Yankees 5
Indians 3
It was Orlando Hernandez vs. Cleveland last night, and outside forces made it sound every bit as dire as Game 4 of the 1998 ALCS.
Outside the Yankee clubhouse, the sky was falling after the worst loss in franchise history Tuesday night, a 22-0 rout by the Indians. There was mounting fear of a reverse of 1978 with Boston.
George Steinbrenner arrived 4½ hours before first pitch, issued a statement and ordered the scoreboards to read, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” during batting practice – which he watched like a hawk from the owner’s box.
So on what felt like a must-win night, El Duque, a hero of championships past, fittingly tossed one-run, three-hit ball over seven frames during the Yankees’ 5-3 victory.
Homers by Jorge Posada, John Olerud and Miguel Cairo staked the Yanks to a three-run advantage, and they survived Tom Gordon’s eighth-inning meltdown that closed the lead to one, thanks to Mariano Rivera’s four-out save.
A day after the Yankees’ AL East lead was shaved to 3½ games with a historic drubbing, order was restored in the Bombers’ universe. Boston won again, but the Yanks (82-50) kept the Sox at bay – barely.
Gordon allowed a two-out walk, single, run-scoring wild pitch and RBI double to Victor Martinez before Joe Torre summoned Rivera, who earned his 46th save in 49 chances. The Yankee closer allowed a leadoff double to Casey Blake in the ninth, which preserved the suspense until the final out.
The outside view may have been calamitous, but the Yankees barely seemed more than a shade concerned. Late Tuesday, Posada spoke of everybody looking in the mirror. He backed up his talk with a go-ahead two-run homer in the fourth. The tape-measure bomb off C.C. Sabathia landed in the back of the home bullpen following Alex Rodriguez’s leadoff walk.
With two outs, Olerud pulled a breaking pitch into the right-field seats, giving the Yanks a 3-1 edge. Cairo greeted reliever David Riske with a solo shot in the seventh.
Jeter, who before the game admitted the Yanks needed to ratchet up their intensity level, looked like a ball of fire. He finished 3-for-4 after his eighth-inning grounder off third baseman Casey Blake’s glove was a base hit, scoring Ruben Sierra with the Yanks’ fifth run.
The Yanks were victorious for the ninth time in Hernandez’s 10 starts, remarkable considering they claimed him off the scrap heap this spring when he was still recovering from shoulder surgery.
In 1998, with the Yanks trailing Cleveland two games to one in the ALCS, El Duque hurled seven shutout innings on the road in his postseason debut for a 4-0 victory. The Bombers swept the rest of the postseason.
El Duque was at his playful best. In the third, he fielded a slow chopper by Coco Crisp and tried to tag him on the baseline, but Crisp evaded him with the footwork of a boxer. Crisp was ruled out for running out of the basepaths. Duque first put his hands out and then folded his arms, more in humor than anger.
In the seventh, after grabbing Ben Broussard’s hot comebacker, Duque held his glove up in a show of flair and then tossed sidearm to first for the out. A crowd of 41,448 began a chant of “El Duque! El Duque!”
Hernandez surrendered a run on a walk and two singles in the first before escaping.
When Bernie Williams was erased at the plate on Gary Sheffield’s grounder to third in the first, it looked like another one of those nights.
But El Duque got rolling, retiring nine straight from the first to the fifth. He set down the last seven Cleveland hitters to end his outing, whiffing three of them.
