Major League Baseball

Lee quiets more than Yankees' bats

Published Oct. 29, 2009 8:45 a.m. ET

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At a cost of $1.3 billion, the new Yankee Stadium was conceived as an homage to the team's history. The facades and monuments are a nice touch. The victuals are better, if pricier. And the press box is certainly more comfortable. But for all the hype, the interior is architecturally undistinguished, not much different from, say, U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago. Worse still, it fails to intimidate. That old Bronx-is-burning sense of menace has been replaced by a new car smell.


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The fans in attendance on Wednesday night — 50,207, the biggest crowd ever at the new Stadium — were both wealthy and wise. Almost half had left by the time Derek Jeter led off the bottom of the ninth.

An expatriate New Yorker, I take some pleasure in bashing my hometown. Then again, perhaps my maiden voyage to the Stadium left me unfairly prejudiced. World Series crowds are notoriously tame to begin with. The fans' dimmed passions had more to do with Cliff Lee.

To say he took the crowd out of the game is a gross understatement. He seemed to put 50,216 — all those fans plus nine Yankee batters — into a coma. He struck out two of the first three batters he faced, and seven of the first 14. Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez would combine to go 0-for-8 with five strikeouts. Neither would hit a ball out of the infield.

"He had a fastball, cutter, curveball, change-up and he used every one of them," said his manager, Charlie Manuel.

Lee struck out 10 and seemed to fool each batter on a different pitch. In the first, he got Jeter swinging at a slider and Teixeira lunging at a fastball. In the second, he got Rodriguez on the slider, and Hideki Matsui on a change. The fourth saw him strike out the side — Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada, an aggregate salary of $65 million. Fastball. Change-up. Curve. Nick Swisher was the only one who went down looking, in the eighth, on a change. As it ended, he suckered Rodriguez and Posada again, finishing them, and the game, with another change and a slow curve.

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