JUMPING FOR JOY: Brett Gardner, Nick Swisher and Curtis Granderson leap in celebration after the Yankees’ 3-2 victory over the Red Sox last night at Fenway Park. (Reuters)
BOSTON — It could mean nothing, OK? We’ve seen enough baseball games, you and I, heard ourselves proclaim far too often that this is the game you’ll remember come October the first or so, that this is the moment that’ll turn the whole season on its head. More often than not, we deal in hype and hyperbole when we do that.
Maybe that’ll be the case with this. Maybe the Red Sox will come out and pound CC Sabathia this afternoon in a way that no team has pounded Sabathia since there was still a hint of frost in the air. Maybe this was just the inevitable mathematical correction, what happens when two evenly matched teams play each other so often and one starts out winning eight out of nine.
Maybe it won’t mean anything in the big picture.
But it sure felt like it meant something.
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It sure felt like this 3-2 Yankees victory in front of another packed house at Fenway Park was a loud, thunderous statement from the visiting team that it was tired of being stepped on and stepped over by the Red Sox. It sure felt like the Red Sox walked onto the field last night, just after seven o’clock, looking just a little bit different than the one that walked off just past 10:30. Swaggering just a little more subtly. Looking just a tad less bulletproof.
Looking, in fact, like a second-place team for the first time in a month.
“We have so many games left in the season that I don’t think first place is something either of us is all that concerned with right now, as good as it is to be in first place,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “What’s most important is winning, especially a game like this, a game that maybe we hadn’t yet proven we could win against that team.”
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Maybe, come October, we’ll remember Girardi decided to use one of his silver bullets early last night, summoning Boone Logan with two outs and the bases loaded in the fifth inning, replacing an exhausted Bartolo Colon with his only left-handed reliever with Adrian Gonzalez looming. It was an aggressive decision, especially with the Yankees down 2-0. And both teams surely noticed.
Gonzalez was looking slider on the first pitch, and let a tasty fastball slither down the heart of the plate for strike one. Logan delivered a slider next, and Gonzalez waved at it. And number three was another bender, and Gonzalez looked like a man trying to hit a golf ball with a Bic pen. He had no shot.
But suddenly the Yankees did: a shot of energy, a shot of life.
A shot at redemption.
“It felt good not only getting the call in that spot,” Logan said, “but also performing well in that spot.”
Immediately, something shifted at Fenway Park then, the crowd stunned to silence by Gonzalez’s meek at-bat, then moved to something beyond that as the first four Yankees in the top of the sixth reached base, cutting the lead in half.
John Lester battled Robinson Cano to a 10-pitch draw, settling for a double play, but surrendering the lead, and then Nick Swisher, continuing his finest week of the season, doubled in the go-ahead run.
In about 15 minutes worth of real time, the Sox had gone from up 2-0 with a serious chance to make it 4-0 or 5-0 to staring up at the scoreboard and facing a deficit.
“It was time for us to make a statement,” Logan said.
They made one. Was it the kind of statement they made two years ago to the weekend, the four-game series at Yankee Stadium in early August of 2009 that crushed the Sox’s spirit, that propelled the Yankees onward toward a 27th championship? Maybe. And maybe it was simply a one-game oasis, and the Sox have something up their sleeves for Sabathia today.
But across 15 minutes in the middle of a muggy Friday night, the Yankees announced that they were tired of being pushed around by their ancient rivals. Forget the long-term ramifications. Even short term it was awfully sweet.