You had a sense early this was going to be different. The wind was blowing out, up to 25 m.p.h. at times, swirling at times, and it wasn’t long before the hitters turned Game 6 of the American League Championship Series into a wild ride.
The Yankees’ slumping Jason Giambi hit a solo home run to the lower deck of right field in the first inning. The Red Sox’s Jason Varitek, as if to trump him, tied the game two innings later with a leadoff solo homer into the highest deck of left field.
“Sometimes that’s what it takes, a big leadoff homer to rattle a pitcher,” said Red Sox reserve infielder Lou Merloni.
And that would be the story Wednesday. The Yankees hit, and the Red Sox slugged, their previously dormant bats coming alive just in time for a 9-6 win that forced a Game 7 Thursday night.
What a finale that promises to be–the “Armageddon Game,” in the hyperbolic estimation of a Boston newspaper Wednesday. It will be a rematch of the Yankees’ Roger Clemens and the Red Sox’s Pedro Martinez, the starting pitchers whose overloaded emotional wires short-circuited in Game 3, sparking beanballs, basebrawls and other bizarre incidents.
“This matchup is storybook, even more so than when they faced each other in Game 3,” Red Sox pitcher Derek Lowe said.
Not for 17 years, when the 1986 Red Sox overcame a three games to one deficit to beat the Angels, has there been a seventh game in the American League Championship Series. This time the Red Sox will be trying to overcome 85 years of accursed history, which legend says began with the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees a little more than a year after he helped pitch Boston to a World Series victory in 1918.
Thursday night’s game is, effectively, a reprise of the one-game 1978 playoff between these genuinely bitter rivals. It was a playoff that occurred because the Red Sox blew a 14-game lead and was decided when light-hitting Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent hit a home run over the Green Monster wall in left field.
That was proof enough, Bostonians figured, that their team was battling a higher power.
“I’m not sure we believe a lot in stuff we can’t control,” said Red Sox second baseman Todd Walker. “We know we have something special here, and we don’t want it to end.
“Unfortunately, negative thoughts do creep into your head. When you’re down three games to two, you start thinking, `If we lose what are we going to do? Have we let the fans down?”‘
Until Wednesday, Walker had been the only Red Sox hitter in this league championship series to uphold the reputation the team built during the season as Green Monster Mashers.
Wednesday they reclaimed some of their bravado. After starter John Burkett gave away a 4-1 lead, the Sox pounded relievers Jose Contreras and Gabe White to rally from a 6-4 deficit with three runs in the seventh inning and two insurance runs in the ninth on a Trot Nixon home run. Another Yankees reliever, ex-Cub Felix Heredia, walked in the go-ahead run.
“We never make it easy on ourselves,” Walker said.
The Red Sox had six hits apiece in Games 4 and 5 and 16 in Game 6, with the players who had struggled most making the biggest contribution.
Coming into Game 6, the trio of Nomar Garciaparra (2-for-19), Bill Mueller (2-for-17) and Kevin Millar (3-for-19) had been hitting a combined .127 in the series. Garciaparra had four hits Wednesday, including the triple that started the comeback; Mueller, three; and Millar two, while David Ortiz (.188 coming into the game) drove in three runs with two hits.
“We’ve been waiting since the postseason started to get the line moving, is how we refer to it in the dugout,” Red Sox manager Grady Little said. “When Nomar and Manny [Ramirez] finally got extra-base hits back-to-back [in the seventh inning], that was something we hadn’t seen in postseason play.”
The game seemed a mismatch with journeyman Burkett starting for the Red Sox against Andy Pettitte, the Yankees’ postseason ace for seven years. While New York predictably pounded Burkett for seven hits and five runs in 3 2/3 innings, Pettitte could do little better. He was relieved after giving up eight hits and four runs in five innings.
Pettitte had oddly backed up a suggestion he made Tuesday when his five straight wins in past league championship series were mentioned.
“I’ve had bad, bad starts in the postseason too,” he said.
The Yankees received homers from Giambi and Jorge Posada among their 12 hits–four more than New York had in any other game of this series–but they failed to hit at times when they could have broken the game open.
Giambi struck out with two men on base to end the fourth inning and struck out again with runners on second and third and one out in the sixth. Bernie Williams ended that inning with a hard grounder to third.
Five members of the oft-maligned Red Sox bullpen held the Yankees to five hits and Posada’s home run over the final 5 1/3 innings, keeping Boston close enough to rally. They did it in time to keep the Yankees’ relief ace, Mariano Rivera, out of the game.
“I don’t know if it was a sense of urgency,” Garciaparra said of the three-run seventh. “It’s just a feeling this team has had all season, that we are playing to the last out.”
The Yankees, whose 101 wins led the major leagues, and the Red Sox, who finished second to New York in the American League East, will be meeting for the 26th time Thursday.
Never before have two major-league teams played so many games that counted in one year. That it should be the Yankees and Red Sox is even more noteworthy.
In 1949, when teams from the same league did not play each other in the postseason, the Red Sox came to Yankee Stadium needing one win in two games for the pennant and lost both. This time, the Yankees need one win in these final two games.
“I guess it was supposed to come down to seven games,” Yankees manager Joe Torre said. “We battled back, they battled back, and it was just no quitting on either ballclub.”
So far this season, the Yankees have won 13 times, the Red Sox 12. The Red Sox can turn 13 into a lucky number, curses be damned.
