For me, one of the most memorable moments from the 2010 Texas Rangers playoff run — the season the Rangers won a playoff series for the first time ever, the season the Rangers went to the World Series for the first time ever — is a scene from a play where things went bad for the Rangers.
Specifically, it involves the second inning of Game Four of the ALCS, when the New York Yankees, down 2 games to 1, took the lead in a game that they needed to win to bring the series back to even.
The first ten batters
of the game had been retired — six Rangers hitters sat down by Yankee starter A.J. Burnett, four Yankees hitters by Tommy Hunter of the Rangers. The #5 hitter for the Yanks, Robinson Cano, got down 0-1 to Hunter before lofting a fly ball to the wall in right field. Nelson Cruz looked like he might have a play on it, but it was caught by a backwards hat wearing Yankees bro in the first row.
The immediate aftermath of the play was captured in this immortal gif:
I have no idea how many times in my life I’ve watched this. Hundreds? Thousands? I feel like I have watched it at least 50 times just today, thinking about doing this post, and then with it cycling on the screen as I continue typing this post.
I really get so much joy from this gif. I feel like Sam Malone on Cheers with the painting of the dogs playing poker, talking about how he sees something new every time he looks at it. There’s so much going on there, and I wish I could find the old SBN piece — I think by Jon Bois, but maybe by Grant Brisbee or Jeff Sullivan — where he offers up a backstory for each person in the gif, and read it again, and make all of y’all read it again.
Part of the reason that I can get joy from this gif is that, well, the Rangers went on to win the game, and then the series. Kind of like I’d probably find some humor and lightness in another extra base hit over Nelson Cruz’s head that occurred a little over a year later, had the Rangers ended up winning that Game 6 (or the subsequent Game 7).
But at the time, it sucked, and I hated the Yankee bro, and everyone else in this shot — yes, including the popcorn guy in glasses, and the two different kids — with a degree of sports hate that I had previously reserved solely for Dwight Clark and for the 1996 Seattle Mariners.
The hate didn’t last long. The Rangers tied it up in the top of the third, gave up singletons in the third and fourth to go down 3-2, but then exploded for eight runs in the final four innings,* rolling to an easy 10-3 win.
* The Rangers scored five runs in all off of Burnett, the final three coming on a two out, three run home run by Bengie Molina in the top of the sixth, a play that may have inspired my “most momentum-shifting play in baseball” mantra. They scored one off of Boone Logan, one off of Joba Chamberlain, and three off of Sergio Mitre. The only Yankee pitcher who made an appearance and didn’t give up a run was future Rangers great David Robertson.
Texas was up 3-1 in the series, and though they fell to the Yankees in Game 5 behind a bad C.J. Wilson start and an offense that managed just two runs on 13 hits (one of which was a Matt Treanor home run, shoutout to Mr. May!), they rolled over New York in their return to Arlington for the Good Game 6. Colby Lewis — who was incredible in that postseason run — threw eight innings of three hit, one run ball, Vlad Guerrero and Nelson Cruz sparked a four run fifth to give the Rangers a comfy lead, and Neftali Feliz finished it off by freezing ARod on a called strike three:
Seriously, watch this clip again (even though you have to sit through a stupid 15 second commercial because MLB.com has to monetize their video snippets). Remember that feeling? Remember how amazing that was? I still get goosebumps when I watch the Corey Seager World Series home run, and I still get goosebumps when I watch this.
So, yeah, the Yankees bro gif is fun to me. It makes the Rangers comeback, and ultimate series win over New York, all the more delightful.
That said, in the aftermath of last night’s Yankees game-tying homer that wasn’t, I was thinking about the Yankees bro clip, and the timing of it in relation to the Yankees’ recent history.
