SABATHIA BECOMES A YANKEE

C.C. Sabathia officially became a Yankee tonite, holding the Angels to one run over 8 innings in Game 1 to lead the Yanks to a 4-1 victory.  While C.C. has pitched well all season, tonite marked a breakthrough performance. 

As all Yankees fans know, the road to Yankee Greatness is fraught with many perils.  A blood-thirsty NY media.  An unforgiving ownership.  Hideous traffic jams on the Major Deegan.  A downright dangerous neighborhood in every direction from the ballpark.  Hungarian midgets…  (Admittedly, this last one is a fiction.)

But while many can claim to have worn the uniform and earned a living with the New York Highlanders, far fewer can claim to have actually earned the right to wear the pinstripes that are the hallmark of this great franchise.  Put another way, a ballplayer can play well during the regular season, and even win things like the Cy Young Award or the MVP.  But until he actually comes up BIG in the postseason, he will never truly know what it means to be welcomed into the Yankee family.  This is to earn the pinstripes. 

By way of illustration, Mike Mussina earned his pinstripes in Game 3 of the 2001 ALDS against Oakland when he almost single-handedly (save for the Derek Jeter flip-play) stopped a three-game Oakland sweep and turned the tide of that classic series, saving the Yankees from ignominious defeat at the hands of a younger and very talented Oakland club.  Andy Pettitte earned his pinstripes when he outdueled Cy Young winner John Smoltz in Atlanta in a 1-0 shutout in Game 5 of the 1996 Fall Classic – a victory that cemented the passing of the torch from the Braves to the Yankees as the dominant team in Baseball in the 1990s.  Likewise, Scott Brosius: Game 3 of the 1998 World Series.  The list goes on. 

Tonite C.C. joined the hallowed ranks.  True, C.C. had already turned out a quality start against Minnesota in the ALDS.  But that was C.C.’s first playoff win.  And he did it against a tired and injured (though admittedly momentum-driven) Twins ballclub.  Tonite, by contrast, he turned out an utterly dominating performance that shut down a very good Angels team before it could even get started.  When the Angels stumbled out of the gate in the 1^st inning with mental mistakes and a fluke dropped pop-up that gave the Yankees an early 2-0 lead, it was C.C. who made sure the Angels never got off the mat.

And this was not without significant efforts and adversity.  The weather was certainly not in anybody’s favor, it being a miserable 45 degrees and raining to start off the game – the coldest game in the Bronx this season.  The home plate umpire, Tim McClelland, also didn’t help with what seemed like an unusually tight strike zone.  (In fairness to McClelland, he called it tight for both teams, creating more than one occasion where pitchers, broadcasters, and fans on both sides wondered how the previous pitch could not have been a strike.)

Meanwhile, the Angels’ starting pitcher, John Lackey, was impressive in his own right.  The weather clearly was impacting Lackey’s curveball, which forced Lackey to throw more fastballs than he would’ve liked.  But he allowed neither this nor his teammates’ 1^st inning fielding incompetence to rattle him.  Instead, he grinded it out with 3 innings of fastballs, then 3 innings of breaking balls, giving up only 2 earned runs and pitching out of more than one jam through sheer mental resilience. 

And finally, there was that awesome defensive play by Angels’ catcher Jeff Mathis, who fielded an off-center one-hop throw to the plate, then lunged leftward into an oncoming A-Rod who ran him over like Tom Berenger in Major League II, but was called out anyway when it was determined that Mathis had held onto the ball.  A remarkable effort that helped keep the Angels in the game. 

But in the end it was not enough to overcome Sabathia and Rivera.  Tonite’s victory was a solid one, and will hopefully set the tone for this series.  There is still a lot of baseball to be played.  But victories like these have really got us believing that the Power and the Glory will soon be ours once again, now and forever, Yankees Universe without end, Amen.

New Major League Baseball Blog Reader?, we highly recommend that you subscribe to our exclusive Major League Blogging RSS feed. Make sure to come back daily for fresh content.

View gormanb's Profile      Subscribe via RSS