WE HAVE grown so accustomed to their adaptability through the years, it is shocking to see what happens when the Yankees slowly start to burst their inseams. Players have been hurt before. The DL has been crowded before. The Yankee hallmark has always been a shrugged set of shoulders and rapid-fire resilience.
Now, we get to see if this edition of the Yankees wears a similar cloak of invincibility. The first results are not encouraging. It isn’t just that the Yankees lost to the Red Sox last night, surrendering a 3-1 lead before falling 5-3, dropping two out of three, and tumbling out of a first-place tie.
It’s the way the game played out, and the series. It’s the still-developing themes of what these two teams look to be all about. None of these things are encouraging if you lean in favor of pinstripes.
“We’re hurting right now,” Johnny Damon said. “We’re hurting because we lost, and we’re hurting because we’re going to have to find a way to overcome losing some awfully important people in our lineup.”
Hideki Matsui broke his wrist two batters into the game, and as he delicately cradled his arm while walking off the field, the depth of the Yankees’ present predicament became ever so terribly clear.
They’ll be without two-thirds of their regular outfield for at least as long as it takes Gary Sheffield to ease off the DL, meaning the two corner slots will be manned by the three-man wrecking crew of Bubba Crosby, Melky Cabrera and Bernie Williams. Suddenly it isn’t so much a question if the Yankees can score 1,000 runs this season, but how many games they can be expected to field 1.000 with that adventurous threesome manning the lawn.
For kicks, the Yankees were also reminded of just how tenuous their pitching is. For the second time in three games against the Sox, they received a dreadful outing from their starter, Shawn Chacon, and the results in the bullpen were decidedly mixed.
Newly-christened savior Scott Proctor reverted to 2005 form; Tanyon Sturtze retained his 2006 form; Ron Villone excised himself from one jam in the sixth but helped create another in the seventh, thanks in part to a wind-blown double that made Williams look, to paraphrase Ron Guidry, like a lost little boy. And even Mariano Rivera surrendered a ninth-inning tack-on run.
“We have to pick up the slack,” Williams said later on. “It’s up to the guys in this room to play at a level where we can overcome what’s happened to some of our key guys.”
It’s clear Yankee Stadium will not stand idly by while the Yankees try to locate their sea legs. The Stadium faithful have grown testy even by their legendarily impatient standards.
They booed Alex Rodriguez. They booed Chacon. They booed each of the parade of pitchers Joe Torre shuttled in during a sixth inning that seemed to take three weeks to play. They even started to boo Rivera in the ninth, before thinking better of it.
It ain’t friendly out there. They’d boo free pie.
What’s worse is, the Red Sox bear the look of every great Yankee team of recent vintage. They get key two-out hits. They not only got a couple of well-placed breaks last night, they took advantage. Tim Wakefield mirrored what Mike Mussina gave the Yankees a night earlier.
Maybe most important, Jonathan Papelbon came in and coolly recorded a four-out save, serving notice that if the guard hasn’t yet been changed between the teams’ two closers, whatever gap that’s left is narrowing by the minute.
“A tough night for us,” Torre admitted. “All the way around.”
And a tough couple of weeks lay ahead, too. One more time, we are reminded that not even $200 million can buy any degree of certainty, not when bones begin to break and tendons start to stretch and hamstrings pop, not when you haven’t a clue what kind of starting pitching you’re going to get, not when the manager is playing Wheel of Fortune with his bullpen.
Not with the Yankees looking far more vulnerable than we’d ever have thought possible on the 12th of May.
“We’ll bounce back from this,” Bernie Williams said. He said it because he’s seen it, time and again. Just not from this group. Not yet.