ANAHEIM, Calif. — The more we see the Yankees play, the more we remember the true way that championships are usually won, which is something apart from the mythologies our minds often embrace.
There is no more enduring tale, after all, in all of Yankeedom than the one about the day before the start of the 1927 World Series. The Pittsburgh Pirates, we have always been told, surely knew the team dubbed “Murderers’ Row” was stacked, surely were well aware that the Yankees had won 110 games that year, and no one gets to 110 by being lucky.
Still, the Bucs were champs in their own right, and won a lot of games themselves in the National League, the loop that was still considered (and considered itself) the more difficult of the two leagues. The Pirates were full of their own swagger.
Except then, legend tells us, they sat in their dugout at Forbes Field and watched the Yankees launch rocket after rocket after rocket in batting practice. Babe Ruth. Lou Gehrig. Irish Bob Meusel. On and on. And the Pirates were done for, intimidated beyond the point of being even reasonably competitive. And so was born the notion that when the Yankees are good, when they are primed to win it all, they get there by pulverizing you, by pounding you, by punishing you.
But that has never been the case. And it’s not the case now, as the Yankees have won all five postseason games in 2009, not simply because they have a lineup that hearkens to Murderers’ Row, but because they are an opportunistic bunch that knows how to seize on mistakes and turn them into gold-plated advantages.
“I tip my hat to them,” Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said after the Yankees swept his team out of the playoffs by winning three games in which Minnesota led, including one in the seventh and one in the ninth. “We had our chances. We played on the same field with those guys and had our chances a lot this year, and they got us every time. And it’s just because they got a few more at-bats than we do in big situations, and they know how to finish people off just a little bit better than we did this year.”
The truth? The Yankees have won 26 championships and have won far more of them playing this brand of October baseball than the Bully Boy style of 1927 and 1961 and 1998.
That was true in the black-and-white days — when the Yankees took advantage of Mickey Owens’ dropped third strike, and Billy Martin caught the ball on his shoetops, and Bobby Richardson snared Willie McCovey’s screaming and potentially season-ending line drive. And it was always true of the modern Yankees, too, whether it was Derek Jeter’s Flip Play or Jim Leyritz capping a comeback from 6-0 down with an unlikely homer or Luis Sojo coaxing a 90-hopper through the middle against the Mets or Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius delivering game-ending scripts on back-to-back nights that still defy description.
“It’s a great baseball team,” Gardenhire said last week. “They deserve all the accolades, they have got a great bullpen. Those guys come out there firing, bench, the whole package, they’ve got the whole deal, and they have got some of the classiest players in the league out in the field, guys that I really enjoyed watching play.”
Back in the dynasty days, you heard a lot of conceding managers talking like that, whether it was Johnny Oates or Davey Johnson or Lou Piniella or Mike Hargrove. You also heard a lot of defiant managers — Bruce Bochy, Bobby Cox, Bobby Valentine, Art Howe — sound the way the Angels’ Mike Scioscia did after Game 2 of the ALCS early yesterday morning:
“Well, we did a lot of good things out there on that ballfield tonight. Unfortunately, one of them wasn’t hitting with runners in scoring position. And that’s eventually what hurt us. We had a lot of opportunities out there. We couldn’t get that key hit that might have put the game in a little different light moving forward. We have to get better at that, that’s for sure. But we’re going back home. The momentum in this series can swing in a heartbeat. We’re going to go out there and come out and play a good ballgame and grind it out pitch by pitch and start all over.”
And that, in the past, is when the Yankees always knew they had a team exactly where they wanted it, when that team was shaking its head not so much in awe of the Yankees’ talent, but at themselves for their own failures and shortcomings. Make no mistake, these Yankees are talented — Alex Rodriguez has never looked more like an extraterrestrial freak of nature than he has across the last 10 days — but other Yankees teams of recent vintage have had plenty of talent, too.
This one clearly has something else, something familiar to Yankees fans, and something that has to terrify the others remaining in this tournament: They are, in the parlance of their own sport, a very tough out.
michael.vaccaro
@nypost.com