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This was inside a champagne-soaked Yankees clubhouse nearly three years ago, the night they beat Pedro Martinez and the Phillies in Game 6 of the 2009 World Series, the night they won a 27th championship and necessitated a uniform change for Joe Girardi.
You tend to hear a lot of hyperbole in moments like this, moments of blissful triumph. It was in the midst of one of these celebrations, back in 1977, when Reggie Jackson actually said, “There’s no manager I’d rather play for than Billy Martin.” In snapshots like these, apparently, the champagne tends to bypass the stomach and go right to the brain.
Anyway, it was in precisely this kind of moment when Alex Rodriguez, enjoying his seminal moment as a Yankee, gushed about how much the crowd at Yankee Stadium had meant to the team, how much the stadium itself had meant to them, how they were all in it together the whole time, how the ghosts and the goblins and Mystique and Aura had migrated across the street, all of it.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I wish we could just stay here every day in October, just keep playing one day after another. That’s how much fun it is to play here. That’s how great it is to play these games here. That’s …”
He would have gone on, but three bottles of champagne converged to splatter and splash him and cut off his sentence and his train of thought, which was just as well, since it drenched my notebook, too.
Well, if things break right for the Yankees, A-Rod just might get his wish across the next few days. If things break right for them, they will get at least two games at the Stadium the next two days and then two more games to start the AL Championship Series beginning Saturday. And if the Division Series goes five and the Yankees survive, it could mean — weather permitting, of course — five playoff games in five days at Yankee Stadium.
It isn’t often you find something in October that’s never been done at Yankee Stadium. There was a perfect game at the old place and Reggie’s three-home run game (and one by George Brett, too) and the Tino-and-Brosius back-to-back miracles and Babe Ruth ending a World Series by getting thrown out trying to steal. River Avenue has long been October’s Warehouse.
But there’s never been five straight October games played in any of the Stadium’s iterations; in fact, the only time that’s ever happened in our town, you have to go back to 1922, when the Yankees and the Giants played five World Series games in five days at the old Polo Grounds (the year before, they played the last five games of the series in succession on Coogan’s Bluff, also).
So thanks to the new playoff format, the Yankees might have been delayed their first taste of a Bronx October. But if they take care of their business now, they can get an extra-large helping across the next few days. It is all there for them as a team and for us as a city.
Now there’s only the small matter of the Orioles to contend with …
And that, as much as anything, will be the buzz in the Bronx air tonight. It has been difficult not to admire what the Orioles have done, a task made simpler from the Yankees’ point of view by the fact that the O’s never did pass them in the standings for even a day in September. But now all of that is prologue. All of that is prelude.
The Yankees won nine games against the O’s in the regular season, the O’s won nine. The Orioles have won one game in this series, the Yankees one game. They have been as perfectly matched as baseball law allows, and now they are engaged in a best-of-three in which the Yankees’ mission remains unchanged: Keep them at arm’s length. Keep them a step behind. Keep them in the rearview mirror.
They do that, we’ll have quite a fall festival at Yankee Stadium the next few days, a baseball San Gennaro, as much Bronx baseball as Alex Rodriguez or anyone else could ever possibly ask for.
But first, the Birds must fly south for the winter.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com