BOSTON – These games will play crazy tricks with your mind, with your sanity, and with your sense of reason. That is what we can take away from this first three-game bite of Yankees-Red Sox ’08. That is the lasting lesson for those of us who have charted every pitch for the past decade, and heard hand-me-down tales from the past century.
That is the immediate lesson that will be carried forth by Joe Girardi, who had himself quite a maiden voyage in the land of ancient rivalries and deep-seeded blood feuds.
A brief recap, if we might:
* Friday, the same day this newspaper unveiled the sinister plot of an obviously insane red-wing conspiracy to implant a Red Sox jersey in the sacred concrete of the new Yankee Stadium, Girardi attempted to put the rivalry in the kind of fish-lens perspective only an innocent could. “The intensity,” he said, “is what separates it.” The Yankees won that night, because Chien-Ming Wang pitched like the best pitcher on planet earth.
* Saturday, the same day that raggedy old David Ortiz shirt was exhumed from the earth and sent on its merry way to eBay, Girardi defied logic and betrayed that he had watched even one inning of the Yankees and the Red Sox over the past eight years. He chose to pitch to Manny Ramirez with the game on the line. You can’t be accused of second-guessing that move. No one can. An entire city was first-guessing it in disbelief as it was happening. The Yankees lost that night, because Ramirez is a circus freak of a hitter, because Jonathan Papelbon was riding his bike during a 171-minute rain delay while the man he knew he would face, Alex Rodriguez, was scarfing doughnuts and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
* And yesterday (on into this morning) was the day when David Ortiz laughed a hearty, old- school Big Papi laugh when he was in formed it was one of his No. 34 models that wound up in the ground back in The Bronx. It also was a day the Yan kees and the Red Sox reminded us that nobody knows how to better squeeze all the passion, life, color and imagination out of this rivalry than they do, whenever they put their minds to playing four-hour steel-cage death matches.
It wasn’t just the 68 (give or take) three-ball counts that Yankees starter Phil Hughes (two innings, 65 pitches, 30 of them out of the strike zone) and Red Sox starter Daisuke Matsuzaka (five innings, 116 pitches, 54 balls) made everyone endure. It wasn’t just the parade of early Red Sox runs, and the teasing cavalcade of late Yankees runs, and the possibility of the biggest Yankees comeback against the Red Sox in 21 years that made it all seem so bizarre.
No, by the time the Yankees had planted the tying runs on base in the top of the eighth, having crept back to 7-5 from 7-1, Girardi had to throw all his cards onto the table with the flourish of Johnny Chan. Because after vowing that he would do everything but chain Jorge Posada to the bench, to keep his sore right arm rested, what did he find himself having to do, on the second weekend of the 26-week season, in the 13th game of the 162-game year, in the third game of this 18-game series with the Red Sox?
He pinch-ran Wilson Betemit for Jose Molina, who had tweaked his hamstring earlier, in the eighth, ensuring that Posada would have to leave his DH exile and catch the rest of the way, ensuring two hysterical things:
1. That the Red Sox would run on Posada at the earliest opportunity, and did, and it wound up buying them an insurance run in the eighth when Coco Crisp singled, stole second without a throw, then scored on two fly balls.
2. That the game, which ended as an 8-5 win for the Red Sox, would also end with Kyle Farnsworth penciled in the leadoff spot in the batting order.
(I will now pause, to accommodate the requisite giggling and gaggling . . .)
Yes, these games are intense, all right. And bizarre. And surreal. As is the idea of the Yankees traveling to Tampa this deep in the season looking upat the Rays (and everyone else in the division, for that matter).
“We’re not where we want to be,” Girardi said, “but we could be a lot worse.”
Welcome to the varsity, Joe.