Major League Baseball

GREAT ESCAPE ARTIST - VINTAGE PETTITTE PULLS MAGIC ACT AGAIN

Published Oct. 8, 2010 10:22 p.m. ET

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MINNEAPOLIS - It seems as if most of his career has been spent with men on the corners and one out, runners at second and third with two outs. Andy Pettitte is one of the greatest traffic cops in baseball history, mostly because he has to be, because the basepaths so often look like the FDR Drive at rush hour.

"It literally is almost like when the crowd gets into it or whenever things get louder out there, I almost feel I can slow things down even more," Pettitte said last night, maybe half an hour after he pitched the Yankees to within nine innings of the ALCS with a brilliant five-hit, 88-pitch 5-2 mastering of the Twins. "I ask the good Lord to calm my nerves and help me relax and be able to do what I want to do."

And that always has been when Pettitte is at his most dangerous.

The second inning last night? That's Pettitte's career, in so many ways. His career WHIP, which measures a pitcher's average number of walks and hits per inning, is 1.357. It might mean something when you consider that the two pitchers to whom Pettitte is most often statistically compared, Mike Mussina and Tim Hudson, had career WHIPs of 1.192 and 1.247, respectively.

It might really hammer it home to learn that A.J. Burnett's is 1.321.

What does that tell you? It tells you that they are, essentially, equally generous when allowing baserunners. Yet when Burnett finds trouble, he is gasoline on a car fire, maximizing every inch of damage. And when Pettitte finds trouble he is a human ejection button, leap-frogging from one mess after another.

Pettitte faced second-andthird, one out in the second, and threw three balls to Jason Kubel, and for an awful lot of major league pitchers, this is when the ball feels like a shot put in their hands. Not Pettitte. He didn't want to groove Kubel a fastball, so he didn't give him one.

"I'll take a walk when I have to," Pettitte explained.

He does this because he believes he is always one doubleplay grounder away from relief, and because he's delivered exactly that on so many past occasions. He didn't get one this time, had to settle for a sacrifice fly from Danny Valencia that gave the Twins an early lead, but that was all. And think about this: What do you think Burnett would have done there? Or countless others?

"They got a future Hall of Famer on the mound tonight," said Orlando Hudson, who reached Pettitte for his other run with a solo homer in the sixth. "The old man can throw it. He knows what he's doing."

Pettitte hasn't always been perfect, on or off the field. He has absorbed his share of postseason poundings. He likely is to endure a pretty miserable spring next year when he's called to testify as a star witness at his old friend Roger Clemens' federal perjury trial, a fix he's in because he succumbed to the temptations of PEDs.

But he's never claimed to be perfect, even on his greatest nights, most of which have been just like this one, taking the ball in Game 2 of a postseason series and keeping the Yankees close enough that they are now 9-5 in those 14 games.

"Same old Andy," said Lance Berkman, last night's offensive hero, who saw the Houston version of Pettitte up close for three seasons, which looked an awful lot like the one he saw last night. "Postseason is postseason, doesn't matter where you're playing, the intensity, the adrenaline, and nobody manages that better than Andy."

This would have all been less of a surprise if Pettitte hadn't experienced mixed results after returning from a groin injury that cost him half his summer. Pettitte himself had conceded going in "I've never felt so unprepared going into the playoffs." But just as Pettitte had outperformed expectations prior to getting hurt, he did the same thing last night.

All kinds of traffic early, and all kinds of nothing late, and a Game 2 victory to stuff in overhead storage for the ride home. Most of the career has been spent that way, too.

RISE IN FALL

Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte notched his record 19th career postseason win in last night?s 5-2 ALDS victory over

the Twins. Here?s a look at the career playoff wins leaders:

PITCHER W L Pct.

Andy Pettitte 19 9 .679

John Smoltz 15 4 .789

Tom Glavine 14 16 .467

Roger Clemens 12 8 .600

Curt Schilling 11 2 .846

Greg Maddux 11 14 .440

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