by Joe Torre
Now the Yankees were six outs away from sweeping the Red Sox, with the heart of the Boston order due up in the eighth inning. Torre was absolutely sure who was going to get those outs: Rivera. Gordon's shakiness didn't even come into play now. Torre's closer was fully rested after three days off. Torre always worried about giving a near-dead opponent any reason for optimism. Rivera, even for six outs, was the surest option in baseball, the king of postseason closers. It was time to step on the throat of the Red Sox.
Rivera yielded a single to his first batter, Manny Ramirez, but it was classic Rivera for the rest of the eighth inning: three consecutive outs on 13 pitches (15 total for the inning) without the ball leaving the infield (a strikeout of David Ortiz and groundballs from Jason Varitek and Trot Nixon).
The Yankees went quietly in the top of the ninth against Keith Foulke. Three outs to go. The Yankees held an extreme advantage over Boston. In all best-of-seven series games, the road team leading by one run with three outs to go was 77-11, an 87.5 percent success rate. Representatives from Major League Baseball Properties carried large boxes into a back room of the Yankees clubhouse. The boxes held dozens of hats and T-shirts that said, “New York Yankees. 2004 American League Champions.” There was no champagne being prepared yet. The Yankees were so experienced at those kind of celebrations—and so cautious not to jinx them—that their clubhouse staff learned to wait for the last possible out; they could set up for the party in under 10 minutes.
As Rivera prepared himself to leave the dugout to pitch the ninth, Torre thought of passing on to him a word of warning about the leadoff hitter, Millar. He thought about having Stottlemyre, or even himself, tell Rivera to be aggressive with Millar. He let the moment pass without saying anything. It is a decision that gnaws at Torre to this day.
“If there's one thing I can second-guess myself about,” Torre said, “it was in 2004 with Mo going out in the ninth inning. I didn't tell Mel, ‘Tell him don't get too fancy’ Or I was going to go to him and tell him, ‘Don't get too fancy. Go after him. Don't worry about trying to make too good of a pitch.’
“The only reason I didn't say anything is I remembered the last time he faced him, in Game 2.”
Rivera had faced Millar, representing the tying run, with Ramirez at second base, with two outs in the ninth inning of Game 2. The at-bat was relatively brief and emphatic: called strike, ball, strike swinging, foul, strike swinging for a strikeout to end the game.
“That's the only reason I didn't plant the seed,” Torre said. “Because of how easy that at-bat was. I said, ‘Fuck it.’ Because I didn't want to plant a seed that wasn't there. It was so easy, the last time.”
That Game 2 at-bat, however, occurred at Yankee Stadium, where Millar's pull-everything hitting philosophy was penalized by the expansiveness of left field. The Game 4 at-bat occurred at Fenway Park, where a fly ball to left field could easily be off or over the towering wall that seemed to loom right over a pitcher's shoulder.
“In that ballpark, you're trying not to make a mistake to him,” Torre said. “It's a little different than in our ballpark.”
On the other side of the field, Francona did not bother to say anything to Millar.
“No,” Millar said. “There's nothing to say. In that situation, we're down by one, we're down 0-3 in the series, you've got Mariano Rivera in the game … there's not a lot of sunlight on us. But you know what? That's why you've got to play the game.”
Millar was a .364 career hitter against Rivera in the regular season, with four hits, including one home run, in 11 at-bats, while also once getting hit by a pitch. Most hitters would begin the ninth inning while down one run trying to find any means possible to get on base, to grind out an at-bat in survival mode. But these were the idiots and this was Millar, who was one of the premier practitioners of the kind of brazen idiocy that served the Red Sox so well. There was only one thing on Millar's mind: try to jack a Rivera pitch over the Green Monster in left field.
“I've always had good at-bats against Mo,” Millar said. “Decent numbers. But you don't want to make a living facing him. He's a power guy and I like the fastball, so I was just thinking one thing: get a pitch up and middle-in and hit it out for a home run. That was my thought process. Just try to hit a home run. There was no looking away. So I was basically in watch mode. If I could just get something up and leaking in and I was trying to pull, I thought that was our only chance. That's what I felt.”
