ball died at the track.
The Yankees expired a few minutes later.
“I didn’t think it was necessarily a hard game to manage,” Girardi said. “It’s a hard game to swallow.”
It will be a hard season to digest, a bitter way for it to end. Perhaps the Yankees were better built for 162 games than for five, better equipped to throw their weight around against the dregs and the detritus of the American League than to figure a way to take three out of five from the young, hard-hitting, harder-throwing Tigers.
Maybe we should have seen this coming.
“I’m proud of the way this team fought,” Posada said.
If this was indeed farewell for the tough old catcher then he was one of the few Yankees who played to his capacity, and to his history, hitting .429. Brett Gardner was another, hitting .412.
The rest? Alex Rodriguez, who would make the 27th out of an elimination game for the second year in a row, hit an appalling .111. Mark Teixeira? A buck sixty-seven. Russell Martin: .176. Nick Swisher? A microscopic .211. Jeter’s .250 felt like something Ty Cobb would be delighted with compared to the surrounding anemia.
Worse, they seemed tight at the absolute worst moment possible. The most clutch plate appearance of the night was a bases-loaded walk in the seventh from Teixeira, who seemed elated to see ball four. Martin and Gardner stranded loaded bases in the fourth. A-Rod fanned with them juiced with one out in the seventh. Swisher ended that inning with a strikeout of his own, leaving the bases loaded.
The richest team in baseball history, the most talented in the game, and you could almost hear the players’ knees knocking over the din of the crowd. Does that come from the manager? Girardi was forced to his bullpen early when Ivan Nova’s forearm started to bark, but it was his choice to use Phil Hughes for only four outs, his choice to use CC Sabathia, his choice to use seven pitchers.
Those relievers, save for Sabathia, were perfect. And you could argue Girardi was merely matching the urgency of the situation.
But you could also argue that anxiety and stress flow from the top down.
Maybe we wouldn’t be talking about that if the jet streams that sometimes occupy Yankee Stadium had gotten hold of Jeter’s ball. Maybe.
“You talk about a game,” Girardi said, “and sometimes it’s a matter of a foot here or a foot there, and it’s the difference in the game.”
A foot here. A foot there. It’s always up to the losers to do the hard arithmetic of failure. The Yankees will have a long winter to figure all of that out. A long road to pitchers and catchers.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com