For 2 ½ hours Tuesday night, the vibe among the 38,695 folks inside Yankee Staium was a strict channeling of Dan Devine before Rudy’s last home game: “No one — and I mean, NO ONE — comes into our house and pushes us around!”
For about five minutes, that switched to the classic Vince Lombardi rant on NFL Films: “What the HELL is going ON out there?!”
And then, at last, Sinatra.
It is a surreal time in this Yankees season. The East is gone, and the only thing left to decide is where the Red Sox will crack open that first case of champagne. The Yankees, needless to say, would rather they not turn the visitor’s locker room at the Stadium into a Rathskeller at last call.
“We haven’t talked about it,” Neil Walker said, “but obviously we don’t want that.”
Walker did his part, jumping on a hanging slider from Ryan Brasier in the bottom of the seventh inning to give the Yankees all the runs they would get and all the runs they would need — barely — to secure a 3-2 win and keep the Sox’s magic number at 2. J.A. Happ did his part, too, mostly muffling the Sox’s bats for six innings and adding to his personal testimony to start the wild-card game two weeks from Wednesday.
That, of course, is the focus of the Yankees’ attention. Whatever fanciful notions the Yankees had of replicating 1978 and catching the Sox went up in flames and in a blur of bad baseball against the woeful likes of the Blue Jays, Twins, White Sox and Tigers. So now there are two remaining goals in the week and a half that remains in the regular season.
Walker spoke of one: “We have to keep grinding out wins like this, have to get closer to playing the brand of baseball we’re capable of. We have to take care of business.”
That business mostly includes keeping themselves at arm’s length from the A’s, who lost 9-7 to the Angels in Oakland on Tuesday night, who are three games behind the Yankees in the loss column and who would love nothing more than to host the Yankees in that play-in game at their Coliseum, where their fans, when motivated, can make life awfully difficult for visiting teams.
It’s funny, though. Maybe there is something to be said for the Sox, who will clinch home field throughout the playoffs soon enough without having to break a sweat. Maybe there’s a benefit for the Indians clinching early, or for the Astros to do the same out West.
But it’s also quite possible that the best thing that could happen to the Yankees is exactly what’s happening to the Yankees: a need to keep their focus for the duration of the regular season, a need to sharpen their game and kick out the rough spots.
Those ugly patches are still there, as evidenced by the slapstick that took place in the ninth inning when the Sox scored a run and put the tying and go-ahead runs on base without the benefit of a hit, when there were banana peels all over the field, when the only thing missing was the organist playing Bizet’s “Carmen” (also known as the theme song from “Bad News Bears”) in the background.
But they have 12 games left to play, and 12 days in which to play them, and it will behoove them to iron those wrinkles out, take advantage of a roster that is just about back to speed, and build a little momentum toward the playoff. The fact that they are still very much in a race for something should only add to that urgency.
That’s certainly a more relevant motivator than keeping bubbly corks from littering the floor of the third-base clubhouse.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Walker said. “We have other things to care about.”
Namely, 12 games in 12 days to be prepared for a second season, when all of this will be part of the prologue, and the prelude, and the real fun can finally begin around here. Assuming they take care of business and make sure it is around here, two weeks from Wednesday.
