April was blissful. May was bountiful. June was beautiful. July was bountiful.
Even August and September, with challenges on either side of baseball New York, had their moments. This was the baseball season out of our dreams, regardless of whether you are Yankees or Mets, regardless on which side of the Triborough Bridge your fiercest loyalties lay.
For large swaths of the summer, both the Yankees and Mets not only looked like the best team in baseball, but also they both seemed custom-designed for October success. Between them, they won 200 games. That never has happened before in New York City, going back to 1962.
Every day in New York, in New Jersey, on Long Island and in Westchester County and Connecticut, every precinct where baseball truly matters here, people wanted to chatter about baseball. Everyone had something to say. Everyone, for almost six straight months, was in a good mood. Baseball made them that way.
Is it really this close to being over?
Is it truly possible that by the close of business Sunday, both ballparks could be shuttered, the padlocks fastened to the front doors, both teams leaving October in a hail of strikeouts and weak pop flies and runners stranded and rallies foiled? Can that be so?
Say it ain’t so.
It’s so.
The Yankees lost 5-0 to the Astros on Saturday in Game 3 of the ALCS, and that nudged their toes right to the edge of the abyss, nudged New York’s fun-filled baseball season to the brink of extinction, and threatened to summon winter two months early. Their scuffling offense continued to scuffle, and the Astros made them pay for it.
The Astros, in fact, made them pay for just about everything. There was the lazy fly ball in the second that Harrison Bader dropped after he was no doubt jarred by the presence of Aaron Judge in his personal space; a few pitches later Chas McCormick found the short porch in right field for a 2-0 lead.
Four innings later, Aaron Boone took the ball away from Gerrit Cole in a bases-loaded jam, Cole sitting on 96 pitches, and gave it instead to Lou Trivino. Two batters later it was 5-0. And the way the Yankees’ bats presently look, that might as well have been 15-0. Or 50-0.
Two weeks ago, the Mets lost meekly to the Padres, and in their final gasp of the season on a Sunday night at Citi Field they managed all of one hit against Joe Musgrove, who has proven in subsequent outings against the Dodgers and Phillies to be something less than the second coming of Bob Gibson.
Saturday, the Yankees managed all of one hit against the Astros across the first 8 ²/₃ innings. Even when Houston showed a smidgen of largesse — Hunter Brown walking the first two hitters of the eighth inning — the best they could do was get a man to third before going down meekly.
Boos rained down then, and that has become the sad soundtrack of this postseason, boos in Flushing and boos in The Bronx. On one of the true epic nights of the summer, at Citi Field, Max Scherzer and Aaron Judge met for two classic at-bats, and there was so much buzz at the ballpark it felt as if it could provide a new power grid for the whole city.
Scherzer won those duels with a pair of strikeouts, and the electricity was tangible.
Two weeks ago, Scherzer was booed off the mound after getting shelled by the Padres. Sunday evening, Judge heard boos a couple of times, the last time after grounding out to third to end that eighth-inning non-rally.
They were the immediate targets of the boos, but New York wasn’t turning on two of their brightest stars as much as it was letting the baseball gods know how they felt, the boos aimed at the wicked, winding and altogether fickle way a whole summer can vanish in the space of a couple of games.
And here we are. We are at the brink. We are at the abyss. We are at the precipice. Maybe Nestor Cortes can save the Yankees on Sunday. Maybe someone can hit a baseball hard, and allow Yankees fans to at least dream of avenging 2004, when everyone saw firsthand that a 3-0 lead in a best-of-seven isn’t necessarily doom.
Someone needs to do something. Winter isn’t welcome just yet. This baseball season promised so much to deliver this little.
Credit: Source link
