Inside the Empire

by Bob Klapisch

  By September, Voit had wrested first base from Bird, though his glove was, to put this kindly, ornamental. He was erratic when tossing to second to force the lead runner, and every short-hopped throw to first was heart-in-throat exciting, especially when that throw came from Miggy. Defensively, the Yanks’ corner guys were Dracula Versus Wolfman, a low-rent monster movie from the 1940s. But that too was part of the bargain Cashman had made when he went whole hog on power over the winter. His team wasn’t going to beat you with defense and speed and the sentimental pleasures of hit-and-run baseball. No, from one to nine now, it was one long truncheon, a blunt instrument to wield at opposing starters. If you were Blake Snell–precise, you could use their aggression against them, sucker them into chasing off the corners. (Snell proved that point in two-hitting the Yankees over five innings in August, striking out six while barely breaking a sweat.) Short of that, though, you either had Verlander’s riding fastball or you were in for a nasty, brutish night—particularly if the game was in the Bronx.

  Because something else happened over those last two weeks that didn’t show up in the line scores. This team and this town fell wildly back in love, and the yield of that passion was a beast. It was noise and turbulence and a charge in the air that took hold of you before you passed through the gate. You felt it walking up there or on the train ride over, a mob convergence of tension and mass: the tribe marching off to battle. If you’re a baseball fan reading this in St. Louis or San Diego, you will have no frame of reference for the sort of dark fervor that consumes a pennant crowd in the Northeast. Savage and joyous and fiercely profane, it’s a buildup and expulsion of adrenalized pride that is easily mistaken for rage. You’ll find it, in spades, at Fenway Park, and for decades it presented in the Yanks’ previous stadium: the brute power of a crowd to disable opposing teams before they take the field.

  In the fall of ’17, the Astros suffocated the Yanks with powerhouse pitching in Houston. Then they came to the Bronx, up two games to none, and were utterly unmanned by the crowd. The Yanks crushed them three straight, outscored them 19–5, and held them to eleven hits total. The playoffs that year were a revival meeting—the raising of the dead park’s ghosts. For the very first time in its nine-year run, the Stadium was a terror-dome. No accident, that. The fans finally had a team to go to war for—and vice versa, as things turned out.

  Forget the wild-card club of 2015: it was pale and passive and consisted of creaky strangers who were paid a lot of money to pose as Yankees. But the Baby Bomber bunch who’d climbed the rungs together and come of age precipitously that summer in ’17—those were the true sons of New York. With their mackadocious blend of youth and muscle, they reflected handsomely on their fans—or their fans’ most romantic self-conception. New Yorkers, wherever they’re from, nurse the crazed conceit that they’re bigger, smarter, and vastly better-looking than people in off-brand towns. There’s a reason they stick around to hear Sinatra sing after thuuhhhh Yankees win. “New York, New York” expresses the sacrosanct myth that they—the team’s followers—are themselves the “King of the hill / Top of the list / A number one.” That the hill in question is a hill of hooey—this town doesn’t make you bigger, and this ball club doesn’t make you brighter—is entirely beside the point. What matters is the product of that mutual infatuation: a thing that people politely call synergy. Of course, in the Bronx, where no one calls anything politely, they know it by its right name: COME AND GET YOUR ASS, MOTHERFUCKERS!

  Which brings us back to love, and its alchemical power to resonate as hate toward visiting teams. When the Oakland A’s touched down in New York City to play the wild-card game, they had every reason to puff their chests—and to book a connecting flight to Boston. They were essentially the Yankees, just younger and cheaper, with the third-smallest payroll in the game. There was power up and down their hirsute lineup, including the majors’ home run king, Khris Davis. They had six or seven guys coming out of the pen throwing 97 or better, among them the hottest closer in baseball, Blake Treinen. They’d suffered and survived their own spate of cruel injuries, chiefly to their starting rotation. Still, they’d been the planet’s best team since June, winning sixty-three of their last ninety-two. In short, they were even hotter than the Yanks.

