The workmen tidied up the infield dirt, took their brooms to the beer cups and hot-dog-wrappers littering the aisles. It’s an enormous task keeping Yankee Stadium tip-top for October, especially when you expect a long run from cold to colder, from a rumor of summer to a whisper of winter.
But the workers tended to their chores in silence last night. They knew, as we all know, that it’s entirely possible that New York City has seen its last baseball until April. The Yankees, the stadium’s punchless tenants, have now played 21 innings in the American League Championship Series and scored in exactly one of them.
They lost 3-0 to the Tigers as the sun was setting, on both the day and, quite possibly, the season. They are down two games to none in the series, and all that stands between themselves and three-games-to-none is a certain right-handed pitcher named Justin Verlander tomorrow night.
“Go win a game Tuesday, that’s all you say,” said Joe Girardi, the Yankees manager who celebrated his 48th birthday yesterday by getting tossed from the game following a blown umpire’s call in the eighth inning, who is now bound for Peoria, Ill., where his late father, Jerry, will be buried today, who looks as tortured and torn as a week of personal turmoil coupled with your baseball team sprinting toward early hibernation ought to make you look.
“Just go win a game on Tuesday.”
The same issues keep foiling and flummoxing the Yankees. For the seventh time in seven playoff games they received a splendid effort from a starting pitcher, Hiroki Kuroda this time, who was perfect through five and mostly brilliant through 7 2/3, but who wound up a losing pitcher because the Yankees still can’t hit.
Now, it isn’t just Alex Rodriguez who hears it from dissatisfied and the disaffected. Robinson Cano — now 0-for-26, the worst such single-year slide in the history of postseason baseball — got it bad all day yesterday during an indifferent 0-for-4, louder when he failed to bust it down the line for a slowly hit roller. Nick Swisher no longer takes his warm-up tosses anywhere near his erstwhile pals in the bleachers, presumably because the creatures find him less charming when he’s costing the Yankees runs on both sides of the ball.
And Curtis Granderson, the man who made the final out of the game? The people were sprinting for the exits by then, but many made a point to stop, watch him strike out for the third time in the game, fifth time in the series and 14th time in seven postseason games, and blanket him with one last round of boos for the road.
“We didn’t score any runs,” said Rodriguez, who did manage to get a ninth-inning single — off lefty Phil Coke — and remains hitless against right-handers in October. “What the hell was there to cheer about?”
There wasn’t. The blown call boiled some blood pressures, but the Yankees were already behind by a run and lately that’s felt like 10 except for those innings when Ichiro Suzuki and Raul Ibanez have bats in their hands. And it was terrible: Swisher’s throw to Cano caught a careless Omar Infante off second, but Jeff Nelson called him safe.
“The call was incorrect,” Nelson admitted later, after he’d tossed Girardi, after Girardi had presented an impassioned case endorsing the need for replay (somehow he failed to do this after Jeffrey Maier and Phil Cuzzi, beneficial blown calls for which he was a first-hand observer).
To his players’ credit, while a few them acknowledged that the play was missed, none of them wanted to issue position papers on the subject and none echoed the loser’s lament of blame-the-ump.
“I’m not going to talk about the call,” Teixeira said. “I’ll talk about the game, which they beat us fair and square. And I’ll talk about the series, which I’m confident we’ll begin to play better in. It isn’t about an umpire’s call.”
No. It isn’t. It is about a team who dented scoreboards all across the summer who can’t get out of their own way now. New York wakes up this morning with two first-place football teams and one baseball team on the brink. The workmen kept at it all night. It’ll be football season here, too, unless the Yankees figure out a way to give them reasons to open the doors before April. It’s gotten late early around here.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com