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Yankees vs. A's |
Mariners vs. White Sox |
Braves vs. Cardinals |
Mets vs. Giants
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Monday, October 9
A's see first hand why Yankees own October
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
NEW YORK -- They tried to warn the Oakland A's there'd be days like this.
Where the great baseball cathedral in the Bronx shook like a roller coaster.
Where the ghosts sneaked out of the monuments and directed innocent choppers into the Bermuda Triangle, or deflected throws to second base off their shortstop's normally trusty glove.
Where their 25-year-old ace went to the mound in front of the least sympathetic audience in sports and pitched his precocious tail off -- but still couldn't win.
|  | | Tim Hudson pitched eight solid innings, but was still tagged with the loss in Game 3. |
This was what happened when the Oakland A's came to Yankee Stadium on Friday night. Stuff happened. Lots of stuff. Crazy stuff. Inexplicable stuff.
But whatever it was, however it happened, it has put the Oakland A's in a whole mess of trouble.
One minute, they were having themselves a fun little underdog-makes-good kind of season. The next, they were losing to the Yankees and Orlando (Senor October) Hernandez, 4-2, Friday night in the pivotal third game of their American League Division Series.
So now the Yankees lead that series, two games to one. And all of a sudden, the Oakland A's are one loss away from winter.
And they still don't know what hit them. Except that it had something to do with divine intervention.
"The baseball gods," said A's starter Tim Hudson, "were definitely on their side tonight."
And nobody ought to know like Tim Hudson. The box score will show he gave up six hits in this game. Only the videotapes will prove that exactly one of them was hit hard enough to put a dent in his sofa.
But it didn't matter. Those six hits still added up to four runs, three of them earned. And those four runs still added up to his first postseason loss. And nothing was going to change that.
"Tim Hudson," said his catcher, Ramon Hernandez, "threw a great ball game. All they got off him were little ground balls and high choppers. You can't do nothing about that."
The problem, though, was that the A's could have done something about some of this stuff. They could have started, in fact, with a play Hudson made -- or actually didn't make -- in the fateful bottom of the second inning.
He had a 1-0 lead at the time. The Yankees had runners on first and third. And Glenallen Hill thunked a high chopper back toward the mound that hung in the crisp October night just a little too long. When it came down in Hudson's glove, he decided to throw home to try to nail Bernie Williams at the plate.
But in reality, he had no shot. Williams easily beat the throw. And a bad brainstorm had just turned this thing into a tie game.
"That's just Tim Hudson being such a competitive guy," said Oakland GM Billy Beane, "that he didn't want to give up a run there -- to anybody."
"Aw, I don't know," Hudson said. "If it wasn't so dad-gum high, maybe I'd have gotten him at home. But I did see him (Williams). He didn't break for home right at first. That's when I made my mind up to go home."
Hernandez actually claimed he was calling for Hudson to throw home at the time. Hudson said he "should have listened to Ramon and thrown to first." When informed that that wasn't Hernandez's version of this screw-up, Hudson could say only: "I really don't know what he said. Honestly, you couldn't hear anything. It was a madhouse out there."
But when those 56,000 customers file through the turnstiles, that's exactly what they have in mind. Call their ballpark a madhouse, you're only paying them the ultimate compliment.
"I can see how early in the ball game, your emotions can get the best of you here," Hudson said. "But I still thought the experience was awesome."
What happened during the experience, on the other hand, wasn't quite so awesome. Three hitters after that play at the plate, with the bases full of Yankees, Derek Jeter guided another chopper into another perfect spot, deep in the shortstop hole. Miguel Tejada got there, got a glove on it and couldn't quite handle it. And that was the Yankees' second run of this game-turning inning -- an inning in which precisely one ball (Williams' leadoff double) left the infield.
The Yankees' third run, in the fourth inning, came because Scott Brosius made a lousy bunt, only to have Hernandez rush his throw to second and have it skip off Tejada's glove. They got their final run in the eighth inning because Terrence Long slipped -- naturally -- as he was fielding Luis Sojo's single to short center while planting his right foot in an attempt to make a throw home.
Ghost got him.
"The amazing thing about tonight," said Yankees manager Joe Torre afterward, "was that we didn't hit the ball out of our shadow all night -- and we still played well enough to win."
But we have seen this someplace before. In fact, we have seen it every October for three years now. This win Friday night was the Yankees' 10th postseason victory in a row at Yankee Stadium, dating back to Game 2 of the 1998 ALCS.
They may have wound up the regular season playing more like the Cubs than the champs. But now, three games into the great Octoberfest, that regular-season funk seems more dated than the Macarena.
The Yankees had one two-game winning streak in the final three weeks of the regular season. The A's had no two-game losing streaks after Sept. 1. Whoop-de-doo. They've both got a streak like that going now, when it counts the most.
"Any time you win a game like this, everyone says, 'It's experience,' " Torre said. "But I don't know. It's nice to know that when you play games that mean as much as these games do, you know what it feels like. But let me tell you. That club over there (Oakland) is not lacking for confidence. I'd like to think that experience helps you. But I don't know if that's true. I just know we've certainly played with a lot of intensity and a lot of patience in this series."
And so, in many respects, have the A's. But the bottom line is that not one player on the Oakland roster has ever played in a World Series. And just the 11 players who got into the game for the Yankees on Friday own a total of 25 World Series rings.
"Basically," Beane said, "we've got a bunch of guys who should be in grad school."
Somewhere, that winds up showing up on the field. But before we make a documentary out of this, Beane felt he ought to point out that Friday night wasn't the first time it's shown up.
"We've been doing this all year," he said. "This time, we just didn't make up for it at the plate. We made some poor decisions tonight. But we've done that a lot this year. And somehow, we've managed to still be a franchise."
But on this night, the Little Franchise That Could ran into the Big Franchise That Does. In the Big Madhouse In The Bronx, where stuff like this happens every October to teams just like the Oakland A's.
Asked about those ghosts, Tim Hudson managed a thin smile.
"I don't know about ghosts," he said. "But there's definitely some kind of magic around here."
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
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