CLEVELAND – There was a time when it seemed the biggest problem in Derek Jeter‘s world would be finding a safety-deposit box large enough to contain all the championship rings he would end up with. Surely he would run out of fingers before the Yankee machine ran out of steam.
In 2000, after he had finished his fifth season and picked up his fourth ring, there was no compelling reason to believe that seven years later, he still would be waiting for one for the thumb, same as Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera, same as Jorge Posada, who was up for eight at-bats in 1996 and just about every big moment that followed.
“It’s been a while,” Jeter said yesterday afternoon at Jacobs Field, fresh from a team meeting on the day before he would begin his 12th professional postseason. “I think it shows how difficult it really is to win the World Series. No other team has won more than once since the last time we did, either.”
He tugged at his uniform pants. “Maybe,” he said, “we made it look easy at times. Easier than it really is.”
There is nothing easy about the pathway to the Canyon of Heroes, and nothing easy about the task that faces the Yankees this time around. The official designation is American League wild card winner. The home-field advantage, at least until the World Series, will remain someone else’s privilege.
But the Yankees, make no mistake, are the ones with the targets stenciled most prominently on their backs, whether it’s on their road grays or their home pinstripes. They are the ones with the most to prove. And also the most to lose.
The turnover of playoff teams – seven new ones this year, the Yankees as holdovers – tells you there are seven cities in which winning a World Series would be a nice ending to a splendid season.
There is one city, New York City, where the stakes are a little higher. The Mets discovered that, slopping mud all over their punch bowl the past few weeks, and the disenchantment has polluted the town ever since. And that will be nothing compared with the sound and the fury should the Yankees make an extra-early playoff exit for the third straight year.
“I don’t feel any more pressure in doing what we’re going to try to do now in the month of October,” Joe Torre said. “The only thing I’ve said to our ball club is, go out and there and just let her go, and play, and we’ll see what the results are.”
In some ways, the Yankees couldn’t have picked a better site than Jacobs Field to begin this long journey, because it was here, in separate acts across two different Octobers, when the core of their dynastic soul was forged.
Ten years ago, with one championship already in their footlockers, the Yankees came here and were four outs away from advancing to the ALCS when Mariano Rivera tried to sneak a fastball past Sandy Alomar that wouldn’t stay snuck. They lost that game, and the next, and there was legitimate reason to believe 1996 had been a feel-good fluke.
The following year, carrying the millstone of 114 regular-season victories around their necks, the Yankees fell behind two games to one in the ALCS against the Indians, and Jim Thome very nearly put them up 3-0 in the first inning of Game 4 off Orlando Hernandez. But Thome’s blast died a whisper shy of the wall, El Duque muffled Cleveland’s bats the rest of the way, and it would be another two years before the Yankees ever wandered that close to playoff trouble again.
“The great part about getting older,” Torre said, “is that instead of dwelling on things that could have been different, you try to figure out how you can learn from it, and how your players can learn from it.”
So there will be no dwelling on Detroit in 2006, or Anaheim in 2005, or Boston in 2004, or any of the potholes that have claimed every Yankee postseason since 2000. But there will be a drumbeat of urgency. For the Yankees players, there always is.
For the Yankees core, Jeter and Pettitte, Posada and Rivera, where it always seems to start, there’s an even more defined sense of what’s possible. There’s that elusive fifth ring. The one for the thumb.