BOSTON – The baseball soared high into the bright Boston afternoon, high over Fenway Park, sailing out toward the 420-foot sign in center field, the place the locals call “the triangle.” Two sets of legs were churning with the crack of the bat. The younger pair galloped after the baseball. The older ones dashed around the basepaths.
The older legs won. They belong to Johnny Damon, who used to patrol the very area to which he’d just hit the ball, leading off the game. The younger legs belong to Coco Crisp. The Red Sox made a concerted decision last year that Damon’s aging gams weren’t worth breaking their piggy banks over. Two minutes into Armageddon, into the most anticipated Yankees-Red Sox regular-season series since the last Yankees-Red Sox regular-season series, the fruits of that decision were on display for the world to see.
Because the only guy in the ballpark who could have caught the ball had hit it.
“It’s good to be able to have an early impact on a game,” Johnny Damon would say almost four hours later, after the Yankees claimed a 12-4 lead in the first game of a day-night doubleheader, the first game of what could well be a decisive five-game series between these two ancient rivals. “As a leadoff hitter, that’s the one thing you hope to do every game.”
He had an early impact, settling for a triple (though he might well have been safe if he’d tried to make it an inside-the-parker) and scoring the game’s first run seconds later on a Derek Jeter single. Damon had an impact in the middle, drilling a two-run home run that extended the Yankees’ lead to three runs after the Red Sox inched to within one run – this coming minutes after making a diving catch that saved one run and halted the Red Sox momentum in its tracks. And he had an impact late, adding a two-run single that guaranteed the Yankees would neither have to extend Scott Proctor nor tax the key members of an already overburdened bullpen any further.
“These types of games,” Joe Torre would say later, “you like him on your side, put it that way.”
If Red Sox fans weren’t quick to admit as much publicly, showering Damon with the kind of abuse he has received since he first returned here, the type he’s surely going to receive until his last hour as a Yankee, they found themselves privately muttering to themselves as they left Fenway after the first game. Damon’s impact hasn’t just been beneficial to the Yankees, it has been a gaping abscess in the Red Sox lineup, robbing it of an energy and a soul that seems especially lacking in games like this.
Crisp would have been termed a disappointment anyway, given the season he has put up, and yesterday’s effort (0-for-5, with that circular pathway taken to Damon’s ball) was a perfect example why. But given the kind of year Damon is putting up with the Yankees, it has becoming downright calamitous.
Especially since you easily could argue that the one player preventing the Yankees and Red Sox from switching places in the standings right now is Damon. If the Red Sox had him, they wouldn’t only be in first place, they may already have hidden. But the Red Sox don’t have him. The Yankees do. And every now and then, Damon sees fit to emphasize that point.
“He’s a winning player,” Jason Giambi said. “Everything he does is geared toward winning.”
His offense stands on its own. But it was the catch he made of Alex Gonzalez’s sinking liner in the sixth that really stood out. If he misses that, the game is tied, Fenway is an epicenter, and the game very well may have gone differently.
“We’ve seen that a lot,” Red Sox manager Terry Francona said, both admiringly and ruefully.
So have the Yankees. Once, it was Damon who helped tear down the walls of history and toppled the cement all over their heads. Now he’s the one trying to build it back up again. Bit by bit. Brick by brick.