This is the part where you start to understand how different things are around the Yankees, how truly separate and apart from the rest of baseball — the rest of sports, really — they are. The other day, someone asked Joe Girardi if the League Championship Series hadn’t supplanted the World Series in some ways, because of all the drama and intrigue and effort that goes into simply surviving baseball’s playoff preliminaries.
“That’s an interesting question,” Girardi said, smiling, though he looked almost puzzled, as if he’d been asked if he would be surprised if he woke up in the morning and discovered the sky really was green. “I don’t think so.”
Elsewhere, it is a fair question. Elsewhere, you can consider yourself a tremendous success simply by qualifying for the World Series, because by any logical measure that is the pinnacle of success. You play 162 regular-season games, and then you have to win seven more under excruciating circumstances simply to get that far. Getting that far is a hell of a thing.
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Around the Yankees, it is called prologue.
“I would be sad if we don’t finish the deal,” Hal Steinbrenner said early Sunday morning, inside the Yankees clubhouse, a room that seemed so large and impersonal all season but suddenly seemed the perfect size to host a champagne sauna. “I’ll be upset, we’ll all be upset. We expect to win a championship every year.”
On the scale of generational transfers, you can place this one right alongside John F. Kennedy telling Old Joe, “Sure, Pop, maybe I’ll take a stab at politics.” For the first time, young Hal not only sounded like his father, he embodied the old man, too.
“This is something we haven’t accomplished in a number of years,” Hal said, referring to the six-year gap between Series appearances, “and this is a great team. They support each other, they never feel like they are out of a game and, boy, they deserve to be here and I’m happy. But I’ll be happier if we win it all.”
Girardi knew this from the moment he was hired, from the moment he slipped into his press-conference jersey, impishly asked reporters, “How many championships have they won here?” and then turned around to reveal the number he’d selected: 27. The Yankees’ next title will be No. 27, and so Girardi wasn’t on the job 30 seconds when he revealed just how deeply he understood the mission statement.
To some, that might have seemed a bit audacious — arrogant, even. But Girardi was a part of the Great Yankees Renaissance of the ’90s, he was a key cog on championship teams in 1996, ’98 and ’99 and, more important, he was a coach in 2005, by which time the novelty of winning championships had worn off, replaced by necessity.
“We make no secret of what our goals are here,” Girardi said last week.
For one of the few times in history, though, the Yankees will be playing a team that is likely to be just as disinterested in a participation prize as they are. The Phillies don’t have anywhere close to the history the Yankees do; they’ve appeared in only six World Series and won but two (the Yankees are 26-13). The Phillies have only played 31 World Series games, total, and are 12-19 in those games; the Yankees have played 219 World Series games and are 130-88-1 in them.
But the Phillies are in possession of the Commissioner’s Trophy, earned last year in a five-game blitzing of the Rays, and they aren’t likely to want to part with it easily. The Yankees have played the defending champions seven times before, winning five (Giants, 1923; Cardinals, 1943; Dodgers, 1956; Braves, 1958; and Braves, 1996) and losing only to the ’22 Giants and the ’76 Reds. The Yankees generally like to take what they believe to be rightfully theirs.
“When you play here,” Alex Rodriguez said at the start of the playoffs, “winning isn’t only a goal, it’s an expectation.”
Around the Yankees, winning the World Series isn’t everything.
Vince Lombardi would understand.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com