  “Nobody had us winning ninety-seven this year, but we were able to wear teams out,” said Billy Beane over the phone before the game. “Even the best pitchers, we got them out of there by the sixth because we drew so many walks and hit home runs.” For a team “with the fewest resources,” they played “great infield defense and beat good teams on the road. Also, our guys are too young to be afraid.” Asked how they’d reacted when the Yanks clinched home-field, Beane essentially yawned at the question. “Oh, they’re fine with it,” he said. “They’re like, ‘We’ll be that much closer to Boston when we win.’”

  And then the Athletics went out and stretched in front of a house that was packed three hours before the ball game. Just getting to the park had required running an armed gauntlet that jammed the roads for miles in both directions. There were counterterror troops at the major intersections, backed up by K-9 squads and precinct cops; the South Bronx was a quinceañera of red and blue lights. Inside, on the concourse, lines fanned out for beer; by the looks of it, most of the red-cheeked patrons began pregaming right around lunch. There were roars every time a couple of Yankees jogged out to long-toss on the track. When Judge knelt down in the outfield grass to cross himself and pray, the crowd took his cue and fell silent a moment, its first—and last—moment of reverence. By the time they introduced the players of both teams up the first- and third-base lines, the place was a shriek machine. Press-box veterans remarked that this was the loudest the Stadium had been all year. Rarely would they see its sound and fury crumple a pitcher completely.

  The A’s, as mentioned, had lost most of their starters to one serious injury or another, including their marvelous lefty Sean Manaea. They’d endured by signing several scrap-heap arms and adopting the Tampa trick of using openers. Liam Hendriks, a vagabond short man who’d found his calling, at twenty-nine, as a thirty-pitch-or-less starting pitcher, was a puddle of pudding on the mound. He walked McCutchen, the leadoff batter, on five shaky pitches, then fell behind the two-hitter, Judge. On his ninth pitch, a straight-as-a-string two-seamer, Judge fired his back hip, whipped the barrel of the bat through, and demolished the thigh-high fastball. It left his bat traveling 116 miles per hour and easily cleared the State Farm sign in left, a 427-foot line drive that was the hardest-hit homer in postseason history (or at least the part of history tracked by Statcast’s lasers).

  Both the ballpark and the Yankees’ dugout went bonkers. For sixty or ninety seconds, everyone pogoed in place, wildly high-fiving the nearest stranger and howling like Samoan rugby players. Hendriks, the helpless waif, ignored the blast on contact, then turned at the last instant to watch it land. Exactly two hitters into the game, the Athletics were done, their spines and spirits broken beyond repair. (Said Fernando Rodney, the veteran A’s reliever, after the game: “Once I saw how Judge hit that ball, I thought to myself, This is over.”) Any false hopes they nursed were stubbed out in the sixth, when Judge led off with a double. Hicks promptly drove him home, then scored on a two-run triple by Voit, and from that point on the A’s were just chew toys for the crowd. The park was still deafening in the bottom of the eighth when Stanton hit a homer a very far piece out to left. At 443 feet and a velo of 117.4, it snatched Judge’s short-lived record away, though Judge—as is his wont—couldn’t have cared less. He was both the game’s conquering general and the homecoming king of the blowout party that started after the game.

  These days, every clubhouse is set-dressed the same after a clinching win. The lockers, cubbies, and carpets are taped in plastic sheeting, and the players greet each other wearing expensive goggles and cheap-o commemorative caps. Reporters, at least the smart ones, come strapped with a poncho: the place is a cafeteria fight of barely drinkable bubbly. The joy wa
s general and belligerent, with a couple of top notes layered on. One of them was giddy relief: the Yanks had been genuinely concerned about the A’s, who’d beaten them up in Oakland one month prior. But in the shouted conversations going on in every corner, all the players were talking about the Sawx. From game 1, their season had been a hard-target chase of the Eternal Rival, a maddening hunt for a team that never slumped or dropped for a couple of weeks into lower gear. Twice, the Sox had opened up a sizable lead and been run down by the Yanks—when both teams were whole and healthy.

  But then Sánchez got hurt, and Judge fell hard behind him, and the second half of the season became a survival course for the ball club in the Bronx. It somehow wasn’t fair, in the sporting sense of that word: the Yanks had sent a skeleton squad to play that pivotal set in August. But now they had their leader back, their lineup of loaded cannons, and a prepacked building of fifty thousand berserkers ready to rain down hell upon the Red Sox.

