These are the ones that hurt.
When the scoreboard taunts you with Bal 3 Min 0, which means you started the night as the first-place Yankees, and left the Stadium long after midnight as the second-place Yankees.
When you show plenty of fight and might and refuse to lose over nine innings and lose 10-5 in a 5:49, 14-inning marathon that ends at 12:57 a.m. anyway because in the moments of truth, you simply refused to win.
When you waste two dominant innings, the 10th and 11th, from Shawn Kelley, and two more from Adam Warren.
When you have your chance to win it in the 11th only to have Ichiro Suzuki, with “Ich-iro, Ich-iro, Ich-iro” chants in the chilled air, roll to second on a full count with Yankees on second and third.
When you have another chance to win it in the 12th with runners on first and second, nobody out, but a wacky 4-3-3-6-3-4-3-4-5-2 double play on a Carlos Beltran left Derek Jeter on third before on third before Alfonso Soriano grounded to short.
When you have yet another chance to win it in the 13th, but Jeter, the bases loaded following an intentional walk to Jacoby Ellsbury (four singles), the diehards chanting “De-rek Je-ter, De-rek Je-ter,” grounds back to Heath Bell, giving him a Mr. May 0-for-7 line in the box score.
When asked about The Captain, Joe Girardi said: “There’s gonna be nights like that.”
Jeter: “It’s one of those days, you know what I mean? Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you see something new. No one wants to go 0-for-what’d you say, 7?”
When finally, you are forced to turn to reliever Chris Leroux, a novice making his second Yankees appearance, and it is batting practice in the wee hours of the morning for the Rays.
“Our bullpen’s a mess, there’s no question about it,” Girardi said.
The shame of it is that after a longlost Ruthian display, the Yankees came up smaller than Dr. Ruth Westheimer in the clutch.
You see, whoever stole the Bronx Bombers had temporarily returned them to the Stadium Friday night.
It is a rite of spring, and summer, and sometimes October. The Yankees stop hitting, and The Bronx begins Burning. It is as if every Pinstriped team has an obligation to honor its Murderers Row legacy.
It matters not that even the Bambino endured slumps, that the 162-game season humbles them all somewhere along the way.
“There’s people doubting — shame on them,” Beltran had said, and smiled at his locker long before Friday afternoon had turned into Saturday morning, much less Friday night.
Then Brian McCann mashed a two-run homer in the second.
Then Mark Teixeira and Soriano bashed back-to-back homers off Joel Peralta to send the game into the ninth inning tied 4-4.
Then Ellsbury lined a single to center off Juan Carlos Oviedo with two outs in the ninth to send the game into the 10th inning tied 5-5.
More often than not — the 1965 Yankees and 1992-93 Mets notwithstanding — the numbers on the backs of the baseball cards do not lie.
Finally, the backs of those cards were standing up a bit and telling the truth.
“We feel that we have a good lineup, we feel like we have a good team,”
Beltran said before the game. “Right now we’re not hitting, but that doesn’t mean anything. We’re gonna have this conversation maybe three or four more times during the year. Sometimes you just go through stretches where you don’t get results, or you’re just not getting hits with the guys in scoring position, you’re not getting the hits when it really means the most for the team. But at the end of the day, that’s how this game is. You just have to be patient, you have to continue to work hard, you have to continue to come to the ballpark with the right mentality, the right approach, and it will change.”
The Yankees hadn’t scored more than four runs in their previous five games. So hallelujah.
“I think we can be a good lineup,” Beltran had said. “You look at the players — you look at what Soriano has done all his life, and myself, Jeter, McCann, Ellsbury … it’s about being able to get hot at the same time, which sometimes is difficult. We feel that we’re gonna be good.”
A return to the Teixeira of old — or something at least close to it — would change the complexion of the Yankee lineup.
“He’s starting to trust his swing from the left side, that’s the key,” hitting coach Kevin Long said. “There for so long he was letting go, trying to protect his wrist.”
Beltran ended an 0-for-17 malaise. McCann, who was the designated hitter Friday, had broken an 0-for-15 slump Thursday night.
“Funny things happen, strange things happen at times, “ Jeter said. “We had our opportunities, it didn’t happen. It would have been a good one to win, you’re our there all that time, but you gotta have a short memory.”