ANAHEIM, Calif. — Well, it finally caught up to Joe Girardi. You knew it would some day. You knew it had to. Girardi has spent most of his first postseason pressing every correct button, flicking every proper switch. Sometimes, it meant a lot of heads-scratching stuff.
This time, it was some head-beating stuff. The Angels won an 11-inning classic, 5-4, mostly because Girardi couldn’t help himself, he had to keep micromanaging his bullpen. Mariano Rivera bailed him out of that in the 10th inning. But Rivera was out by the time Alfredo Aceves came in with two out and no one on and promptly surrendered a single to Howie Kendrick and a game-winning double to Jeff Mathis.
The midas touch had turned to charcoal. And we suddenly have an American League Championship Series again.
Quicker than you could say “Bobby Jones, 2000 World Series,” Derek Jeter had quieted the boisterous red-clad crowd by smacking a home run off Jered Weaver. There were still a few hundred empty seats specked among the stadium, folks who’d no doubt had difficulty negotiating the freeways in time for the first pitch.
And for most of the game’s first half, you’d have thought the people who didn’t come were the ones who did the smart thing, because it seemed evident that the Yankees weren’t going to fool around in Game 3, no matter how exhausted they may have been, no matter that they’d arrived in Southern California at around 5:30 Sunday morning.
No, thanks to Jeter they were up a run before most had even ordered up their first beer. It was 2-0 in the fourth, when Alex Rodriguez continued his personal redemption tour by clubbing a home run to the back of the Angels’ bullpen in left-field, a massive blast that he seemed to swat with a half swing; that’s how good he’s going, and how ridiculously easy he makes the game look when he is at his best. And he is very much at his best in this series.
Then it was Johnny Damon’s turn; Damon, who’d struggled so miserably during the ALDS sweep against the Twins and had found his old stroke in Game 1 and 2 of this series at Yankee Stadium; Damon, who apparently packed his Yankee Stadium swing in his carry-on bag and curled one just over the small fence in right field.
With Andy Pettitte on the mound, you could already hear cash register clanging on Yankee Stadium World Series tickets … unless you were an Angels fan, in which case you were no doubt preparing to read all the stories of thousands of Red Sox fans in 2004, talking about how going down 0-3 isn’t nearly the black hole it’s cracked up to be.
But then the Angels finally threw a counter-punch against Pettitte, who spent most of the day armed with his “A” game, whose magnificent pickoff move had completely neutralized the Angels running game, which they’d to a man sworn would be resurrected at Angels Stadium. He’d even picked off Torii Hunter in a critical spot in the fourth inning, with Vladimir Guerrero at the plate. Pettitte, a man with so many October notches on his belt, seemed determined to add another.
But then a newfangled Yankees killer named Howie Kendrick finally got the Angels on the board in the fifth with a home run, and for the first time it seemed the locals were ready to rise up. Then, during an epic battle with Guerrero with one on and two outs in the sixth, Girardi jogged out to the mound to talk to Pettitte.
It’s doubtful that Girardi said, “Give him a pitch he can hit so he can yank it out of here and we can get ourselves a tie game,” but that’s precisely what happened.
And suddenly Angels Stadium, which had sounded just a half a decibel from dead a few minutes earlier, was officially back, officially sprung to life. The baseball season had officially returned to Southern California.
