They’ll tell you it’s a best-of-three series, but it’s not. The whole season comes down to tonight. This is the whole reason you trade for Garrett Crochet: To beat Yankees offseason acquisition Max Fried
at his own game, in his own stadium, on a beautiful night in New York.
I cannot stress that last part enough. I’m currently just across the river in a small town along the New Jersey border. If I walk to get pizza, it’s from the Garden State. This is as solidly Yankees territory as you’re going to find in the world, and it’s idyllic right now. It is the actual calm before the metaphorical storm.
And, for what it’s worth, I don’t feel a bit of dread. The Yankees and Sox have switched places when it comes to offseason heebie-jeebies from the last time our boys found themselves in this position. I’m not talking about anything that happened this century. I’m talking about 1999, the prime Pedro Martinez era, which was the last time the Sox were staring at a playoff run with these particular team dynamics, not leastwise because they haven’t had a pitcher as good since then. That said, a lot has changed in the interim, nearly all of it for the better.
The biggest difference, of course, is that the Red Sox won four World Series over the same period the Yankees have won one of them, full stop. But the second-order stuff has nothing to do with us. At least when the Yankees had A-Rod they had a convenient scapegoat on whom to blame their two-decades-long fallow postseason period, 2009 excepted, but after his retirement they’ve become sad, fatalistic losers, especially after the 2017 Astros series that broke their brains the way COVID broke everyone else’s.
To this day, Yankees fans are bitter about 2017, moreso even than last year’s World Series flop, which was over at the end of Game 1. “If the Astros hadn’t cheated” sounds far more like “If Bob Stanley and Bill Buckner hadn’t biffed it” or “if Ted Williams hadn’t gotten hurt in the tune-up” than anything else you’ve ever heard them say. It’s almost as if they believe they’re cursed to lose in new and humiliating ways. Sound familiar?
They didn’t think this way in the late 1990s, when they were fielding some of the best baseball teams of all-time – teams so good that only the greatest pitcher in history at his peak stood a chance against them, really. Aaron Judge’s singular brilliance aside, this team is nothing like those. And so Crochet’s start tonight doesn’t, in some ways, have the magnitude of any of Pedro’s from that era. The weight of the world was on his tiny shoulders. Crochet has no such added pressure.
Instead, he’s just the guy looking to make 60,000 people from New York shut up tonight, for the purposes not of silencing ghosts but emboldening them. The Yankees fans are scared shitless of anything and everything, and Crochet has a chance to get halfway toward ending their season tonight. If he doesn’t, the Sox will likely slink away quietly, and the Yankees will wait for the Sword of Damocles to fall on them next round. But if he does? If he beats them like we beat Gerrit Cole in the one-game playoff in 2021? It’s as good as things get.
I’m not nervous: I’m fucking pumped. LFG!
