Cliff Lee was prepared to make the old-timers weep. He was ready to walk back out for the ninth inning, 122 pitches already in that soon-to-be nine-figure left arm, eager to take his place among the gritty gamers of yesteryear, with Gibby, Spahnie, Newk and the rest.
“How are you feeling?” Ron Washington, the Rangers’ manager, asked Lee as he jogged off the field after fanning Brett Gardner on three filthy pitches to end the eighth, his 13th strikeout of the night. There was really only one answer Washington wanted to hear.
“I feel good,” Lee said.
That’s what Washington wanted to hear.
“It’s your game,” he told his ace.
The Rangers made the issue sadly moot a few minutes later, treating the ninth inning like one of those postgame promotions where the kids are allowed to run the bases, taking a precarious 2-0 lead and inflating it to 8-0, and at some point Washington and Lee shook hands, his workday complete.
“The guy can pitch,” Washington marveled. “He can move the ball around. He can change speeds. He can hit spots …”
He was grinning now, practically gushing, and didn’t care. Would you care if you had just taken a 2-1 lead in games in this best-of-7 American League Championship Series, if you knew that you had Cliff Lee looming on your side in the event of a seventh game?
“He can do,” Washington said, “whatever he has to do.”
He could last night. As much as Yankees fans feared Lee, as much as past performance suggested he’d ascended to the very top of the list of postseason pitching phenomena, he was even better. This was “Born to Run” living up to and beyond the covers of Newsweek and Time. This was “Avatar” selling more tickets than even James Cameron would’ve dreamed.
“It’s really fun being in center field and watching him pitch,” Josh Hamilton said.
It was Hamilton who lunged at an Andy Pettitte cutter on the game’s 15th pitch, put a stroke on it like a one-handed tennis backhand, and delivered a 2-0 lead to Lee before the Yankees ever came to bat; it was soon apparent the Yankees would’ve preferred to never have to come to bat.
Lee was perfect through the game’s first 11 hitters. He still owned a no-hitter with two outs in the fifth. In the sixth the Yankees finally got a man in scoring position when Gardner singled and stole second, then Derek Jeter struck out on high gas and Lee induced grounders from Nick Swisher and Mark Teixeira, and that was that.
How dominant was he? The Yankees’ three best at-bats were strikeouts; Swisher, Curtis Granderson and Marcus Thames built 26 notches of Lee’s pitch count, which is the only reason the ninth inning was even in debate.
“The ultimate respect,” Rangers outfielder Jeff Francoeur said, “is they were cheering for a walk. You don’t see that in Yankee Stadium. You don’t cheer for a no-hitter broken up in the fifth inning.”
The closest Lee came to tasting trouble came later on, when he slipped while sitting down at the postgame podium and nearly tasted some floor as a microphone went tumbling.
“Booby trap,” he joked.
The Yankees had already seen plenty of Lee, had already contributed two wins last October to a postseason record that now sits at 8-0 with a Gibsonesque 1.12 ERA. Pettitte, the winningest pitcher in the history of postseason play and on this night only a half-step behind Lee, was astonished at what he was seeing.
“With our offense, you keep expecting someone to get on and then another guy to pop one and you’re right there, we’ve done that so many times,” he said. “But not the way Cliff was throwing out there.”
The Yankees will have to wait to get their paws on Lee, at least the respectful five days between the end of the World Series and the start of free agency. If they wish to remain occupied until then they’d best figure a way to avoid a Game 7. Everyone thought it silly that the Yankees, the mighty Yankees, would cower before any pitcher.
Doesn’t seem quite so silly anymore, does it?
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com