THERE was a time, not so very long ago, when it wasn’t just possible to believe we’d be seeing a Subway Series this year, but to assume it. The Mets, even with their occasional spasms of self-sabotage, were flying. The Yankees, even after 21-29, were soaring even higher.
In early September, on the same day Pedro Martinez was making his first start of the year against the Reds in Cincinnati, on the same day the Yankees were starting what turned out to be a series with the Mariners at Yankee Stadium that all but assured them a playoff slot, I asked Billy Wagner, the Mets’ closer, a simple question.
“You ever think about a Mets-Yankees World Series?”
“Hell, yeah, I think about it,” he said. “How cool would that be? Are you kidding me?”
A funny thing happened on the way to Gotham baseball nirvana, of course. The Mets’ season died a most ignominious death exactly one week ago, and the outer boroughs are still draped in black crepe.
Now it is the Yankees’ turn to wiggle on the city’s griddle. It is the Yankees who face the first of three successive elimination games, starting this evening at 6:37. And it is entirely possible that by the close of business this evening, on the sixth day of October, baseball season will be dead in New York City, the windows shuttered for what would be the coldest winter in many, many years.
“Don’t count us out,” Yankees GM Brian Cashman warned yesterday.
“We feel good about ourselves,” Joe Torre insisted.
“I just have to get the ball to the next guy,” Roger Clemens said. “To the next starter, which would mean we’ve gotten to a Game 4. Or just get the ball to [Mariano Rivera].”
Of those three esteemed Yankees employees, it will be Clemens who can do the most about it, because it will be Clemens who will throw the first pitch of the night to Cleveland’s Grady Sizemore, and Clemens who will be the one to set the evening’s tone. We know how much money the Yankees paid him for this truncated season. Tonight, he gets to earn every nickel.
“I have to be aggressive,” Clemens said. “What I lack in stuff I’ll have to make up for with effort and just pitching my heart out.”
In the back of the room, Clemens’ two sisters nodded their heads. A few minutes later, asked if this might be his last postseason, a camouflaged way of asking if he was going to retire, it was sister Janet who nodded her head vociferously, and Clemens who bashfully acknowledged he has had problems coming to permanent career conclusions in the past.
“This is what he’s always wanted,” Janet said later. “This is the stuff he lives for.”
Whatever you’ve thought about Clemens’ career – which has almost always been touched by greatness, not always as much by graciousness – you can never deny his willingness to take the baseball.
He has earned his keep as a Yankee. He closed out the 1999 World Series. He threw a magnificent one-hitter in the swing game of the 2000 ALCS in Seattle, and followed that by strangling the Mets a week later in the infamous Thrown Bat Game. And in Game 7 of the ’01 World Series, he stood in there pitch for pitch, fastball for fastball, with Curt Schilling.
He is a big pitcher who has embraced big moments. That can sustain Yankees fans today. Even if, at this point last Sunday, we were saying the same things about Tom Glavine, a future Hall of Fame neighbor of Clemens, in the hours before he went out and got mugged by the Florida Marlins in a third of an inning’s work.
Everything we’ve ever seen from Clemens tells us this will be different, tells us that if nothing else, he will do his part to make sure nobody knocks down the walls of the New York baseball summer just yet. As his buddy Andy Pettitte showed Friday night, just throwing a gem won’t mean much if the Yankees’ bats don’t come alive.
But Clemens knows what’s at stake. Arriving at the Stadium yesterday, he gazed at the exterior mural that lists all 26 of the Yankees’ championships. His eyes fixed on 2000. The last banner.
“Seven years,” he said. “That’s a long time.”
About as long as the baseball winter will feel if it descends on New York City tonight.