THE YANKEES managed to spend the season’s first four-plus months cruising peacefully under the spotlight tracking the best teams in baseball. The Dodgers monopolized that conversation for a while, and the Phillies checked in, and the Red Sox spent a small chunk of time looking unbeatable.
Then a funny thing happened early Saturday morning, not long after Alex Rodriguez’s home run gave the Yankees a 15-inning win over Boston: The Dodgers lost their own 12-inning marathon, at home to Atlanta. And for the first time all season, the Yankees had a better record than the Dodgers.
Meaning they had the best record in baseball.
Meaning that when CC Sabathia went out and threw 7 2/3 innings of suffocating shutout ball at the Red Sox yesterday, fueling a 5-0 Yankees win and adding another few miles of distance between themselves and their sputtering rivals there was, for the first time, a distinctly different flavor to his performance.
“He did,” manager Joe Girardi gushed, “exactly what we needed him to do today.”
No longer was Sabathia finding his way as an ace on a team finding its way as a contender. No, Sabathia looked every bit the pitching ogre for whom the Yankees committed $161 million. And so the Yankees looked every bit the front-running, pace-setting baseball beast they always had imagined they could become.
From his first pitch, Sabathia had everything working, pushing his fastball as high as 98 mph, buckling the Sox’s knees with his slider, maintaining an overriding rhythm Boston could never interrupt.
He threw 123 pitches and looked like he could have thrown 20 or 30 more. And looked like he wanted to, even as he surrendered the ball to Girardi with two outs in the eighth, even as he immediately doffed his cap to recognize a grateful, gleeful gathering of 48,796.
“I had goose bumps walking off,” Sabathia said after upping his record to 12-7 and lowering his ERA to 3.76. “It’s just unbelievable to get that type of ovation.”
And the kudos didn’t end there. Later, Boston manager Terry Francona — whose team has now gone 24 innings without a run — shook his head and marveled, “He’s the type of guy that some people see and think he just rares back and throws. But he has a real good feel for pitching.”
He did this night. He was perfect into the fifth before surrendering a 3-2 walk to the day’s other prominent character, David Ortiz. He had a no-hitter until two outs in the sixth. He allowed two hits, struck out seven, looked bigger than life, certainly bigger than the Red Sox were capable of handling.
“It was,” Girardi cooed, “his best game as a Yankee.”
Twinned with A.J. Burnett’s brilliant effort Friday, the Yankees’ 1-2 starters have thrown 15 1/3 unblemished innings against the team that, despite its present predicament, still seems certain to be the greatest impediment keeping the Yankees out of their first World Series since 2003.
“They’re the team we know we have to beat to get where we want to be,” Sabathia said.
But the standings now tell us that it’s the Red Sox who have to start getting busy in that department, that show a 5½-game gap between the teams, that show the Yankees have picked up 11½ games in the last 45 days.
And the standings that tell us what our eyes have believed for weeks, that the Yankees are the team to beat even if you happen to work in Los Angeles or Philadelphia, Boston or Anaheim. And when CC Sabathia is on top of things as he was yesterday … well, the eyes don’t lie.
And neither do the standings.
