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That N.Y. magic Mariners try to deal with Yanks' unrelenting pressure
NEW YORK -- Maybe fear isn't the right word. Really, maybe fear has nothing to do with this at all. Maybe the reason the Seattle Mariners are down 0-2 in the American League Championship Series is not so much that they're playing scared, but that they're just not playing the way they absolutely have to play to beat the New York Yankees. Maybe it just looks like the Mariners are playing scared. That's what the Yankees do to teams. It's what they've always done. They put on the pressure. And then they put on some more. They get a timely hit, or they make some perfect play -- it doesn't have to be spectacular, necessarily, just a nice, by-the-book play -- and so the pressure keeps building and building and building. Then, all of a sudden, somebody on the other team makes an error and it starts to look like the end of the world, so everybody is swinging out of their spikes to try to get back in the game. The next thing a team knows it's down 0-2 heading into Yankee Stadium and 116 wins doesn't mean a blasted thing. It's what the Yankees do to teams. Thursday night, after the Yankees did it to the Mariners again in Seattle to win Game 2 of the ALCS, Lou Piniella vowed all that would stop. Piniella, the former Yankee who has done such a great job managing the Mariners, has a veteran team that knows how to win. But after losing Games 1 and 2, he felt the need to boost this veteran, winning team before it ended up looking like another sniveling, scared Yankees victim.
"We're going to be back here [in Seattle] to play Game 6. OK?" he guaranteed. What is it about the Yankees that so discombobulates their rivals? How come the Oakland A's fell apart so thoroughly in Game 5 of the American League Division Series, when the A's had the Yankees -- they had them, dang it! -- down 0-2 with the series heading back to Oakland? How come it's always the other guys that seem to hiccup at just the wrong moment? "The Yankees, you know, have this mystique about them," Piniella said Friday at Yankee Stadium on the off day before Game 3. "I played here. I know. I played here for 11 years, and they have got this mystique about them and so forth." The "so forth" part, translated, means that Piniella knows that there is just something about the Yankees -- and he's tired of talking about it. But he knows. Better than most. It is real. And it affects other teams. "You've got to overlook that," Piniella said. But it's never that easy. The Yankees just never let up. The Yankees have played 48 postseason games since the last time they lost a playoff series. They've made more errors than the other guys in just six of those games. And in half of them, they won anyway. They throw Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte and Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez and Mike Mussina out there. Derek Jeter pegs out a loafing Timo Perez at the plate last year. Luis Sojo bounces a ball up the middle for a game-winner. Jeter gets a non-sliding Jeremy Giambi at the plate this year. Closer Mariano Rivera, a baseball executioner with the sharpest cutter alive, awaits. Mistakes are magnified. One Yankee run looks like three. The pressure builds. "I really don't know anything about their mystique," says Seattle's Jamie Moyer, who will start Game 3 on Saturday night. Moyer knows. You better believe he knows. But no one wants to admit the Yankees have that advantage. Because then, for sure, you're done. "You go out and beat them. There's no other way," Piniella said of overcoming the Yankees' mystique. "You can talk about it. But you've got to go out and do it. And it can be done. It really can." Nobody's done it lately. Nobody's done it in the postseason since 1997. That is positively scary. John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.
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