Major League Baseball

CC not enough to save this Yankee team

Published Oct. 19, 2010 1:00 a.m. ET

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Bob Klapisch

CC Sabathia was nowhere to be found in the still of the dead-silent Yankee clubhouse. It was almost 1 a.m. ET, and players were muttering their apologies and explanations for an ALCS that has all but slipped away from them.

Sabathia was already over the George Washington Bridge, at home with his family in Bergen County. The Yankees dispatched the big lefthander early to get a good night’s rest before Game 5. Fortunately for Sabathia, he wasn’t around to pick up on the air of finality in the room.

It’s not that the Yankees have given up, but they’ve seen every weapon neutralized, every strategy backfire. The result was a gruesome 10-3 loss in Game 4 Tuesday night that cleaned out the ballpark by the eighth inning, an embarrassment not just to ownership but to Joe Girardi, who was booed thickly by the fans who did bother to hang around.

Can Sabathia save the Yankees? It’s not impossible, of course. Nor should the Bombers be entirely dismissed as comeback candidates — not with Sabathia, Phil Hughes and Andy Pettitte all lined up on full rest for the remainder of the series.

But they’re facing elimination Wednesday because nothing has gone right. Even the injury report on Mark Teixeira was devastating. The first baseman suffered a grade two strain of his right hamstring after merely running to first base in the fifth inning.

Teixeira collapsed as if a sniper’s bullet had found him; he was unable to walk off the field on his own. When Teixeira finally disappeared into the dugout, everyone in the ballpark sensed his next appearance in Pinstripes would be in Tampa in February. The Yankees themselves are hurtling toward the black hole called winter, stripped of their invincibility by a Rangers’ team that’s out-performed them in every way since the series began.

Why? Partly because Girardi has suffered the kind of professional regression that’ll at least force ownership to take a hard look before renewing his contract in November.

It was Girardi, after all, who insisted on starting Hughes over Pettitte in Game 2. And it was Girardi who made a data-based decision in the sixth inning that similarly sunk the Yankees in Game 4.

It revolved around keeping A.J. Burnett in the game long after he’d earned the moral victory the Yankees had hoped for. The franchise’s most troubled star had actually taken a 3-2 lead into the sixth inning; any sensible manager would’ve hustled Burnett off the field once he allowed Vladimir Guerrero a leadoff single.

But Girardi said, “I liked the way A.J. was throwing” as a rationale for his greed. The manager wanted to prove to the doubters that Burnett wasn’t the loser he’d been cast as. So when the inning reached its crossroads — runner on second, two out — Girardi refused to bend.

Incredibly, he ordered an intentional walk of David Murphy. Never mind that doing so contradicted conventional wisdom that says never, ever put the go-ahead run on base that late in the game. Certainly this late in the season.

Not only did Girardi ignore common sense, he didn’t stop to consider what an extra base runner would do to Burnett’s confidence. Why? Because the numbers had convinced him otherwise, as usual.

Murphy was 5-for-18 against Burnett, and that’s all the manager had to know. He forced Burnett to walk Murphy and plow ahead against Bengie Molina, unaware that the fibers of his pitcher’s brilliance were now starting to fray.

The brilliant fastball Burnett had been throwing all night — he didn’t come in under 95-mph in the first inning — was no longer. Burnett squeezed that first fastball to Molina, gripped it just tightly enough that it didn’t explode over the outside corner as it was supposed to.

Instead, the pitch drifted back over the plate, where Molina was waiting. He nailed it over the left field wall, a three-run home run that was so shocking, Burnett himself brought his hands to his head.

“It was like, 'Oh no, I can’t believe it went out,'“ Burnett said. “I wasn’t mad at myself, it was an aggressive mistake. I gave everything I had. But I didn’t make the pitch that I wanted to.”

The home run gave the Rangers a 5-3 lead they would never lose. Later, they appeared as loose as the Yankees were shocked. No one was gloating in the visitors’ clubhouse, but more and more, the Rangers are giving off the scent that it’s their year.

After all, they have baseball’s best pitcher in Cliff Lee and a human home run machine in Hamilton, who’s gone deep four times in this ALCS, including one against each of the Bombers’ lefties.

As for the Bombers, they’re being taken down by a lack of offense from Alex Rodriguez (2-for-15), Nick Swisher (1-for-15) and before his injury, Teixeira (0-for-14). In the long winter that awaits, the Yankees will have to ask why the major leagues’ No. 1 offense choked so emphatically in October.

Maybe they absorbed Girardi’s tension — it’s plausible if you believe a team takes on the personality of its manager.

This much is certain: Yankee fans let Girardi have it when he made a pitching change in the seventh inning, pulling Boone Logan after Hamilton’s long home run to right.

Girardi’s head had barely popped out from the dugout before the boos covered him like a soft rain, quickly soaking him. Girardi gets one more chance Wednesday, when he and 24 other Yankees will look to Sabathia with an expression that’ll need no translation: Please save us.

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