The recipe was there for a long, hot day, soup to nuts, all afternoon, first pitch to last. Day game after a night game after a blown chance to pick up ground on the devil Red Sox. A bear of a lefty pitcher, Blake Snell, on the mound. Ninety degrees, something close to 174 percent humidity.
(So hot, in fact, that home plate umpire Jerry Layne could barely muster the energy to raise his right arm on called strikes and needed regular visits from Yankees trainer Steve Donohue and his rubbing alcohol-soaked towels — and Layne didn’t even have the worst day among his crew, as we’ll see …)
So maybe it wasn’t unusual that Yankee Stadium chose not to harness its frustration any longer. There were 41,033 folks inside, and they were every bit as hot and bothered as Layne was, and instead of rubbing alcohol-drenched towels, they opted for alcohol-filled 16-ounce cups to keep from spontaneously combusting.
Anyway, the boos started in the seventh, when Greg Bird grounded out meekly to end the inning, the displeasure cascading out of the upper deck and the bleachers. A little more of that came tumbling down an inning later, when the Yankees scored their only run but stranded Giancarlo Stanton at second.
And by the time Austin Romine swung through strike three from a Tampa Bay lefty named Adam Kolarek, officially tying a bow on this thoroughly uninspired 3-1 loss … well, they weren’t simply going to slog quietly to their crowded subway cars or trudge silently off to the Deegan.
“THAT’S BRUTAL!” came one editorial parting shot.
“THAT’S @#$%&%!!” came a more colorful version.
So the Yankees dropped 10 ½ games behind the Sox in the East (and a full 10 back in the loss column), they saw their lead over Oakland dip to three games (and their cushion over Seattle to 5 ¹/₂) in the wild-card picture, and for one of the few times in this mostly feel-good season, the folks in the stands weren’t feeling so good.
“We’ve got to keep pushing forward. Every day is a battle,” Stanton said after contributing two of the Yankees’ seven hits and driving in their only run. “We’re in a long stretch. All we can do is keep pushing.”
Of course, if you want to jump to conclusions, you might argue the day seemed to get to everyone early, then just kept pounding away, the doggiest kind of August dog day. Hell, first-base ump Greg Gibson was already having a tough day having blown a fairly obvious call at first base; a ball Stanton hit in the eighth made you wonder if he might not be in the throes of sun poisoning.
Stanton lofted a fly ball to the corner. That much everyone could see. In the ensuing few minutes Gibson, soon backed by his wingmen in blue:
1. Called it a home run, even though most everyone else in the ballpark could not only see it wasn’t but hear it, too, as it thumped off the wall.
2. Reversed course and called the ball foul — which had to have been a guess, because it just as clearly collided with the yellow line on the wall against which it had thumped.
3. Reviewed the play and awarded Stanton a double even though the ball had bounded wildly away from right fielder Mallex Smith, and if the play had simply been allowed to unfold naturally Stanton, bad wheel and all, could’ve cruised into third jogging backward.
(“That’s the goodness about replay,” Layne, the crew chief, would tell a pool reporter later on, even though all he clearly wanted to say was, “Please get me a tub, 30 bags of ice and a cold, fruity drink, STAT.”)
So yeah. The umps had just as tough a day as the Yanks. And Yankees manager Aaron Boone could sense what that meant, partly because he could hear the boos just as well as anyone else could, partly because he’s spent a lifetime of his own dog days playing baseball, and he knows that a team looks a certain way when it simply isn’t scoring runs.
“It’s natural to default to ‘flat,’ ” Boone said, using the adjectives that, by an unofficial count, 40,242 of the 41,033 fans likely used at least once as they made their way home. He called that “a non-issue.”
“We need guys in big spots to step up and break the dam and get us rolling a little bit,” he said.
A cool, ventilating breeze every now and again wouldn’t hurt, either.