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The forgettable, forgotten man Knoblauch's rocky year ends in odd, yet familiar glory
By Daniel G. Habib, Sports Illustrated NEW YORK -- Chuck Knoblauch marched up the walkway that leads from the visitors' dugout at Shea Stadium into the concrete tunnel outside of the Yankees clubhouse, his dark blue undershirt soaked with sweat and champagne, plastered to his chest. "It's freezing out there," he grinned to a clubhouse attendant. Reporters began to hover tentatively, looking for feedback from an unlikely source: A bit player who hit a foul popout to Mets catcher Mike Piazza while pinch-hitting in the eighth, his only action of Game 5. "I'm not saying anything," Knoblauch said. "The season's over." With satisfaction, the now seemingly obsolete Yankees second baseman hoisted a can of Bud Light in his left hand and had an unopened bottle of Cordon Brut -- being saved for a rainy day, one imagines -- sticking out of the back pocket of his uniform pants, before he strolled back into the world champions' locker room. Twenty feet away, his teammates were holding court in the infield of their surrogate home park.
Knoblauch was eclipsed in this Subway Series by a pair of journeymen. Jose Vizcaino, who wears tinted red wraparound sunglasses morning, noon and night, had four hits, including a 12th-inning game-winner in Game 1. Luis Sojo, who told his wife he was ready to retire before the Yankees came calling in August, bounced Al Leiter's 142nd pitch of Thursday night into center field to score New York's third and fourth runs, the ones that would give them their fourth championship in five seasons. Knoblauch was inconspicuously mediocre. He was 1-for-10, with a sacrifice fly in Game 1, and he didn't play an inning at second base. Joe Torre said he didn't feel it would have been fair to put Knoblauch in the field -- in front of a hostile Flushing crowd, one that would have jeered his every miscue like bad-tempered bullies -- but it was evident that Torre had lost confidence in Knoblauch's ability. So he became the least likely of designated hitters, a 5-foot-9, 175-pound slap-hitter who batted leadoff and took more pitches than he swung at. His role was to go deep into at-bats, to feel out a starter's stuff, and to reach base. It was a measure of Torre's residual confidence in Knoblauch's skills as a hitter that he chose him to lead off the eighth of a 2-2 tie, and he ran the count 3-2, then fouled off a pitch, before his popout. In the economy of scale that undid Leiter, maybe Knoblauch's eight pitches were significant. Knoblauch's year, like the Yankees', has been a famously rocky one. His scattershot throws to first base were scrutinized like the Zapruder film, his psychological state speculated upon daily. In a moment of tragicomic absurdism, he plunked Fox Sports pundit Keith Olbermann's mother with an errant throw. His was the most celebrated missing arm since the Venus de Milo's. But Knoblauch was a Yankee for 2000, a year in which the two-time defending World Series champions were religiously doubted, in which their bullpen and their starters were questioned, and in which they were called the worst team in the postseason. And in which, like Knoblauch, they ended October drenched in champagne.
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