The “watch mode” approach served Millar well. Because he was going to swing only if the ball entered the area in which he was watching, Millar actually made himself patient. The downside of his approach is that he essentially conceded the outer half of the plate to Rivera, at least until he got two strikes. Rivera never got to two strikes. He missed with his first pitch. Millar fouled off the next. Then Rivera missed with three consecutive pitches, putting the tying run on first base with a free pass.
What were the odds that Rivera would walk the leadoff batter? Through 2004 in his regular season career, Rivera had faced 110 leadoff batters in the ninth inning while protecting a one-run lead. He had walked only four of them, and only twice did those walks presage a defeat. One of them occurred only one month earlier against the Red Sox, a game that suddenly looked eerily predictive. On September 17, Rivera began the ninth inning by walking Nixon with a 2-1 lead. Dave Roberts pinch-ran and stole second base as Varitek struck out. Rivera hit Millar with a pitch. Cabrera knocked in Roberts with the tying run. One out later, Damon knocked in the winning run with a single. Millar's walk in Game 4 gave the Red Sox that shred of belief that Torre wanted to avoid.
“You're looking in,” Millar said of his approach, “and the thing is sometimes when you're aggressive at the plate in an area like that, your hitter's instincts will be to lay off. Whereas sometimes when you think you have to cover too much of the plate you start chasing more. I was just actually looking for one pitch. I was looking dead red and in. When you're facing Mariano you just hope he's not hitting his spots and you might have a chance. He's definitely tougher against lefties. He's not blowing up bats against righties that he does to lefties.”
Francona sent in Roberts to run for Millar. Roberts was on his own, meaning he was free to attempt to steal second base whenever he thought he could get the bag. Roberts, however, was chilled, stiff and a bit jittery from sitting out the game for nine innings. Fenway Park, built in 1912, has no adequate area for someone to fully prepare himself for pinch-running on a cool night. Roberts had done the best he could, running in the narrow, short, wet concrete hallway that leads from the Red Sox dugout to a stairwell that winds to the clubhouse. When Roberts reached first base he had no intention of stealing second base on the first pitch; on September 17 he had waited until the third pitch.
Rivera made a pickoff throw to first base. Roberts got back easily. Then Rivera threw over again, and this time the play was a little closer. And then Rivera threw over for a third time, and this time it was closer still. Something unintended and important had happened with that sequence of three consecutive throws to first base: Roberts was now warm and his legs were loose. Rivera had done him a favor. Roberts now was fully immersed in the flow of the game. His plan had changed. He made up his mind to steal on the first pitch.
There was no fourth pickoff attempt. Rivera threw home with a pitch to the batter, Mueller. Roberts ran. The pitch was a ball. Jorge Posada, with a quick release, loosed a strong, accurate throw to second base. Jeter caught it, very close to the bag, and put a tag on Roberts. But it was too late. Roberts reached the base barely before Jeter applied the tag. The Red Sox had the tying run in scoring position with no outs.
Mueller was a .375 career regular-season hitter off Rivera, with three hits, including a walkoff homer July 24, 2004, in eight at-bats. Mueller took the next pitch for a strike, evening the count at 1-and-1.
“I give Tito a lot of credit for not bunting,” Epstein said. “Back then Mariano really didn't use his sinker away to lefties. So if Bi
ll Mueller makes an out, it's likely to be a groundball to the right side that gets him over anyway.”
On the next offering from Rivera, Mueller grounded a hard single over the mound, over the second-base area and into center field. Roberts came bounding home with the tying run. The Red Sox were alive.
What were the odds? Through 2004 in his regular season career, Rivera had faced 231 lefthanded hitters with a one-run lead in the ninth inning. In only 10 such cases did Rivera blow the lead. Mueller was the only batter responsible for two of those failures: a single on May 28, 2003, and his walkoff home run three months earlier.
It was all so improbable. There was only a 3.6 percent chance Rivera would walk the lead-off batter in the ninth with a one-run lead. There was only a 4.3 percent chance he would lose such a lead while facing a lefthanded batter. And yet both of those occurrences, like the two longest shots in a daily double, had come through and paid off for the Red Sox. There was still a long way to go to get there, but was it somehow possible that even that longest of long shots, the 0.85 percent chance that a pro sports team could come back from being down three games to none, was suddenly in play?