The 2010 Yankees, you may recall, were the defending World Series champions, having beaten the Philadelphia Phillies in the 2009 World Series four games to two. (Both losses, incidentally, were against Cliff Lee, who shut out the Yankees on two hits over eight innings in Game 3 of the 2010 ALCS. The Yankees, of course, tried to get Lee from the Mariners at the 2010 trade deadline before the Rangers out-bid them, and there was talk that Lee was in the Yankees’ head, much like Mike Scott was in the head of the Yankees’ crosstown rivals in the NLCS in 1986).
The 2010 Yankees were favored over the Rangers, even though the Rangers had homefield advantage. The Yankees had the second best record in the A.L., with 95 wins, while the Rangers had the worst record of the four A.L. playoff teams, at “just” 90-72. The Yankees still had Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte from their dynasty teams, plus high-priced former Rangers Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez, stud second baseman Robinson Cano (who the Rangers could have had in the ARod trade, though they picked Joaquin Arias instead) in his prime, C.C. Sabathia fronting the rotation…
And the Rangers…well, they were the Rangers. Yes, they traded for Cliff Lee, and signed an aging Vlad Guerrero to be their DH. But otherwise, they were relying on a bunch of hitters without playoff experience, as well a converted reliever and a guy who got run out of the majors and had to go to Japan in the rotation behind Lee. The end of the 90s saw the Rangers chased from the playoffs by a Yankees dynasty, and the start of the 2010s seemed to be setting the stage for the same thing to happen in a new decade.
Texas ceded homefield advantage one game into the series, blowing a 5-0 lead that included a gruesome five run eighth inning where five pitchers — C.J. Wilson, Darren Oliver, Darren O’Day, Clay Rapada and Derek Holland — combined to retire none of the first seven batters in the inning. The Rangers won big in Games 2 and 3, but when Cano homered off of Big Game Hunter to give the Yankees a 1-0 lead in Game 4, when backwards hat Yankees douche was yelling and posturing and Horatio Sanz’s twin was cheering and the Sopranos extra in the 72 inch waist jeans was yelling “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” over and over, it felt like an ill harbinger, a bad omen, the beginning of the end of the Rangers’ magical run.
In another timeline, maybe that’s the case. In another timeline, the Burnett stifles the Rangers in this Game 4, and Wilson’s Game 5 egg is followed up by a slightly less effective Colby Lewis in Game 6, with Philip Hughes avoiding the crooked number in the bottom of the fifth in Arlington and David Robertson and Kerry Wood keeping Texas off the board until Mariano Rivera gets Josh Hamilton swinging with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Rangers fans watching the Yankees celebrate at TBiA before stomping the San Francisco Giants in the World Series.
We aren’t in that timeline, though. In this timeline, the Rangers ended the Yankees’ hope of repeating as champions, of bringing back the Yankees Dynasty. They rebounded from the Cano home run that set off the iconic celebration in the stands, won the game, and won the series.
And the Yankees?
The Yankees are still chasing their next ring. When Robinson Cano hit that home run, Yankees fans felt another title was imminent, and even if, somehow, someway, they didn’t win it all in 2010, it would just be a brief delay of the inevitable, and the next ring would come in 2011 or 2012, with the Yankees surely having accumulated multiple rings by the time the 2026 season ended.
But that hasn’t happened. The Rangers have won more titles since then than the Yankees have. The Rangers have been to three World Series — including 2010 — to the Yankees’ one. Nevermind a Yankees dynasty…New York has found it difficult to get past the divisional round during that time.
Could it be that the Yankee bro’s celebration, caught on camera, along with the fans around him, caught the eye of the fickle gods of baseball? Could it be that the ostentatiousness and brashness of an entitled fanbase, encapsulated in that that shot, caught the attention of the baseball gods, who decided to punish Yankees fans for their hubris?
Despite consistently running one of the highest payrolls in the game, despite being one of the marquee franchises in the game, the Yankees haven’t won a World Series title since. They have now gone 17 seasons without a title, tied for the longest stretch in franchise history since the team won its first title in 1923. Given their payroll, their on-field success in the regular season during that time, you’d have thought they’d have won the World Series at least once in that stretch, right?
Could it be…the Curse of the Yankees Bro?
