Bronx, N.Y., May 14, 2006 — I got greedy Sunday afternoon, deciding the Yanks would play their third straight game under semi-pleasant skies in a weekend that seemed doomed to bring to the fore the title of Julia Roberts’ first Broadway show running some 90 blocks south, “Three Days of Rain.” So I showed up clad in shorts, and ready to lend support, with my no. 41 Randy Johnson Pinstriped home jersey fluttering in the breeze. I guess the only good news is that the weather disappointed more than Johnson did.
Things got off to a bad start as Randy fell behind Oakland second baseman Mark Ellis 3-0 under a sky dominated by clouds. Subtract the 12-mph breezes from the posted 58-degree temperature (with 94% humidity), and you get about the right idea of the conditions. The bad start did not end until Mark Scutaro lofted a fly to Bernie Williams in right field on Johnson’s 36th pitch. Ellis had walked after five straight strikes, and Randy whiffed Nick Swisher swinging, but the first-pitch Mark Kotsay line home run to the short porch in right created a 2-0 score the Yanks would never match against Oakland righty Danny Haren.
Randy surrendered four hits with the free pass in the three-run first, but the (only) good news is that he then got better. After the Red Sox worked him to a three-run, 39-pitch third frame last Tuesday, they pounced for four more in the fourth and drove him from the mound. Johnson found his 93-mph fastball and started throwing it for strikes in the second, mixing in a slider and even a change from time to time. He retired 15 of the next 17 until former Met Jay Payton barely cleared the left field wall and Melky Cabrera’s glove on a first-pitch shot in the sixth. Had the Yankee bats done their more usual work, it would have been a game by then.
Not to say, of course, that a two-, then three-run lead in Yankee Stadium with three innings to go constitutes an insurmountable lead. But it would if the Yanks could not find a way to break through on the dominant Haren, and they never did. With Johnson’s six inning pitch total of 106, all the credit for the 2-hour, 33-minute game time goes to the Oakland righty. He has a fine 94-mph fastball that he used to keep the Yanks honest, but he dominated their bats with a mid-eighties splitter and an 83-mph curve. The six hits allowed were all in diferent innings, and aside from Jorge Posada’s 0-2 second-inning home run to right, none reached second base.
The superb Chien-Ming Wang retired the A’s on six pitches in the fifth inning Friday night. But Haren matched that figure in both the third and fourth, taking three to strike out a batter each time. So there was never a point when the crowd felt the Yanks were about to recover from the three-run shortfall, at least not after Haren recorded three outs on five tosses after Johnny Damon singled to left to begin the Yankee first.
There is really not much else to report. Fans in the third row of Box 607 and the first row of Box 604 made great barehand catches of foul balls, but the gem of the day was the running spear of A-Rod’s foul pop in the fourth Ellis made stretched out over the rolled up tarp down first. Scott Erickson made his Yankee debut retiring five of six in relief of Johnson until a second walk ended his day.
It mattered little in the scheme of things, but things got weird at the end, with the A’s tacking on runs number five and six in the eight and ninth on plays that featured the last out of each inning. The sliver lining here was the Melky Cabrera tracer fired to nail Jason Kendall at home after a two-out, bases-loaded base hit by Antonio Perez in the eighth that plated Crosby.
In the ninth Oakland scored when Crosby eluded Robinson Cano’s one-out sacks-filled tag on a Bobby Kielty grounder. By the time a tag was planted the run had scored. Ten pitches later the game was over when Swisher nabbed Alex Rodriguex, who had singled, at first on Robby Cano’s one-hop smash. Because Alex was still forced to second, Swisher’s tag on the first base bag retired him, and the game was over when the A’s first sacker touched up, though that was not first base ump Jim Wolf’s confused original call. Home plate ump Tony Randazzo also did not distinguish himself by allowing Kotsay to call time well after Johnson had begun his motion on a pitch in the fifth. The stop sign enraged Randy, and rightfully so. He easily could have been injured trying to stop the pitch.
Although I can’t dispute the no-force/force logic of the two ninth-inning plays, that the Yanks were on the short end both times irks me, and forces me to dispute another rulebook decision this week. The valiant and professional Hideki Matsui may have lost his season in short left field Thursday, and because the play happened before a half inning was complete, by rule he did not participate in the game. Huh? He broke his wrist trying to make a play, but he did not play? Is there no one running this game who knows what the right thing to do is, and to do it in this case? Of course he played the game.
May 14 was a great day in the Bronx 10 years ago, as it was that day that Doc Gooden gave a ballclub finally ready to return to its glorious past some credibility with his 2-0 no-hitter over the Seattle Mariners. But it hasn’t always been good, and Sunday was the 50th anniversary of a Bob Lemon-pitched 3-2 Indians win over the Yanks where the only hometown scores were back-to-back jacks by Gil Mcdougald and Mickey Mantle. Lemon could not have been any better then than Haren was today.
And as for the weather, the day never really improved. Sure, late in the game the wind subsided a few times, and every once in a while a sun-like light almost filtered through to the field. But once the wind began anew the damp and the cold dominated the scene. And when the loss was final, Liza Minelli’s “New York, New York” blared over the PA.
On May 14, 1998, Frank Sinatra passed away. There was no Frank in the ballpark today. And no “Summer Wind” either.
YANKEE BASEBALL!!!