“You start feeling it's possible after the walk,” Millar said, “but the biggest at-bat of the whole thing was by Billy Mueller. You hear about the walk. You hear about the stolen base, but who drove him in? Billy Mueller got a single to drive in the son of a bitch. Then you hear about Ortiz's walkoff off Quantrill and Ortiz's at-bat against Loaiza, but Billy Mueller had the greatest at-bat of the postseason.”
The Yankees would still have chances to win the game, getting four at-bats with the go-ahead run in scoring position in the 11th and 12th innings. Every one of those at-bats ended in failure, by Rodriguez (line-out), Williams (fly-out), Clark (fly-out) and Cairo (strikeout).
Gordon, pressed into duty, gave Torre two shutout innings. Paul Quantrill, the Yankees’ fifth pitcher, started the 12th. Ramirez greeted him with a single. Ortiz ended the long night with a walk -off home run.
“Everything flipped with that game,” Millar said. “One hundred percent. I said that before the game.”
The Yankees had not heeded Millar's warning. They had let the idiots win Game 4.
“I am very uncomfortable at that point,” Torre said. “I mean, everybody else feels better than I do. We still have a three games to one lead. But the fact is we had our closer on the mound and we let them breathe.”
The Yankees were in position to win Game 5, too. Trailing 2-1 in the sixth against Martinez, Jeter swatted a three-run double, yet another game-changing play in his long history of clutch postseason moments. But somehow, with multiple chances, the Yankees never scored again over what would be eight more agonizing innings. A series of bad breaks and bad at-bats began that same sixth inning, when the Yankees reloaded the bases after Jeter's double. With two outs, Hideki Matsui drilled a line drive into right field. Nixon, fighting the encroaching twilight, somehow found the ball and caught it for the third out.
“If that ball isn't caught, it opens up the game,” Torre said. “It's over. Of course, when anything happens like that, I think it's a bad sign, because you never have enough runs.”
The Yankees looked as if they would add to that 4-2 lead in the eighth inning, too. Cairo led off with a double against reliever Mike Timlin. Torre ordered Jeter to bunt him to third base to give Rodriguez a shot at bringing home a big insurance run. Again, the Red Sox had no fear pitching to Rodriguez with a base open, and Timlin rewarded their confidence. Timlin fanned Rodriguez on five pitches.
“Timlin just blew him away, basically,” Torre said. “That to me stood out more than anything. It was not being able to get that third run.”
Sheffield walked after Rodriguez's whiff, then Matsui lined out again, this time to left field, to end the threat.
Still, the Yankees had a two-run lead with six outs to go to end the series. What were the odds they could blow that? Among the 766 postseason games in best-of-seven series to that point, road teams with a two-run lead with six outs to go were 67-10, representing an 87 percent success rate. The Yankees still held a firm grip on the series. The game was in the hands of Gordon, who had pitched to one batter in the seventh, getting a double play. Gordon had been excitable all series, so unable to calm his anxieties that he had been throwing up in the Yankees bullpen before coming into the game.
“Flash always got very excited in the bullpen,” said Borzello, the bullpen catcher. “There was nothing different about that game versus any other. Flash is high-strung and cares a lot. I don't think it's fear. I think it's more just the anxiety of not being out there yet. This moment is coming, and he knows it's there, and he gets anxious. I think he just reacts to that. I don't think he's scared. He's not afraid of anything, and he wants the ball, and he wants to win. People want to paint that as he was scared. I don't see that at all.”
Gordon coughed up more than his lunch. His second pitch of the eighth inning was hammered by Ortiz for a home run. Now it was 4-3. Gordon then managed to get two swinging strikes on Millar, but then threw four consecutive balls to put the tying run on first base with no outs. To complete the symmetry of another key walk by Millar, Roberts replaced him as a pinch runner. Gordon fell behind Nixon, 3-and-1, and then Nixon slashed a single up the middle. Roberts scooted to third base. Gordon had faced three batters in the eighth inning with a two-run lead and retired none of them, going home run, walk, single. Torre brought in Rivera in what technically would be recorded as a blown save, but Rivera did well to get out of the jam—first and third, no outs—with only one run scoring a sacrifice fly by Varitek.
