For a moment, it felt like nobody could breathe, nobody could move. This baseball basilica, which shook with life and with energy barely an hour before, was suddenly, sullenly silent. An hour before, thousands of them had aped the words of the great Jack Buck, watching Raul Ibanez’ latest moonshot miracle.
And now they said the same thing.
Because The Captain was on the ground.
The Tigers had already re-taken the lead, and while that was surprising, it isn’t law that amazing comebacks are required to have satisfying endings. The Lakers lost the Jerry West Halfcourt Shot Game, after all. The Mets lost the Endy Chavez Game. It wasn’t beyond the realm that the Yankees could lose the game.
But to lose The Captain, too?
Suddenly, impossibly, this wasn’t going to be about a game lost, but something far deeper, far graver. The Tigers won the game 6-4, rendering as a footnote the Yankees four-run comeback in the ninth, and Ibanez’ fifth astonishing home run in the last three weeks. That’s minor, though. That’s get-em-again-tomorrow stuff.
This was something else. Jhonny Peralta hit a ball to Derek Jeter in the top of the 12th. Jeter dove for the ball. And never got up. He rolled on the ground, flipped the ball aside. And was in pain. Real pain. How many times have we seen shake these things off? Ugly bruises were laughed off. Ankle sprains were dealt with.
Only once, when he’d separated his shoulder in Toronto on the opening day of the 2003 season, had Jeter ever really looked hurt, and been hurt. It had become a running joke with two different managers: Jeter grinding his way through pain, talking his way into the lineup.
There was no laughing this one off. Jeter couldn’t put any weight on his leg. He was carried off the field. Carried off the field? You’d sooner see Jeter wear a Red Sox hat onto a field then get carried off one, unless absolutely necessary.
This, clearly, was absolutely necessary.
And so this is what the Yankees must deal with now: a Jeter who has a broken ankle, and a 0-1 deficit to the Tigers, and a star player, Robinson Cano, now 0-for-his-last-22, and an iconic one, Alex Rodriguez, who for the fourth straight game was either pinch hit for or kept on the bench entirely.
It seemed like it was going to be such a magic night. Where were you when it happened again? Were you on the Deegan? The Bridge? Or were you one of the 25,000 or so who actually stayed to the end, who saw Raul Ibanez do it again, who saw the Yankees do it again, who knew enough that this is starting to be an October when 27 outs means 27 outs?
We know better now, all of us, those of us in the pressboxes who’d already filed stories that nobody but snickering copy editors will ever read, those of you in the stands who’d hustled out to the parking lot, those of you watching on TV who opted for the opening monologue of “Saturday Night Live.”
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me again and again and again and again and again?
It was almost too good to be true. And then turned out to be precisely that. A night earlier, we’d all seen the Cardinals rise from the dead, shake off all those pitches that could have ended their season in Washington. We saw how baseball can be singularly cruel and uplifting at the same time, how it can devastate one fan base while enthralling another.
Those Cardinals were facing the end of their season if they’d lost and so the stakes were certainly higher for them. But the Yankees looked so completely hopeless and hapless for eight innings last night, stranding the bases loaded on three different occasions. They didn’t seem like they could buy a big hit with Donald Trump’s wallet.
Then they did. They were bulletproof. Surely they couldn’t lose.
And then they did lose. A ballgame. And then something far worse.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com