Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

MLB

At least these Yankees are going down swinging

The ball was sitting there, sweet and lovely and all but resting on a tee. This is what happens to a split-finger fastball that doesn’t dart due south, as it’s supposed to, disappearing into the dirt. These, as a rule, disappear somewhere else.

These are invitations major league hitters cannot ignore.

“You hope he can get the ball up,” Chase Headley said, “and you hope you can put a good swing on it.”

Koji Uehara spent most of his first year and a half as a big leaguer taunting and torturing hitters with that splitter. He threw it all the way to Game 6 of the World Series a year ago, striking out the world.

But his mojo lately has been shaken. Brian McCann hit a cosmetic ninth-inning bomb off him Tuesday night. He’s been getting hit.

And now, for the second time in a ninth inning that the Yankees needed as badly as oxygen, his money pitch didn’t dip, didn’t dance, didn’t dart. It was up there on a tee. A few minutes earlier, Mark Teixeira saw a pitch exactly like it, and it didn’t matter that he was embroiled in the worst slump of his career; he wasn’t missing that one. He didn’t. 4-3 Sox became 4-4, and Yankee Stadium felt like Yankee Stadium for the first time all year.

Now, Headley saw the exact same thing. The precise pitch.

All but gift-wrapped.

Headley, like Teixeira, has scuffled a bit since coming to the Yankees July 22, since greeting his new team with a 14th-inning, walk-off single the night he arrived from San Diego. And Headley, like so many, knew what being a Yankee entailed, because he had seen so much of it as a kid in Fountain, Colo.

“I remember them jumping up and down on the field a lot,” he said, smiling. “That looked fun. I always thought, I want to be a part of that.”

And now, he was.

Now there was this hanging splitter, this gift, and in an instant Headley knew what he had done. He is nowhere close to a look-at-me player, but in the moment it doesn’t matter. When you know you’ve hit a baseball over the sky, long into the night, when you know the moment it lands it’s going to deliver your team a got-to-have-it 5-4 win, then of course you lift your arm and you shake it in triumph.

“Not a lot of better feelings in sports,” Headley would say later, in a clubhouse thick with relief and thicker with hope, “than a walk-off hit.”

The Yankees still face a grisly gauntlet ahead, the product of too few games like this one across the season’s first five months, too few times when the offense has produced and too few times when a moment went un-seized.

“We’ve made it hard on ourselves,” the general manager, Brian Cashman, would say. “I don’t know what our chances are. All I know is we have to win our games.”

There is little choice, really. Bad news came from all over the map Thursday: from Baltimore, where the Orioles finished off a four-game drubbing of the Reds; from Texas, where the Mariners clobbered the Rangers; from Cleveland, where the Tigers outlasted the Indians in 11; even from Tampa, where the Jays continue to fight for relevance just behind the Yankees with their own extra-inning escape.

None of that could temper this moment in The Bronx, though, and none of it should. The out-of-town scoreboard is the enemy in these narrow hours of September, and only bad tidings can be found there. The Yankees have their own business to worry about. They have their own itinerary, and it needs to include so many more moments like this one.

Still: better to walk-off than to wobble off.

Better to shovel a little more sod on the Sox on their last visit of the year, better to officially separate them from their one-year championship belt. Better to go down swinging, especially when you’re taking aim at hanging splitters that all but beg you to crush them. And, while you’re at it, better to crush them, and give the Stadium a spasm of juice.

Maybe it’s too late for any of this to matter. Maybe the hole they’re in is too great.

“It doesn’t matter how you win them, or when you win them,” manager Joe Girardi said. “Just that you win them. And that you keep winning them.”

On to the gauntlet.