The ball was seemingly a mile high, soaring over the infield, and just for kicks, just for laughs, there had to be a sizable portion of the clientele inside Yankee Stadium and the interested observers at points throughout greater Gotham who instantly heard the same two words careen around their brains:
Luis. Castillo.
It was silly, of course. That was early June, and that was the ninth inning and, most relevant, that was the Mets, baseball’s endless blooper reel. This was October, the first inning of the American League Championship Series, and these were the Angels, a team we’ve spent the past five days canonizing as the smartest, savviest kids in class, so sound in fundamentals you can almost see Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright weeping as they watch, saying, “That’s how you play our game, lads.”
“They are a team that plays the game well and plays the game right, and you don’t expect to get any breaks from them,” Mark Teixeira said later.
PHOTOS: YANKEES BEAT ANGELS TO TAKE ALCS LEAD
Only, that is precisely what the Yankees were about to get. They already had a run in. They already had a frenzied and frosty crowd percolating behind them. Hideki Matsui lofted the pop-up, and Johnny Damon dutifully sprinted around third and sped toward home, and even if everyone believed this was the most routine kind of play . . .
Well, they had seen things before, seen things happen at Yankee Stadium before, crazy things, oddball things. And now they saw Chone Figgins, the Angels third baseman, look at Erick Aybar, the shortstop. They saw Aybar look right back at Figgins. They saw the ball twisting in the wind, giving in to gravity.
“It gets awful loud out there,” Mike Scioscia, the Angels’ manager, explained after the Yankees’ 4-1 Game 1 victory, even if he didn’t seem terribly convinced by his own rationalization. “And in the weather, the wind can play tricks with the ball . . . ”
It was at this precise moment that Figgins, Aybar, the other 48 players scattered throughout the field, benches and bullpen, and the 49,688 people in the stands, and Scioscia, and manager Joe Girardi, and everyone else started to realize the same thing:
Nobody was going to catch the baseball.
The Yankees were going to take a 2-0 lead.
The Angels had slipped into their Mets uniforms, their Twins uniforms, they had kicked off their spikes and slipped into a pair of banana shoes. The so-called smartest team in baseball suddenly looked dumber than “Brothers.” The so-called savviest team suddenly looked clumsier than Ronan Tynan’s sense of humor.
And suddenly, you had to wonder. Maybe it’s the Yankees who do all of this, who creep into the Mets’ heads in June and the Red Sox’s in August and the Twins’ in October. Maybe it’s Yankee Stadium. Maybe that’s the overriding effect of walking into the Stadium and knowing the Yankees aren’t ever going to beat themselves, aren’t ever going to make it easy for you, and will make you earn every one of the 27 outs you need to collect if you’re going to walk off the field happy.
“We cracked the door open for them and they kept chipping away at it,” Scioscia said, before choosing a simpler term to describe what he had just seen: “Ugly.”
Maybe it was ugly, the same as the Twins series was ugly. Why shouldn’t it have been? It was a brutal night, Yankee Stadium playing like Lambeau Field, the wind stealing home runs from both Vladimir Guerrero and Robinson Cano, whipping everyone like Edgar Prado trying beat it down the backstretch at Belmont.
But the Yankees had CC Sabathia throwing the ball like a hulking poet, and they accepted timely singles and doubles with their home-run strokes grounded, and they watched the Angels turn into a tribute band for Marvelous Marv Throneberry, kicking the ball around and generally looking like Bob Hayes digging his hands in his uniform pants in the Ice Bowl.
“We’ll take it,” said Damon, who rediscovered his mojo with two hits and two runs.
Sure they will. When someone is offering, as the Angels so generously did last night, as so many spooked teams have all across the summer? You bet they will take it.