"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

I swear to God, the last week in terms of baseball viewing has been nothing short of headspinning. AND IT’S FINALLY OVER. My concept of time has been mega distorted. After spending the weekend in the office, I made my way to DC for market research.

By the time me and my coworker made it to the Hyatt, the Yanks were in a 3-run deficit. My poor coworker is starving but understands my need for the game and graciously picks a table in hotel bar that’s angled towards the TV. Thanks, Mel…

I felt like Satan, but Mel cheerfully watched the game with me and told me she was trying to get into baseball, and I explained that with a 5-run hole, when the Yanks have yet to even score 1 run, is not very promising.

I tried to write off the game, to use their struggle as a reason to pull my attention away from the tv. How easy would that have been? Just to think, “Ok, it’s a lost cause. Let’s move on. Let’s pay attention to other things that are going on in life. Like other people. And work. And life in general.”

But is there a Yankee fan alive that can ever honestly say or do that? You can’t. You just can’t. Because you’ve been watching them play for too long to ever think it’s over before the last out is recorded.

After dinner, me and Mel went to our room, and I fell asleep to the post game. It was 5-2 when I turned on the tv and told my coworker I’d shut off the tv when the game ended. We had a 6:30am wake up call to look forward to, and 12 hours of market research to follow.

I could’ve just called it a night then, got a good night’s sleep, and not risk staying up late only to get confirmation that the Yanks couldn’t make up those elusive runs in the remaining innings.

Maybe it was 6-0 I would have? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But when Arod put us on the board with his 2-run ding that scored Tex, there was a chance. Even after Furcal’s retaliating homerun in the 8th that made the hole just that much more annoying to climb out of.
4 runs down. 3 outs to go.

Tex strikes out to start the top of the 9th. 2 outs to get 4 runs. After the Yankees had barely been able to even remotely ignite the bats the entire game. It’s weird because when you look at the numbers it didn’t seem to add up. The Yanks were 3-7 with RISP, and stranded 5. But the logged 11 hits on the day. And could only manage 2 runs in 8 innings, only because of a long ball.

Where did all the baserunners go?

So there was the charge. 4 runs to score, with only 2 outs to do it.

You can blame Broxton for completely choking on this non-save situation. 9 batters, and 48 pitches when he just needed 2 outs to go home and get some sleep. But after whiffing Tex, he put the next 5 guys on, and you knew what was happening. Like clockwork.

Any time a team brings in a closer in a non-save situation, the Yanks’ pride gets miffed and they punish the condescension and arrogance.

Which they did. Cano doubled Arod home. Huffman (??) singled in Cano and Posada. Colin Curtis who I’m starting to develop a crush on drove in Granderson, and also demonstrated exactly why we picked up Grandy in the first place (although to be honest, I think Damon’s baserunning skills were just as, if not more so, astute.) And all of a sudden, the game is tied.

6-6.

I’ll go bulleted list style for the rest, for the sake of brevity and for the sake of the fact I gotta go back to market research soon…

• Cano’s game winning homerun to right was mind boggling. An opposite field bomb that I swear to God I was convinced was a lazy fly ball that wouldn’t even make it to the warning track. I was literally stunned when I saw it clean the fence. Stunned. In conclusion, Cano is not a real human being. He’s some kind of Roy Hobbes mystical being. (That WAS my conclusion, anyway, until I saw him celebrating it up in the dugout like a 12-year old who just defeated a piñata.)

• For all Torre’s mumblings about “this is a team that can hurt you from top to bottom, etc etc” the damage didn’t just come from our big bats (though, most of it did). But let’s not dismiss the work of Huffman and Curtis when the game was on the line. Your team just isn’t that good, Torre. And our team is.
  
  For all the talk about how this was a showdown between Arod and Torre, I think the REAL slap in the face and demonstration of the dialectic here was when Girardi brought in Mo with the game tied 6-6, to pitch the bottom of the 9th and 10th. This was the anti-Torre move, in spades.
  
  One of the most aggravating things about Joe T. was his insistence on summoning Farnsworth or someone akin to Farnsworth when it wasn’t technically a save situation. And 9 out of 10 times, we’d never see that save situation he was saving Mo for…because when you bring in Kyle Farnsworth in the bottom of the 9th, the 10th inning is an impossibility.
  
  WELL F’N PLAYED, JOE G. WELL PLAYED.

• The Dodgers have become the latest NL team to support my contention that they’re all huge babies. Seriously. Did you see how much stomping of the feet and screaming and whining there was on the Dodgers’ end? 3 players had to be ejected during the course of the series. Garret Anderson being ejected might have been my favorite though.
  
  He didn’t get called out on strikes. There was one debatable strike call, but he followed it up by putting the ball in play, albeit a line-out to left-center. But when the ball’s been caught, Anderson storms back to the dugout and blames the whole thing on the strike that shouldn’t have been a strike.
  
  Right. Because the game would have been drastically different if only that one strike call was made. Like you weren’t immensely lucky to even make contact with the ball, when you’re batting .167 against Mo in your lifetime.

• Russell Martin gets ejected shortly thereafter for the same bullshit. Torre comes out and is trying to calm everyone down, and more than ever, he looked just like a dad. Putting his arm around Martin and walking him back to the dugout.

• As much as I have beef with Torre because of his book, I have to say that when he was wearing pinstripes, he was fiercely loyal to his boys. Too bad Steinbrenner made him feel like he had carte blanche to put a match and gasoline to this commitment.

• Magnanimous in victory, Arod continues to curry my favor: Torre and Rodriguez finally met up, greeting each other with a hug behind the batting cage. "I wanted to be a gentleman and do the right thing," A-Rod said. "It was important to not let things linger."

• Our bullpen was decent, the only run coming off Joba but eh, we won who cares about that run. I DO care about the awesome display by Marte in zipping one over WoManny’s head. Well done Damaso. (Anagram: “Drama At Some.”)

• Our starting pitcher, however, less that stellar. Actually his pitching was really horrendous, it was eclipsed by his inability to field a bunt. The Dodgers bunted 3 times in a row, Andy made throwing errors on 2 of those, letting the first 2 runs of the game in. But, hey, alls well that ends well, yeah?

See ya, Torre. You may have won something (I’m not sure what) with The Yankee Years…but it’s obvious who ultimately comes out on top. And I don’t just mean with this series.

If nothing else…we don’t have to deal with Manny Ramirez.

Seriously, I think that is on par with the fate of Sisyphus.

See you Tuesday night, when the West Coast comes east, and we face off against…dun dun dun (scary music)…Cliff Lee.

Psh. Cliff who?