NEW YORK, N.Y., Oct. 25 — I’ve been a fan a long time, but I didn’t know the game like I do now back when we won in ’77 and ’78, so a lot of the time I have been focussing on games and rooting with my very being, well, we didn’t win a lot of those games. One thing my brother and I witnessed years ago was what we decided to call (back in a much kinder and gentler time) the Kiss of “Death,” (any biblical reference totally unintended). As a seemingly unbreakable law pertaining to cosmic baseball, it has broken my heart time and time again. When what you need is a dinger, the proverbial “blast” part of the “bloop and a blast,” a big fat tater, if your guy hits one but it goes foul, fuggetaboutit. E = MC squared. Need homer plus foul homer = you lose.

Exceptions? Well, sure, earlier this very season I was musing about the time I saw Rusty Staub win a pretty meaningless game for the Mets after a near miss when my feelings about them were pretty ambivalent. The cause of my reverie? Well, Tino broke the spell this year on June 25 vs. the Indians, the 125th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Historical implications of playing that team aside, it was one of the most bizarre games of the year, as Randy Keisler and the Yanks took a 6-0 lead, surrendered it all and more to a Cleveland seven-run sixth, only to have Tino carry us off to victory (and into the sunset?) on his two-run seventh-inning dinger, a homer hit two pitches after he hit one 10 feet foul. And, of course there’s the Robert Redford movie, The Natural, the title character of which not only comes through after hitting one foul, but after breaking his “magic” bat doing it!

Even with Mr. Redford’s half morality play/half Arthurian legend of a movie and Tino’s heroic exploits, however, the chill that pevaded Yankee Stadium in Game 4 vs. the Mariners after Boone broke the tie by taking Ramiro deep in the eighth was pervasive, and the fact that Bernie hit a one-out foul homer in the eighth felt like a cruel tease. But when he followed it with perhaps the second biggest home run of the 2001 ALCS (behind the soon-to-come bomb from Alfonso), and the third biggest dinger of this Yankee postseason so far (Jorge off Zito clearly tops the hill), well, the Kiss of “Death” had received its very own final, fatal caress.

BTW, TYW
YANKEE BASEBALL!!!