“It's a blown save, but it certainly wasn't his fault,” Torre said. “Tom Gordon, for whatever reason, was a mess out there.”
The Yankees would never lead again in the series. They did nearly win it in the ninth when Clark smashed a two-out hit into the right-field corner that appeared would score Ruben Sierra from first base. But the ball hopped into the stands for a ground rule double, and Sierra was ordered stopped at third base, whence he stayed when Cairo lofted a foul pop-up for the third out. It was another bad sign for the Yankees.
They kept wasting chances in extra innings, too. In the 11th inning, with a runner at second base, Jeter lined out and Rodriguez flied out. In the 13th, Sierra struck out with runners at second and third. The longer the game went on, the tighter the Yankees looked. In extra innings they went 2-for-18 against four Boston relievers while striking out in half of those at-bats.
In the 14th inning, Torre had Loaiza, his seventh pitcher, on the mound for his third inning of work. Loaiza walked Damon with one out. He walked Ramirez with two outs. Then, on the tenth pitch of the at-bat and the 471st pitch of the game—which came five hours and 49 minutes after the first one—Ortiz smacked a base hit up the middle to send home Damon with the winning run.
The Yankees were stunned. They led the series three games to two but to everyone involved now it felt as if they were chasing Boston. They had played two games at Fenway that lasted a total of 10 hours, 51 minutes, two games in which they held leads in the eighth and ninth innings that statistically gave them win probabilities of 87.5 and 87 percent—and somehow they had managed to lose both of them. “It was draining,” Torre said. The Yankees were going home to Yankee Stadium for Game 6, and their mission had changed, becoming psychologically more heavy and complicated. They were no longer trying to win the series. They were trying not to blow it.
The Yankees had Lieber to face Schilling in Game 6. Unbeknownst to the Yankees, Schilling had undergone an unprecedented medical procedure to keep the torn tendon sheath in his ankle from flapping open, a temporary suturing of the sheath that had been tried as an experiment on a cadaver. No one was sure if the suturing would hold up. Indeed, even as Schilling started to warm in the bullpen, blood started oozing from the area of the incision and through his white sanitary sock. There was some speculation that the Yankees would test Schilling's mobility early in the game by bunting on him. But
Torre, unaware of the true extent of the injury spoke to his team before the game about taking the same approach they always did against Schilling.
“I basically said, ‘I don't believe this whole injury aspect of it,’ Torre said. “ ‘You go out there and play your game.’ We had pretty good success against him. So I didn't want to do anything different. ‘Let's make him make the adjustment.’
“We just had to go play the game. And I just tried to add perspective, that we're home and that we have a 3-2 lead. But it's very difficult when you lose a couple of games. You sort of lose your footing.”
The Red Sox, meanwhile, only grew bolder and looser with each win. Millar decided before the game that the team would not take batting practice on the field before Game 6.
“It was raining,” Millar said. “It was like 47 degrees. They always play Yankeeography in New York on the videoboard. As a visiting player, you see that they get music to hit to and when we come up we get Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle all the time.”
Millar walked into the office of Francona.
“We're not hitting on the field today, Skip,” Millar said. “We're not falling for the Yankeeography crap.”
Francona barely looked up from his desk.
“Whatever you guys want,” the manager replied.
The idiots were running the asylum.
As Millar walked out of the office, something caught his eye. “A big bottle of Jack Daniel's,” he said. Millar got an idea. The Red Sox would all drink a pregame toast for good luck. He started pouring shots for guys into paper cups. Two days earlier the Red Sox were stuck at the bottom of a dark well from which no baseball team ever had recovered: trailing a best-of-seven series three games to none. And now here they were in Yankee Stadium, essentially flipping the finger at Yankee history as presented in Yankeeography hagiology, and lifting paper-cup shots of whiskey to toast themselves and their audacity.