  No one in the room was talking about the A’s, or about the game they’d just played, or about the minefield of a season they’d endured. Instead, through grins that looked a little like snarls, the Yanks said, Bring it on, bitches. “This is the series we’ve been waiting for—the one everyone’s been waiting for!” yelled Betances over a deafening track by Drake. Even Boone, Mr. Circumspect, was caught up in the flow, crowing that his players were locked and loaded. “We know how good they are, and we’ll have to play our best to beat ’em—but the guys in this room can’t wait to get it done.”

  Meanwhile, the champagne continued flying after everyone was drenched. The target of each fresh downpour was Judge, the evening’s standout hero. Manfully, he kept trying to field writers’ questions because, even in celebration, that is who Judge is: a guy who calmly stands there and does his job. He talked about the crowd—“they were so loud tonight, I couldn’t hear the end of the National Anthem”—but otherwise he turned around every query to praise the players beside him. They, in turn, doused him with sticky spray that was the surest expression of love. Ballplayers don’t have words for certain things, and by things we mean, of course, feelings. They don’t tell the guy at the center of a clubhouse that they adore and depend on him; that’s what horseplay’s for. In those champagne gushers, they spoke for themselves and all those fans by saying, after their fashion, Thank you.

  11

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  ALDS: Running Into an October Buzzsaw

  Despite the block of bars facing Fenway Park, there’s something quaintly charming about a pregame Red Sox crowd. That great pedestrian mall formerly known as Yawkey Way (then-named for the arrant racist who owned the Boston franchise for four largely segregated decades) is practically a lawn party for visiting scholars when set against the vehemence of Yankee Stadium. Couples from New York City who catch the northbound Acela can freely browse the pubs in their Jeter apparel without being doused in Sam Adams, and strike up conversations with local patrons that don’t become restagings of Bunker Hill. However you explain it, there’s a period of communion before hostilities start, a jolly couple of hours in which the celebration of baseball prevails over parochial loutishness. There are no cops walking point here in tactical armor, no snarling German shepherds barely tethered by leashes, no stone-faced parking clerks passing mirrors under your car. If you wish to compare the cultures of these teams, here’s a handy marker of their mind-sets. The Yankees treat their fans like sleeper cells, half-expecting to find a bomb strapped to their chest. The Sawx assume good conduct from their faithful and are rewarded for it before a game. It’s truly a sight to see—given what that crowd becomes the moment the Red Sox starter takes the mound. At that point, God help the folks who wore their Stanton grays. Even in Boston, good fellowship has a sell-by date.

  There’s also something quaint, if markedly less charming, about playing an actual ball game here. The ballpark opened in 1912, when humans were apparently the height of Shetland ponies. You enter the visitors’ clubhouse—and you feel like you’re in Colonial Williamsburg. The dimensions are puny, an assault on evolution; you imagine the clubhouse guys drying jockstraps with a paddle. The visitors’ quarters are a frat-house prank on the road team (and out-of-town writers) gone horribly wrong. The room is so cramped, you have to stick your bottom in Stanton’s face just to ask Gleyber Torres a question. It’s also a death trap waiting to happen: the doors are single-file in, single-file out. All you’d need is some crank yelling “Fire!” and half the team would be trampled underfoot. You’re reminded of the overheated squalor in Boston Garden when the Knicks of the 1980s would go in to play the Celtics and drop seven pounds of water weight by halftime.

  All in all, Fenway is a marvelous place—for a wrecking ball. History is one thing, but this park’s something else. It’s a snow globe draped in recent pennants.

  The Yankees opened the ALDS with three thoughts firmly in mind. The first was that their team was better than its record and the Red Sox were worse than theirs. This wasn’t, strictly speaking, a fresh idea: for a month, the Boston media had been openly theorizing that the Sox were paper tigers. With the pot-stirring hosts on WEEI leading the charge, the indictments ranged from the leakiness of Boston’s pen to the defects in its four likely starters. Sure, the Sox had swept the Yankees here in August, then coasted the rest of the way home—but those Yanks were ciphers, pale substitutes for the beasts who’d show up, in ill humor, on October 5. With all that retrenched muscle in their right-handed lineup, they’d bash the Green Monster—and Boston’s middle-innings guys—like so many dime-store piñatas. Or so went the story in a town that still behaves like it hasn’t won a pennant since Babe Ruth’s trade.

