For the strangest of seconds, nobody could quite believe what they’d seen.
You could see that Mark Teixeira had hit a rocket to left field, but everyone craned their necks, squinted their eyes, looking for the ball. It had disappeared.
It was as if everyone needed to remind their brains what their eyes had just seen.
It had disappeared.
And that’s when the party began. That’s when Teixeira lifted his fist in the air, and the crowd started to roar, and dance in the aisles at the New Stadium, and when the first strands of Sinatra started to fill the chilly air. Delmon Young hung his head in left field. The ball was gone. It wasn’t coming back. Yankees 4, Twins 3.
An instant classic in the billion-dollar playpen. And the place started to shake, started to shimmy, started to pulsate . and started to sound, for good, for real, like October.
It was back in the ninth inning when the New Stadium’s hazing officially ended. All season long, we’d been gauging the noise level at the new park, we’d been charting the progress of the fans’ familiarity with their new digs, and the acoustic consequences of abandoning sports’ loudest venue for one that sometimes felt like it had been sound-proofed.
Derek Jeter had taken care of that specific worry two nights before, when he launched a home run that erased an early Twins lead and got the place sounding like a Springsteen show during “Rosalita.”
But Alex Rodriguez had something else in mind now.
Because with one swing of his bat, he not only launched a Joe Nathan fastball far over the right-center field fence – an opposite-field blast that only the freakiest kind of athletic freak could possibly hope to execute – and he’d not only turned a 3-1 Twins lead into a 3-3 tie, he managed something else:
He got the new yard rocking.
Literally.
From the moment the ball made contact with the bat, A-Rod knew, and so did Nathan. Rodriguez flipped the bat away and pumped his fist. Nathan . well, the kid from upstate New York looked like he’d gotten hold of some bad sushi all of a sudden, looked ready to double over, started to back up home plate as if by adhering to simple fundamentals he could bring the blast back. But nothing could.
And the place was shaking.
The game wasn’t over yet, but in some ways something greater was in fact
over: With that one swing of his bat (and the previous one, that had tied the game for the first time at 1-1 in the sixth) Rodriguez had finally helped calm the notion that he would never be equal to another October moment. That can only help him, and it can only help the Yankees. The Yankees had now scored 10 runs in this series, and A-Rod had driven in half of them.
Before the game, A-Rod had met with the man who’d helped put him back together again back in the spring, the doctor who’d done the knitting on his hip surgery. Together they chatted in the dugout, and later on, after watching his star patient take some batting practice swings, Dr. Marc Philippon would speak with great admiration about what Rodriguez had accomplished.
“He had a great season and I have to say I’m impressed with his progression, the way the season went and I wouldn’t say I’m surprised because you’re dealing with a world-class athlete who has a lot of discipline, so I think he had great preparation,” Philippon said. “His execution was excellent, so it’s all positive during the season and I expect him to also have a positive playoffs.”
He’d had that. Now it was about figuring a way to win the game. The Yankees threatened in the bottom of the 10th, first and third and one out, but Brett Gardner got caught off third on a soft Johnny Damon liner. The Twins couldn’t have been more perfectly set up in the top of the 11th, bases loaded and none out, but David Robertson somehow wiggled out of that.
So it would be left up to Mark Teixeira to give the game the ending every one of the 50,006 in the house was looking for. And to give the place a proper shake again.
