THEY had been waiting to officially christen the new place, waiting for a game just like this one, one fitting enough to receive a glass of champagnes tossed against its side. So much of Yankee Stadium II’s first four months had been devoted to all that was missing: the charm, the history, the intimacy of a loud crowd on a summer night.
This, at last, was a test.
And this, at last, was a game worthy of the neighborhood pedigree. The Yankees and the Red Sox had played 14½ innings. They had hung 29 zeroes on the board. They just about gone through every available arm in both bullpens.
And now a rookie named Junichi Tazawa, who had started his baseball career in the Japanese Industrial League, who had a poster of Hideki Matsui on his wall as a kid. This was his first game in the bigs, his second inning, and he had been lucky as hell to survive the first. Now he faced down Alex Rodriguez.
“Never seen him before,” Rodriguez said. “He threw me something soft.”
The swing, however, was not. And as soon as ball met bat, there were a lot of streaks leaving the ballpark along with the baseball. It had been 72 at-bats since Alex Rodriguez had hit his 19th home run of the year. And it had been well over a year since a Bronx baseball stadium had sounded this loud, this raucous, this . . .
Well, this much like Yankee Stadium.
But on this night, it had. This night, they had watched a couple of studs named Josh Beckett and A.J. Burnett match zeroes with each other, mow through hitters with fierce precision. They had seen the bullpens do the same. In the 14th, they had seen J.D. Drew save the game with a remarkable catch, seen a baseball do the same a few moments later when Melky Cabrera’s would-be game-winner landed a few millimeters foul.
They were almost out of breath. Almost out of energy. Five hours and 33 minutes of October-style baseball will do that to you.
And then ball met bat.
And ball met the night sky.
And before you knew it, before A-Rod had even reached second base, Sinatra already was spreading the news, and the remnants of 48,262 were trying to lift their voices to the sky, the way they used to, trying to make a Bronx sound like they used to, finally getting there.
A-Rod trotted around the basepaths, and he flung his helmet away, and he took his home-plate pounding and received the mandatory cream pie to his pie hole.
And the Yankees won 2-0, won what obviously was the greatest game in the brief history of the new ballpark, won a second straight game over the Red Sox, extended their lead to 4½ games, and gave everyone a stern reminder that they are the alpha dogs of the AL East now. And good luck to anyone who wishes to steal that bone from them.
“Alex was patient, he kept looking for his pitch,” manager Joe Girardi said, “and he smoked it.”
He smoked it, all right, same as the Yankees have smoked the Sox the past two nights, same as they have smoked the American League on a nightly basis since the start of May. All the talk of baseball’s best team has bounced around baseball the past few months, from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to Boston.
Look homeward now. Look to The Bronx. Look to the familiar old neighborhood. And cross the street. Yankee Stadium II made its bones last night, proved it can be a fair acoustic heir, and maybe approach the experience the old joint used to specialize in: feeling like you had a stake in things. Feeling like everyone on the field could hear you. Feeling like a 10th man.
And being one. The games that came before didn’t have any of that. This one did. This one lasted until close to 1 in the morning, but when it ended everyone was ready. Everyone was prepared. The best game in the new ballpark, and they screamed as the ball soared, and it sounded sweeter even than Sinatra.
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