  The Yankees’ second thought: they had a Sox-killer in Happ, who would pitch game 1 (and 5, if the need arose). In his twenty-one starts against them over the course of twelve years, he’d stoned each version of Boston’s lineup that he faced, baffling them with his snake-charmer fastball. He didn’t have to be perfect now; he just had to be Happ, the guy who would give them five strong innings, then hand a lead off to Chad Green. It scarcely mattered that the Yanks were facing their own assassin in Chris Sale. Oft-injured and seldom-glimpsed in the second half of the season, Sale was, at best now, a ninety-pitch curio whom they’d see through by the top of the sixth. And then, at worst, it was bullpen versus bullpen, and the Yankees loved their chances in that matchup.

  Then there was their third thought, the break-glass-in-case-of-fire clause: they were going against David Price in game 2. Somewhere in Christendom, there’s a forensic pathologist who can explain Price’s tragic Yankee-phobia. Against everyone else, the man is magic, a wizard with a biting cutter. Against New York, he’s a nervous breakdown in progress, a wretch who probably sweats when he dreams pinstripes. The Yanks had high hopes that they could steal game 1, but knew for a stone fact they’d win game 2. And if they snuck out of Fenway up two games to none, they’d all but punch their tickets to the ALCS, given the way Severino had pitched against the A’s. No less sweet, they’d take a leisurely leak on the records the Sox had set all season—and on the many pomps and splendors of their recent past.

  Since 2004, when the Sox stormed back and stole that championship series from the Yanks, they, not New York, have been the class of the American League. Yes, the Yanks have won six divisional titles to five for the Red Sox through 2018. But the Sox have won three Series to the Yankees’ one—and in the Bronx, it’s strictly World Series or bust. If you doubt that, just walk the inner concourse of the Stadium, where, every ten feet, there’s a poster-sized print of Yankees battery-mates embracing after the final out of Series clinchers. There’s Yogi hugging Whitey, Thurman hugging Goose, Posada hugging Rivera, and on and on. Archaeologists of the future who unearth these ruins might be tempted to tell those couples: Get a room! But such are the stakes when you play for the New York Yankees: either deliver the goods or get erased altogether from the walls—and collective cortex—of the empire.

  In summar
y, then, the Yankees had a certain big-armed swagger when they took the field in game 1. They’d gotten hot at the right time, had Judge back to midyear form, and were sending their best man to the mound.

  Those sentiments lasted exactly twelve pitches.

  Happ came out of the pen with his worst stuff of the year: his four-seamer was as flat as a rope-swing tire. Nine starts out of ten, he gets that strange little rise just as his fastball breaks the zone. Hitters see it clearly till they’re into their swing; then the pitch just ups and disappears. But that night—nothing. It sat there belt-high, a 92-mile-an-hour gift to his hosts. Velocity wasn’t the problem—perceived velocity was, the magic that high spin rates produce. Happ made forty-four pitches, his shortest start in ages: he got three swings-and-misses from Red Sox hitters. And still, he kept going to his bread-and-butter pitch. Neither his two-seam nor his slider were biting either.

  He somehow struck out Betts, the leadoff hitter, but served a scorched single to Benintendi. Then Happ, who couldn’t locate, lost Steve Pearce, the exact wrong guy to walk. In stepped Martinez, who straight owns the Yankees and has the title and registration to prove it. Happ fell behind him and threw another four-seamer, his thirteenth pitch of the night. Martinez clubbed it over the Monster like a nine-iron hit in anger, a blur that barely cleared the top of the wall. And that, essentially, was that for game 1. When Happ departed in the third with runners at the corners, Chad Green came on and fanned the flames. The guy with the best high fastball in their pen got beat around the hind parts by Pearce and Martinez and allowed both runners to score. It was a one-two punch the Yankees didn’t see coming—and a combo from which they never really recovered.