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Baseball like it oughta be It's no wonder the Yankees keeping winning
Updated: Friday October 19, 2001 2:19 PM
These are hard times for Yankees haters. Times to try our souls. Not only are the men in pinstripes beating this year's standard bearers of the anti-Yankees nation, they're beating them by playing baseball the way it ought to be played. Great baseball. Imaginative baseball. Fun baseball. It's enough to shake the very foundations that we stand for. In Game 2 of the ALCS Thursday night, for example, aging right fielder Paul O'Neill, days from retirement, raced down a gapper in the bottom of the second and flipped the ball backhanded to center fielder Bernie Williams, to keep Stan Javier from scoring from first and to hold Dan Wilson to a single. O'Neill looked like a young second baseman turning a double play. Then there's the irrepressible Derek Jeter, who plays the game like they did in the 1950s: diving into stands for pop flies, bunting runners over, making that improbable toss to nail Oakland's Jeremy Giambi at home plate in Game 3 of the Division Series to keep the Yanks from being swept. People talk about the Sports Illustrated cover jinx (see: Nomar Garciaparra, March 5, 2001), but guess who was on the cover of this year's baseball preview issue wearing his four World Series rings? You can't jinx a player like Jeter. The Yankees aren't mouthy. They don't gloat. Everyone contributes. And they never beat themselves.
It's happening again in the Mariners series. In the fourth inning of Game 1, catcher Jorge Posada's line drive off the wall was fielded perfectly by Seattle right fielder Ichiro Suzuki, who threw a strike to shortstop Carlos Guillen covering second. If Guillen had put his glove on the bag, as high school infielders are taught to do, instead of reaching for the sliding Posada, umpire Gary Cederstrom would have called Posada out. As it was, Posada evaded Guillen's waving tag, then scored on O'Neill's ensuing homer. A big run that never should have scored. In Game 2 the situation was reversed. The Yanks' Williams dropped Ichiro's fly ball in the bottom of the third with none out for a two-base error. But the Mariners failed to capitalize on the miscue when Mark McLemore, batting next, couldn't move Ichiro to third. Ichiro would have scored on Bret Boone's deep fly to center -- the second out. Instead, the Mariners lost the game by one run. It is on such plays that championships are won and lost. It's happening right before our eyes, night after night. The Yankees aren't winning on talent. Not on superior talent, anyway. Scott Brosius? Chuck Knoblauch? These are lunch-bucket guys. The Yanks are winning on execution. Sound, fundamental baseball. The sort of baseball that makes fans love the sport beyond reason or words. Which is the problem. Because a lot of those fans, I'm guessing about 120 million of us, are fed up to here with the Yankees winning all those championships -- 842 and counting. So year after year Chicagoans, Bostonians, Clevelanders, Detroiters gnash their teeth and wring their hands, knit their brows and tug on their sideburns, rooting for their adoptive teams from Oakland, Seattle, Atlanta, Phoenix -- wherever -- hoping against hope that just once, just one doggone year in their whole friggin' lifetimes, their guys would play like the hated Yanks. Sports Illustrated senior writer E.M. Swift is a frequent contributor to CNNSI.com.
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